Hi hi!
Interrupting our regularly scheduled programing to announce that finally, after many, many years, my chapbook, Wound Light, is being released by Bottlecap Press. Yay!
The chapbook follows a young woman navigating loss at every scale–from climate change and geological time to the death of a father and the loss of a romantic relationship. While at times sparse and desolate, Wound Light simultaneously displays the fecundity and wonder of life on Earth. It is a book that is both hopeful and yearning.
I’m super proud of this poetry collection and I am so grateful that after all this time it’s in a place where I can share it will all of you! I’ve recorded a little virtual reading of two of the pieces included in the book.
*Sean’s Fly Company (from the podcast) (sorry for forgetting the name Category 3! How could I have possibly forgotten!)
I’m currently in the process of moving from Denver, Colorado to Olympia, Washington so I am not sure if I will have a newsletter for June. We shall see!
Arachnocampa Luminosa
Riding dark water where openness feels the same as closed. Then—a ceiling of light. Puncture wounds in darkness congealed to turquoise pools. That a creature can produce luminescence from within its body: a cage transforming sustenance into radiance, morphing the inner blackness of the earth from a place with no beginning, no end, to a field of stars where end and begin stream toward irrelevance
Don’t tell me about protein or enzymes. I won’t listen. I might be interested if you told me that creatures capable of illumination contain Luciferin: the light of the body, a fallen angel. But I don’t care to dissect further
The how of a thing is not nearly as great as the know. We should be frightened that the biblical know grew flat and impotent from our less devoted tongues. Language lost her disciples. Jesus knew Mary. Perhaps. I do not care—the only thing of which I am certain is the power of a phrase, words capable of dethroning mythology when left to their own devices. Words that must be castrated lest they destroy
When did I understand become: we have discovered that x = y and there is solace in the equation. When did I understand you become: it is clear I am required to empathize, not—
I know you
You entered and infused me. I discovered you were made of embers when my body formed a shell around your coals. We’ve cooled and crusted and yet still we burn. To say I know the light of glowworms is to say: your light suffuses. Knowledge of your existence spawns within. I am prey, lured to light on a train of silk—snared, unwittingly nest bound
I know there are creatures, together creating galaxies, not caring enough to ask if their stars are the only ones or if they are enough
How I Came to Know You:
About The Big Bang, I remain unconvinced. The science is unsatisfactory. Like lukewarm pasta. A little wormy and swollen going in.
But I do believe a body formed from a cloud of interstellar dust and fell in on itself, hot and heaving, burning off anything nearby that wasn't worth the weight. Until all that heavy matter spun into discs around a burning orb.
Imagine—at first the planets were cold.
I could say it is because I arrived at the show too early. I interrupted you on the stairs. I could say it’s because the bathroom was occupied, and you were late to do your makeup.
Earth began as a molten core with thin skin. She would have stayed that way if not for the big burp. Geysers, eruptions, methane and ammonia—and suddenly the world was warmed and ready for life. But once living things appeared they began to feed, starved and gluttonous. The planet should have frozen and died—her gases consumed.
Or I could say it's because I failed high school English and my teacher took pity on me and so I went to a school where no girls wanted to kiss me back. I could say it's because you quit that job at Columbia or because you never found light in Glasgow or because on an island six-thousand miles away, I caught eels with my bare hands and herded fawns through the hills but never found a body I wanted to touch.
Why did Earth live? Because algae changed its color from light to dark and back again and the transformation was enough to radiate heat. But even then, that should not have been enough. The globe would have become glacial ice with only a small band left alive near the equator.
I can see by the look on your face that you think I’m on another one of my climate doomer rants. Just give me a sec! I’m getting there.
The answer is wind. Wind that carried the heat of the algae across the globe and back again.
Nothing is more suspicious, more improbable, than life itself…It would be doing unnecessary violence to the laws of chance to suggest that so many singularities came by coincidence to the third planet of a minor star. So, in the face of such wild improbability, it becomes necessary to look for connections.[1]
Don’t worry, I’ll help you load the car in a second. I’m almost done.
What I am trying to say is that I know. I know what it's like to be afraid to stay because you can feel the heat of that apparition—the you who left, who made a different choice, the you who holds the potential for a warmer life. I know what it's like to be haunted by the army of yous who took a different path—the one who stayed at Columbia, who never met me on the stairs—circle the earth with their ghosts.
I don’t blame you. You’re right—in a lot of ways choosing is like death.
But what I mean is: our planet was once only rock, and it is true that life is nothing but an aberration, like sand against skin, rubbing the world raw, splitting what once was into what will be with nothing more directed than consistent pressure.
An unplanned accident.
But if something comes from nothing and returns, is there such a thing as nothing? Or is the very word misdirection? Like the color black—infinite fullness disguised as absence.
This world, this life, this moment with you on the couch in April, is an experience that could have been lost if only the wind had blown north longer than it had flown south. A near miss. The web of choices that brought me here to your hand, to this night, contains a quantity of divergences that no human mind can bear. The likelihood of this moment is so unfeasible it feels stolen.
I shouldn’t have any of it, so how could I possibly want more?
So yes, what I am saying is: I'd rather watch you leave me than have never found you. Unplanned accident. Luminescent anomaly.
[1] Heaven’s Breath: A Natural History of the Wind, Lyall Watson
Thanks for attending this virtual reading. Now go smell a flower!
Wound Light