storytellers

Now, on a worn couch, I am reading aloud to a friend:
my favorite poems, a passage from Anna Karenina,
a collection of short stories from Southern writers.

She pours hot water onto tea leaves in our mugs.
The steam rises over her face. This was
how I spent my childhood.

Listening. Reading. Words like
drops of amber, like growing pearls, like wet clay.
On the table of my elementary school library:

glazed pastries and green tea,
word games, lessons in character voices.
My mother reads to her tired father

and he laughs, then catches his breath.
A poet smiles at her husband in the audience,
reading a love poem to a crowd.

If you were deaf, I would read to you with
my hands in your hands.
Words outloud, words we feel.

My friend finds a bookmarked page,
says to me that this is her favorite part of the book,
the part where Tereza dreams.

When I was a child, my father read me
the best of 20th century sci-fi; I closed my eyes.
I went flying into space.

A mother reads to her son
to chase away the nightmares; she keeps reading
even after he has fallen asleep, just in case.

These words are not mine

but I’d like to share them anyway.

sleeping patterns

sometimes i decide the day
should be over, so i go to sleep
at 8 or 9
and wake up the next day at 5
and bike to starbucks
and drink too much coffee
and get many things done

sometimes i get the urge

to cut off all my hair
to stop reading email, forever
to run away to the mountains
to stop using electricity
to eat everything in my fridge,
including at least a pound
of cheddar cheese
to stay up late
to pray for rain
to buy five-hundred dollar Frye boots
and one of those indoor composters
to scrub off my make up
all the lotions and hair gunk
and walk around naked
to make BIG art
to take up room

the future has a shape, size eight, straight legged jeans

I am going to Illinois in August, to study children's library services in a little town called Champaign-Urbana, where I will also take stealthy poetry classes.

Here, it is starting to get hot. I keep busy busy busy and it's less lonely, I guess. Looking forward to new horizons.

these things are good; these things are worthwhile

Learning new things; ice cream on a hot day; hot tea in winter; patience; passion; keeping promises; respect; the fight for equality; hand-made gifts; home-cooked meals; yoga at sunrise; calling the people you love, just to tell them that you love them; saying ‘thank you’; new school supplies in the fall; someone to help you stand up after you make a snow angel; running on the beach; smiling at strangers; replacing tolerance with acceptance; hand-written letters; tapioca pudding; long hikes; giving things away; floating on a lake or a pool or a calm ocean; the last berries of summer; hostess gifts; beeswax instead of petroleum wax; compost piles; speaking another language; loving someone who loves you back; reusing things; loving someone even if they don’t love you back (but not in a creepy way); long books you wish would never end; reaching out to others; unexpected kindness; sustainability; clean dirt; oatmeal; poetry read out loud; rejection of a life dependent on the suffering of others; live music; caring; curiosity; listening--really listening--to what other people have to say, asking questions.

i am writing some poems
and a very long prose piece
and my fellow has gone back
to england where is it cold
here it is too hot
and i think i am running
out of words

march is ending
the year is beat beat beating toward graduation
and i am choosing
between illinois
and chapel hill
where i will study how to be
a children's librarian