SIDE A
The Year of the Burning Roses
[or: A Problem of Tenderness]
Poetry Problem
When I was in graduate school, I got to know a philosophy student in the master’s program who was married to one of the other poets. In the second year of my MFA, two days after my best friend stopped being alive, the philosopher told me he’d theorized that we were inside a metafiction with me at its center, everyone else minor characters. He said it gave him comfort—took the pressure off—to imagine being a supporting actor in my story. Why me, I asked. Because things happen to you, he replied.
I’ve been asked many times how it’s possible that so many of my friends have died. I have worried something is wrong with me—that maybe I wasn’t close with them at all, am simply hypersensitive, overly reactive to any old death. One answer I’ve found that doesn’t throw my own tenderness under the bus is that when I love I love hard and enduringly and often I love poets. The other answer is longer, shimmering, straddled between this world and the next.
To me, poetry feels singular as a medium. I sense it on its own, separate from other genres of writing, separate from literature entirely, to be taken on terms well beyond language. I have thought of poets not so much as writers but as feelers—channels that absorb what is floating in the surrounding air, metabolize it, and transform it into text, making legible what was before invisible and in so doing healing, taking on a couple of shards of what is broken, what is for many too difficult to hold, and converting them into something new through the labor of the poem. I believe this is real even as it is unseen. I believe this is god work.
The Year of the Burning Roses
In the fall of 2022, Rushi asks if I’ll be part of a panel with writers who have been close to and have written about suicide. On a rainy spring morning in Seattle, five poets sit in a conference room in front of an audience and try to make order from destruction.
It is the first time I have been in front of a large group of people since before the pandemic started, since before I started training and working as an intuitive. No one has chosen to be in this room with us because they haven’t been touched by suicide and as I look out at their faces, their pain radiates, fills the air between us, starts to enter my body. When it is my turn to talk, I take deep breaths and start to read from my notes, but once my mouth opens I cannot stop crying. Trying to be funny, I say something about how maybe crying is more appropriate than trying to use language for a subject like this. No one laughs but I somehow make it through my notes, my poem.
I take my seat again, tears down my face for the rest of the hour.
When the panel is over, the five of us walk up the hill to Montana, a bar Rachel opened when I was first living in Seattle. I spent a good part of my 20s there, drinking with friends in joy and in sorrow. It was the bar we poured out of when we found out Obama was re-elected and weed became legal in Washington state, everyone on Capitol Hill laughing and crying and dancing in the streets. Where I went by myself late afternoons reeling from a year of death and where I met my sister for a drink the first time I was manic, my brain pulsing electric while I ignored her description of the symptoms of bipolar disorder. The poets order drinks then we sit and talk. I feel emptied out and leave before too long. A month later, Rachel dies of organ failure.
Panel: When There Are No Words: Grieving Suicide through Poetry
Panelists: Rushi Vyas, Chloe Honum, CL Young, John James, Jeffrey Pethybridge
Location: Rooms 340-342, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3
Time: 3:20 pm to 4:35 pm
Panel Discussion Model: The moderator will begin the event by speaking briefly about how the panel came together, introducing the panelists, and reading their short biographies. The five panelists, including the moderator, will give a brief introduction of their own work, and read a sample of their poetry for five to seven minutes each. The moderator will then open up discussion with a list of questions prepared in advance for about 25-30 minutes. The panel will end with a ten-to-fifteen-minute audience Q&A.
It is the first time I have been in front of a large group of people since before the pandemic started, since before I started training and working as an intuitive. No one has chosen to be in this room with us because they haven’t been touched by suicide and as I look out at their faces, their pain radiates, fills the air between us, starts to enter my body. When it is my turn to talk, I take deep breaths and start to read from my notes, but once my mouth opens I cannot stop crying. Trying to be funny, I say something about how maybe crying is more appropriate than trying to use language for a subject like this. No one laughs but I somehow make it through my notes, my poem.
CL (5-7 minutes)
Though it has not occurred there in my lifetime, suicide runs in my family. This knowledge was part of my DNA, part of the history offered to me when I asked, but it was not direct knowledge. In my early 20s, I lost a friend to what was framed as an accident, though later, I would come to understand it as something else—not suicide, exactly, but something murkier, an instance of death that felt not so far from intentional, after years of suicidal behavior. At the end of my 20s, though, this distinct form of loss became more concrete, more mine, after the death of a sibling-close friend. The poems I wrote first were single images of shock. They were not about my friend or about our love, rather, they were arrows. Not making sense or alchemizing, they simply functioned as screams of fact. In the months that followed, the poems turned with my grief, became elegies, became devotions, then they became prose trying to understand, sifting through layers the act of suicide, and attempting, often in response to reductive mainstream narratives around mental illness, to conceptualize of it as a space of agency. As years have accumulated between the present and that loss, the writing has continued to change. Now, I find a mirror turned towards my own madness, my own long period of feeling unsure about this world and whether or not I wanted to remain in it, and the shift in my embodied experience as I have come to deeply love being alive. The poem I’ll read today is of this sort—still in grief, but far enough away from its initial acuteness to paint some layers over—having arrived, part in debt to my friend’s death, at wanting to stay here.
INTERLUDE
in the presentation
on the aesthetics
of madness
all I want to keep
falls from my mind
wet threads pulled
from my temples
soaking into
the ground
the artist suggests
the possibility
of no longer taking
the medicine
required
to be alive
in this world
having only just begun
I allow this
to break the clock
I’ve built
on either side
of the present tense
all the winter
a slow scab
acting strong
then bleeding out
Tyler said
to ask why
from the image
said notice when
it’s easier to imagine
than to feel
only when
it’s over
do I realize
I’ve spent all year
ready to die
it’s okay
to just be anything
blueberries
in August
the gun
in your hand
or (a world
where) not
all I write anymore
are letters
for what won’t
actually happen
room full
of smooth bald heads
bobbing around
dreams
that can be returned to
like a place
keep becoming
the self
even with
nobody watching
bush sewn
with rose hips
pearls set into
a veil
I start to really lean
into trees
alone & with
people around
how people
who are new to town
don’t talk to me is
I’m finally
the good kind
of invisible
why don’t you need
a body anymore
instead of eating
the lost flower petal
I look up
if it’s poisonous
how tired I am
of talking to you here
I imagine a tea party
at the bottom of the ocean
everyone dead chanting
GET HEALED
pretend cups of tea raised
and not filling with sea
I’d give you that
an hour
where the worst thing
to think of
is having forgotten
a pen
dialing in solitude
like a hotline to call
when you want
to work on
dying well
instead of not
dying at all
what I have
to say now
is distinguishable
layers trying
to become
indistinguishable
a song that plays
on either side
the erotics of paying rent
& banking
on my shields
as a way for
NO RAPE
or any
varietal of harm
psychic or bodily
kestrel or an osprey
really diving into water
when no fish comes out
I start to worry
until the thought becomes
don’t fix it
this isn’t about anything
wings flapping
keeping me in place
while I watch my friends
give birth
to babies
& to books
I take tastes
of their names
find some new dust
to roll through
Bodie
Winnie
Tiny
Ruth
The Last
Unkillable Thing
all the mistakes I’ve made
forgetting
we are two
She loved every year
when the forsythia
came out is a sentence
I put in my head
for the future
first shot in my arm
river not high enough
to drown in
cold water
my hands
recording a bridge
half-moon shows up
bowl of dead flowers
Billie
Garnett
Silver
Royal
While I Reach
for Your Pulse
the future
a negation
to make
something
I believe
Karena writes
let it unravel
into what’s inside
I thought
I already did that
stay on the road
all day
WE ARE BECAUSE
OF ALL OF US
a beer can says
tears fall from me
unemotionally
someone calls the poem
beautiful & I let it be over
almost always
I care more
about a creek
than a barn
antler shed
on the hillside
definitive willow crown
wrapped around my head
I walk home
the word
I can’t remember
is left brimming
on the table
a quick snake
across the center
of a trail
the good part
of the story is now
we don’t yell
& every morning
nothing comes out of me
I start an idea anyway
convince myself
it’s a chair
a chain to follow
deep breath
all the way
to pubic bone
back flat on the ground
arms spread like waiting
for my heart to beat out
red-tailed hawk
quince blossom
dead friend stuck
between my ribs
some hurts still hurt
for a reason
decide really hard to live
I take my seat again, tears down my face for the rest of the hour.
1) How do the techniques and practices of poetry facilitate or interrupt your experience/understanding of grief in the wake of suicide?
- container to pour into
- grappling with the transformation of poetry from a space once shared with the lost into a place to respond to their death
- limitation of all forms – poetry, prose, performance – to express the complexity of loss by suicide
2) What has happened when the deeply private has become public through your writing?
- concern regarding family members, friends of the dead/concern around portrayal/what is mine to share – all more often than not is met with gratitude; sense of fidelity to the dead over the living - this person is gone, what would they have wanted me to scream out from the mountain top in their absence?
- the losses I’ve written most about have been of very close 1:1 friends – the feeling, at times, of having made up that closeness or of it having all been a dream – the witness (& risk) inherent in making those deeply private relationships public, particularly through their disappearances
3) How do writers negotiate the responsibilities that come with writing about suicide with the necessary work of revealing what is often kept silent?
- I still don’t know if I have a good answer for this – I have worried so much about the perpetuation of suicide through writing that centers it / the ways I have needed to write through my own suicidality & what this passes on to others – sometimes I feel so rooted in the fact that these things need to be talked about, expressed, grappled with in public spaces because they are so prevalent & also so terribly treated by the mainstream – they need to be complicated then complicated some more / other times I feel terrified that I am harming or furthering a sort of fascination with this way of leaving the world
- that said, I tend toward revealing over concealing – and hope to have space to speak to these complications whenever possible
4) How has engaging with concepts of suicide in your writing affected your own relationship with living?
- writing into the decision of suicide, looking at it from as many angles as I can & where that has gotten me, all the stages of transformation that thinking has gone through – ultimately coming to a place that can understand this choice while also knowing that to make it myself would be futile
- one element of engagement (alongside many others – whether healing modalities, excavation of my own patterns, etc., +++ the grieving this has facilitated) that has helped lead me to a sense of devotion to life
5) What other obsessions have emerged in your writing through the process of writing through these griefs?
- Madness / “mental illness”
- perhaps more notable for me than what has emerged in my writing are the spaces beyond writing that have emerged – that is, at one point, poems were the ground upon which I communed with the dead & non-ordinary; now I find this elsewhere more often & without the mediation of writing
- intuitive/somatic/healing work w/ others
When the panel is over, the five of us walk up the hill to Montana, a bar Rachel opened when I was first living in Seattle. I spent a good part of my 20s there, drinking with friends in joy and in sorrow. It was the bar we poured out of when we found out Obama was re-elected and weed became legal in Washington state, everyone on Capitol Hill laughing and crying and dancing in the streets. Where I went by myself late afternoons reeling from a year of death and where I met my sister for a drink the first time I was manic, my brain pulsing electric while I ignored her description of the symptoms of bipolar disorder. The poets order drinks then we sit and talk. I feel emptied out and leave before too long. A month later, Rachel dies of organ failure.
Poetry Problem
I wrote my first poem when I was 9 or 10—a profession of love to my then boyfriend of almost five years. We’d gotten together in preschool and hadn’t looked back. No one had taught me what a poem was or how to do it; it just came out of me, fully formed, a pearl in the center of my palm.
With the exception of adolescent diary scrawling about my eating disorder—columns of calorie math in the margins—writing, for the next five or six years after that was a utility not unlike a calculator. I used it when it was called for in school, mostly in accelerated English class. I was smart by then, or someone had decided it was so. After spending early childhood at an experimental preschool called The Children’s School, where we were taught to use our words and sort out any issues under the shade of the Conflict Tree, where I learned to love boys and girls and reading, I’d fallen into a kind of academic depression. One abrasive first grade teacher and a series of extracurricular recognitions of mortality and I’d curled inward, didn’t reemerge until fourth grade when Ms. Kent, a vivacious and energetic teacher whose obsession with Australia heavily influenced our learning environment, saw me squinting from the back row and recommended that I go to the eye doctor. Not long after getting glasses, “they” realized I was “smart” and plopped me in a weekly gifted program where I was free to explore my curiosities, which then included Shakespeare and the Globe Theater, Antonio Stradivari, Sarah Winchester’s house, and Watergate.
Thanksgiving break of my junior year of high school, I had my wisdom teeth removed. I took my Vicodin as prescribed until I stopped needing it. The opioid crisis not yet legible, my parents were no more concerned about my hydrocodone prescription than they would have been about a round of antibiotics. I kept what pills were left in the bathroom cupboard, or I hid them in a shoebox with artifacts from parties my parents didn’t know I went to and letters from my long lost first love.
One night, I cut a pill in half and took it. At first, my skin felt itchy and too small for me, my insides hot and melty. Soon enough, though, my brain opened up, expanded and unfurled into pillowy clouds, like food coloring dropped in a glass of water, and I wrote. Sentences streamed out of me one after another, each pulling the next forward, a chain of color linked together impossibly, invisibly.
I didn’t do it much—halved the two or three I’d kept, took them nights after my parents went to bed, the stars on my teenage duvet cover pulsing, pushing themselves into the air from its surface—and once the pills were gone, I didn’t try to find more. An early example of survival that I would not come to understand until many years later when others with similar experiences started to die. The difference between recreation and addiction, fun and undoing, experiment and death: one degree of brain chemistry, a slightly stronger connection to family, a few more tools, a slightly longer delay between access and action. But what I had found there stayed—the writing—an engagement with language not about language but about bringing what was once inside and formless out into a mysterious yet material shape. An expulsion of feeling I hadn’t known was possible, pure and whole and all at once, one that I would come to need more and more urgently.
The Year of the Burning Roses
I name 2023 The Year of the Burning Roses. A few weeks after Rachel dies, Rachael goes too in an echo of aloneness. Late summer, Christopher leaves. A visionary and a poet and a musician. Alcohol and alcohol and a murkiness. The chorus of them leaving rattles back and forth through a tunnel in my heart. I do what I can to help the people who most loved the people who are gone. Sand and river and flowers, fire and grass, a portal burned into the backyard closed.
23 May 2023
AM
Dream (recurring?) of housesitting for Rachel in what felt like Tenino but also Colorado & I hadn’t been visiting very much – the dogs were restless & some of the plants were dying. A sense of her being dead & not knowing. Stuck between here and where she is going.
26 May 2023
AM
Dream with a sentence I tried to get myself to remember. Put the legal pad next to the bed again.
29 May 2023
AM
L texted yesterday while I was on my walk & I called her. Rachael died, also of organ failure. Talked to Elijah after that & I’m glad I called because he said it helped him remember how to talk to people. Called D & B but mostly tried to be quiet & not overextend, not fall into the well, the emergency. Walked a lot. Went to V’s to pick lettuce. Had a dream of being in Challis with B. Then a dream of being in this house with both K & T. All these blankets & trying to help K decide what to wear & drew a mustache on his face. T said something about the importance of finding a passionate way to live & to live passionately. I woke up thinking about Rachael, about that need for a tether of some kind in order to stay. & a sense of something I need to write about all these tender people who die of different forms of suicide. Kept hearing the phrase a problem of tenderness.
31 May 2023
AM
Dream of Rachael. I was driving back to Boise from Challis, I think, or maybe that was a separate dream. I was staying in this apartment/hotel where she & M lived. She seemed to be in bed a lot & there were all these cats around. It was one of the situations where she’d come back, wasn’t really dead. & she seemed a little upset that everyone had been telling each other she was. Mostly it was nice though - to see her, to be there. Maybe she was confused. I had gotten back to Boise but everyone seemed to think I had to come back this other way. I kept saying “but I’m here,” I have all my things and my car. It was like I’d gotten back in some way they didn’t know existed.
05 June 2023
AM
Yesterday had a lot of emotion come out finally. A pretty difficult afternoon but what I needed. To move & cry & have a big dinner & rest. Feel better, calmer this morning. Grief is so strange & it feels like it only gets more complicated as I get older. As these deaths continue to pile up, echo each other.
Later -
Rachael & Jam & Katy in dashboard, Michael & Jones somewhere behind:
R: I could not stay – no tether. I am a teacher for you & all of you.
J & K, et al.: Understand that all of these [deaths] are related, different tones of the same spectrum.
Ritual with Elijah
23 July 2024
for Rachael
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Poetry Problem
Somewhere around the time I first encountered opiates, I met Michael. Archangel Michael with a tattoo on his forearm about Truth with a capital T. I had a year left of high school and he was a year out. Michael was beautiful—tall, handsome face, a head of dark, curly hair, perpetually tan and a little dirty, a thinker, a talker, one of the mad ones—my Platonic form of Bohemian intellectual. He smoked cigarettes and drank yerba mate from a gourd and he was the most alive person I’d ever met. I remember the first time we went to coffee, watching him refuse cream then sprinkle drops of cold water into the cup so that he could drink it faster. And that was how he was—he wanted everything all at once, as immediate and undiluted as possible.
Michael made cigarettes look cool and read thick books, but he didn’t care about academia or achievement. Though my parents were progressive enough, especially as far as Idaho is concerned, I still grew up under a not so subtle expectation of perfection. Straight As, no cops, Ivy League or one tier below. Knowing Michael blew open my understanding of what my life could look like—a life also of books and ideas but one entered into from a space of freedom for the purpose of discovery and creativity, not a path to an end—and he was the first person I ever met who was proud of writing poems.
Though there is no question that I was in whatever love means to a 15-year-old with him, I was also a little afraid. Not of Michael, exactly, but of what it would mean to pour into him. It was my first time feeling a sensation I would come to understand more clearly as I got older, a feeling that shows itself when I am nearing someone who is even more fire than me, even more bright burning. Intoxicating and almost impossible to tear away from, I have learned to recognize it from far away, walk in the other direction. We kissed once, listening to The Weakerthans on his bed in an apartment he shared with a friend across from the Boise Co-op that would now cost at least two grand a month to rent. He tasted like coffee and tobacco and Nag Champa and I knew if it happened again I’d be toast. It was 2003.
||
I graduated high school, went to Eugene for my first couple of years of college, came back to Boise in an anemia and rain-induced depression, and got a job at a coffee shop. The early 21st century was a golden time to be young in Boise. We could afford rent with part time jobs, people in their 20s owned businesses and ran artist spaces downtown. We learned how to be adults inside a glowing utopia we didn’t recognize as such. Friends were always hanging around the coffee shop, writing and making art, getting drunk, falling in love. Michael was around. Still beautiful, still palpably alive. But after not too long, it became clear that his initial aura of contemporary beat poet had morphed into something more extreme. He’d disappear for months on end, hopping trains and doing drugs and falling in love, returning briefly with rapid speech and half a shirt on, his eyes obscured with a thickening glaze, wonder rotted to disillusionment.
After finishing college, I moved to Seattle. A winter night late, Michael wrote on my Facebook wall asking for new light. He called and I could feel him hollowed out, trying to pull something of me and into him. I made an excuse and hung up the phone. Two months later, he was gone. Hopped a train south of Portland, headed toward Eugene. Around 3am Michael jumped or fell between two train cars, his blood alcohol level .35. Years later, I would write: I guess I never thought of Michael / as having had a problem insomuch as I thought / he was in love with feeling / and not feeling in equal measure. And that was true. And he died of it.
Conversation with Rachael
PART ONE / IDAHOI put your pink art outside, wooden chair barricaded by snow, left dead lily in frozen pot for whoever I must pray to to hear you.
We had so much fight in us, still do – I do, fight in my mind horses kicking the interior of me: dead lily, sage brush, I’d’ve knotted myself together to meet you clearly, to meet anyone.
Do I? I feel weaker & strong at once, my heart a backward walking shadow smart in bright morning. I lay down diamond water in geode cave & wait for a signal, see you shimmer a little to the left, your laugh.
Fight in all alive no matter. Sun set into my eyes though it was not my fault. You saw x-ray vision my tender center, so open it scared you of yours, am I correct? Here is saltier, as I like. Warm ocean body held.
Yes. I watched you sing, slow dance in the rain, driving drunk across a city I love. Dark booth in dark bar we cried, recognized, hands held under table, your endless hair. “Peach,” you said.
As it happens, I could love anything, how even disdain is a form of laying eyes on. Filtered through a glimmer, ugliness become its own tea left to sweat in afternoon heat. Idaho.
I never saw you in the desert, only sheltered by green – thick leaves & flowers, water everywhere. What would you have been, us together there walking soft hill to lower alpine in the sun.
You live because of the desert, which is no longer a question to ask. That water swirling into a drain no use for you. I chose it knowing the exit door I wanted to take. Don’t be afraid to be honest. Fuck anyone else.
||
& here I am for you suspended over creek bridge trying to remember. When you died that was where I met them, even before – the brightness of April ocean, of evening & birds, flowers imagining the love of a child. Later, summer.
You’ve thought of me as water but really I am birds. Here you get to pick the sky – it’s true. There’s a questionnaire at the door you fill out – bubbles, #2 pencil, the whole thing; best test I’ve ever taken no studying.
I’d want wind in the trees, I think. Was that an option? What kind of hair do you have now is it feathers? A man passed by me just then did you see? Did you send him?
Ha! I’d never. My hair is sparkling silver gold everywhere. You don’t have to be just one thing. I’d pick woman again though of course it was difficult. For me, as it has been for you, I know. We recognized that in each other. The propensity for falling, sight of goodness in all & the likelihood then of violation, smooth hand beneath the clothes. We loved them both & all.
Which leg am I to stand on, constellation across the sky, did you have a few more poems to write?
Legs strong together make one & the one you are to choose. I am not All Knowing. Death isn’t like that – voices heard but inarticulate beyond the door. Still in a way I am myself. Just as wise & bobbing just above in the sea of consciousness. What I make here is with my hands. Woven, more direct, uncomplicated by narrative or time. Poet always, the one lone bird behind.
Where next?
The sun.
||
So much of you feels possible right now. What do you think about that?
Do you need to ask? You know well by now. Of course the dead are always possible, though it is true I am closer & will remain so for some time as the grief of me continues to be grieved. It is not all gray water, though, as your mind sometimes makes it to be. Allow your fear to go. The point of your being here is that path isn’t it? The path from loss to divinity? It was my path too in a way, though it both found & took me differently than you.
Why did not I go, continue that direction as I had started it? Atheism, a swollen heart, anger at premature goneness, alcohol dripping from me. I understand it is not so simple—sunglasses in dark late winter bird sounds.
That path we were both walking – let’s be honest, most of us poets were walking it – was so beautiful. Dark ink glimmering, all of us swimming in it, naked together, attached at various nexus points of our bodies. Wasn’t it delicious? I would’ve eaten that cake forever with you, thick chocolate spread over our skin. You’d’ve too, maybe, left to the rainy parts. Problem was I got alone. The party stopped & I was there, suspended in the bubble of my lone apartment, trying to love what I could, sopping wet & gathering dust simultaneous antique obsolescent ornate ruin. I felt the romance in it even then.
& now? In the center after?
I regret nothing. I watch the movie with my bucket of buttery popcorn & I laugh – how clumsy & throbbing with youth we were – cry sometimes, mostly just awestruck waiting for you all to fill the seats next to me.
What if we just wrote some poems now? In weird Idaho spring winter summer all flavors from the soda machine suicide. Hail like Styrofoam in the sun, that sort of thing, a river to wait by what do you think? Stopped for bleeding color, kept walking, called my mother, saw her name cut off from a plastic banner, a sign.
As you know, I spent so long without my mother. What would you have done? Snow gathered in feet inside the frigid walls. Don’t stop visiting even if a poem. I like pink & ribbons, fake statue of deer & outdoor aerobics station. Outside can be everything, not just IDAHO idea of nature. Some swans wading through pond muck amidst the paddle boats, etc. I watched you singing.
For you only, long gone Patsy Cline in my ear dream, your dancing, my.
||
“A memory of us wanting God to be real.”
I thought a couple
of kids laid up
in a sand box.
Sun a radioactive
color through haze
no clouds. A dog
named cowboy.
“Cowboy sit.”
Make the morning
stay all day.
Leopard print
roller skates.
Rachael wrote a poem
called Activities for Love.
Actually it was her
life – butterfly closed
in Mason jar. Exquisite.
“Love like a human
heart you are eating”
was more or less
the argument.
I thought God
floating over that
sandbox grit
between our toes.
“Saturday could be
every day,” God
said then in string
across the sky.
“Actually I’d like the jar
smashed open,” I said. Glass
turned sand again
I’d wash my face with.
No,” God said; putting
our shoes on one
foot then the other.
Our ankles bare
God wrapped
the scene in candy
wrapper & waited.
The moon did a few
circles. Our wings
turned sugar.
“I thought I’d be more
meat than this,”
you said.
“Don’t worry,”
I said. “We’ll
be meat tomorrow.”
||
POEM WITH KARENA & RACHAEL
I thought it could be fun us all together
black ink while fake cops roam the sidewalks
in clown car four-wheeler side-by-side.
Pink highlighter tied to a tree branch
pink comb on the ground pink lunch
box ice pack placed at the root, okay, God.
Cold wind past wintertime & dry despite
snowflake come into my mouth no ask –
that’s what does it. Long walk gray February
old spring, make it out alive.
Yesterday heart pain traveling from one side
of body to the other I pressed a fake tattoo
into my shoulder to help, your hands held
wet washcloth where mine couldn’t
reach. Soft kid palms, blanket broken
with rain, a difficult beach.
Real bird real dirt real heart real wind real life.
Karena & I walk a square around the center
of time, a street called Pandora, a school
turned condos haunted by gone babies.
I leave you in my bag in her house to rest
before we pick back up again. The books
near you all titled for ending I let you seep
into each other, wait for what else.
We pass the many mile markers of our lives,
pathways, the hair of a girl, the name of mine.
No dead birds today but a cloud of crows, three
hawks separate in each their own allotment of sky
while we find new ways to say “It’s okay to feel
bad” & “It’s okay to feel bad & stay alive.”
Resolve to trade in holding tight to shoulders shaking
hard screaming STAY, wait to make some other alchemy.
||
Wind carried me to meet you in dry end-of-winter field, your brother’s song ends as a truck turns HOME in block letters on the side. I wonder what you thought of that, where & where now.
I like that you can all be happy. Life is long even when perceived to have been shortened, you know? Home inside a joke or standing a few feet into stage, dark bar on a Friday night swaying. Clear-eyed as any of you may be now, you can’t deny that sparkle. The liquid of it gold or iridescent bubble floating into night no knowing how high. I didn’t want to stay for war beyond what war there already was.
What does that feel like where you are – war? We felt through each other into it between evergreen imagination of sea.
Where do you think that image came from? Bright burning hole in atmosphere crows between. I & the rest of us beyond are often one being. I myself at times alone in each of your living minds, but often what seems like separate entity messages is actually all of us up here, whatever layer I wanted you to grieve me, to wash me with rain come not so far from the ocean. I thought HOLE IN THE SKY CL. See? Stitch me with ribbon to this home & I’ll stay.
Yes I see & have been assured of this from those wiser than me without fully understanding the utility of separation. What is it?
For you to understand the quality of the message, what it regards. You’re psychic but you don’t have to see everything plainly & in accuracy. More fun to work in symbols, anyway. Find whatever form brings forward the puzzle, ya know? One fun side effect of being god now – become anything for love.
Wind carried me to meet you in dry end-of-winter field, your brother’s song ends as a truck turns HOME in block letters on the side. I wonder what you thought of that, where & where now.
I like that you can all be happy. Life is long even when perceived to have been shortened, you know? Home inside a joke or standing a few feet into stage, dark bar on a Friday night swaying. Clear-eyed as any of you may be now, you can’t deny that sparkle. The liquid of it gold or iridescent bubble floating into night no knowing how high. I didn’t want to stay for war beyond what war there already was.
What does that feel like where you are – war? We felt through each other into it between evergreen imagination of sea.
Where do you think that image came from? Bright burning hole in atmosphere crows between. I & the rest of us beyond are often one being. I myself at times alone in each of your living minds, but often what seems like separate entity messages is actually all of us up here, whatever layer I wanted you to grieve me, to wash me with rain come not so far from the ocean. I thought HOLE IN THE SKY CL. See? Stitch me with ribbon to this home & I’ll stay.
Yes I see & have been assured of this from those wiser than me without fully understanding the utility of separation. What is it?
For you to understand the quality of the message, what it regards. You’re psychic but you don’t have to see everything plainly & in accuracy. More fun to work in symbols, anyway. Find whatever form brings forward the puzzle, ya know? One fun side effect of being god now – become anything for love.
The Year of the Burning Roses
25 August 2023
Sat in the Burlington airport for a while then got on plane. Was very tired in Denver & the people in the waiting area were so depressing, so beige. But we got up into the sky & got closer to Idaho & I felt better & better. Beautiful sunset in clouds then the massive, rugged landscape below. How different the west – the mountain west – is from the rest of the country. This vast expanse, this geology. Even if Boise is difficult, this topography is where I feel best, where I make sense & fit & can spread & feel home. Meditated for most of both flights. Christopher died a couple of days ago, of suicide or overdose I think but no one is saying exactly. Found out in Denver between flights & I guess am just now registering it. Saw it on I’s story, couldn’t engage right away, in the center of return. Dreamed that M was actually the one who died & I was part of this big thing for her, helped organize it. It felt weird that it was me doing it, but everyone seemed okay with it & there was a way in which I was the only one who could.
26 August 2023
A series of dreams I’ve now lost. Feeling more rested this morning & calm again after a hard evening. Spent most of the day unpacking & rearranging the house. Talked with E & she told me more about Christopher, then called V. She seems ok, relatively … probably in shock. Walked to the Co-op, felt aimless but had a nice afternoon in the house, moving stuff around, reintegrating. Went to do yoga in the basement just before K got home & finally found my own feelings. Cried hard for awhile. Had a flash of talking with him at the Record Exchange, of having a crush on him before he & V / me & B. Probably 2009. Had dinner & K & I talked about him & cried more. Some guilt feelings that I wasn’t more warm & open with him this go round in Boise. Really had a sense of his nearness to death. What am I supposed to do with that? It’s the same as the feeling I had with Jam … of course there is some logic to it but it’s deeper than that. Seeing someone & knowing they won’t be around too much longer. & how my response to that has been to close up, as though if I let them in too much the death drive will get into me too. This period since 2016, but especially since 2020, a sense of escalation, of more people leaving. A sort of death crisis.
27 August 2023
Dream I was teaching a group of people over the course of many days. The image I remember most clearly was standing in front of the ocean with all of them, our hands open toward the water & somehow we were so powerful that it sort of pressed the ocean upward, made a wall. Yesterday K & I had a sweet morning – coffee, walking, the Record Exchange. Had good conversations about Christopher & suicide & all of it, then came home & B came over, good to talk to him & to cry some more after he left. K & I listened to the Arthur Russell record that just came out. The feeling, lying on the living room was of when we did mushrooms – that feeling of Michael’s presence, his consciousness fracture, while I was coming up, somehow an echo of this moment, reverse/forward echo? V came over & we all sat around the firepit then lightning started, all around the sky almost continuously. I’ve never seen that before. Then rain. The sound of the rain in the fire. We burned a hole in the grass.
30 August 2023
Met V for coffee & a walk in the morning yesterday. Tried to balance myself in the afternoon, then walked downtown, stopped at the cemetery to say hi to Jones & J., then went to Atlas & V came, Tenth & K joined us. Went to Neurolux & it was so nice – tons of flowers & photos, food. A strange transformation of that space that also felt natural – we’ve been sitting in vigil there for 13 years practically. Lots of sweet interactions, speeches, music, hugs, etc. It felt good to have a core of longtime Boise community together like that, felt healing. A letting go of old shit & a space for grieving we’ve all needed for a long while, I think. Good & loving feeling. When his best friend was talking in particular, I felt all the layers of the gone people very clearly & it was hard not to unravel. A mirror, though. Sometimes I wonder if I made up my closeness with Jam, but having a grief like Christopher come in that’s present but a little more removed from me helps me know how real that all was. Watching her destroyed, trying to talk still, I saw myself – I was that.
||
I go to Seattle for a couple of weeks and meet with my cousin. 10 years old when her father died of suicide, 23 years older than me, she is a psychic medium. I spent the second year of the pandemic studying with her, learning how to grow a boundary around myself, learning how to listen cleanly, to find right action and right timing. Learning how not to go crazy. When we meet, I am two years out from our mentorship, finding my way as an intuitive worker. I have come to her because I am tired, beyond myself in a way I haven’t been in recent memory.
This is not a reading—we aren’t allowed to do that anymore; I am supposed to figure things out myself—this is a conversation about work, a check-in to help keep me on track. When we sit down to begin our conversation, she opens the space and my dead uncle appears. She asks him why he is here—his presence usually an indication of suicide or suicidality—and once it is clear that I am not suicidal, I tell her what has been going on. How orbited I have been by these newly dead, their presences in my dreams and when I go up to my dashboard. I tell her I knew years ago that one of them was going to die soon and all I could manage was to distance myself. I want to know what I’m supposed to do when I feel that—the same sense I had in the years before Jam died—the awareness that a person is getting ready to leave. And what I am supposed to do for them when they’re gone from their bodies but still linger in view.
She says I am doing enough, as though I am to recognize I have already had the answer, and we move on. She tells me a specialty guide will be coming in to help me with the book I’m about to write. Male writer, deceased, gentle humor, talks in an old-timey way. 1800s, 1880s? Evolution of writers in American history, their voices—what it was like, culture up to next century, your century. I translate this into what I have already known was coming—poets who have died of as a result of their tenderness. Not of their tenderness, but of the failure of the world to hold that tenderness—and I know it is the same book the friends have been wanting. She says part of the plan of my life involves requests for different helpers and I know this; it is not the first time someone has come in. When I was writing fiction in my 20s, trying to recover from a different string of losses, one book was about a French girl riddled with madness. For months she would wake me up in the middle of the night and I’d light a candle, sit in her hospital room and listen, bear witness to her as she unraveled, glass all over the floor. This new guide sounds different, whimsical and funny. I look forward to meeting him.
Conversation with Rachael
PART TWO / PORTLAND& now on the rain side, water in one ear, a mile away we are here together late night victory lap, the air it sparkled, out of gas to drive.
I never got used to an airplane, metal star in sky. I’d pace around, make circles of myself in spirals, decorated sky.
Are we too much the same voice? Or is that all any voice is, if beckoned to properly, a coming together imperceptibly.
I wouldn’t worry about it. Twinkie, HoHo, rubber chicken, etc. What I would do is lay facedown or on gravel, stone turned to shards. Do anything to become an atom away from earth material. I could have stood in life to do that more, though you seem to have figured it out. Each measure a beat away from human time. Turn a few circles around & you find.
What else?
More tomorrow &
||
Reclined, I see! & preparing to begin. Don’t be afraid that the body takes time to catch up. Without one, it’s easier to appreciate that. All flaw & human filled with water, slow matter made of stars. I come into your view as the sky does – always here & working, language isn’t everything, as you have well begun to discern. How in the periphery to show what shadow next to shine on. Always another once one has been seen.
& what is that – this time, the shadow? Hello I am happy to hear you. Is this okay?
Don’t be stupid, you have my full permission. Shadow is about fun & hiding ourself. If you want this baby to come you have to find again the capacity for complete joy uncomplicated by notions of responsibility, knowing all will be accomplished through such an allowance. This is the doorway to expressing yourself filterless, allowing the divine to speak. You must not fear, trust your capabilities, your body, your own tender & beautiful heart. I help show you what a waste of a life it is to silence.
Thank you. I am ready to step into that light & I will stand barefooted each morning in trust. & you? How are you? Where? What now is your vantage.
Oh I am all vantage. No need to worry so much about the dead. Find who needs you alive & listen, help with hands & throat & your vibration will heighten to the next level of work – all ease & trust from here.
What is this restlessness?
Oh just to kick you forward a little. Remind you of your sparkling agency & all you are to stay alive. Wisdom & responsibility give unto a lightness, lightening. Diagonal & into the change you go, Peach <3
||
Maybe you could tell me what to do in the actual present OR – if the dead wrong title Idaho girl in the dream was you or a poem. I’d keep here awhile, hop around. I wish away a year ago for you, see you crying in bed not comatose but seething. I’ve chosen another way – not to look directly in the direction of looking. A form of powerful animal to remember. Our names.
You shouldn’t be surprised to know I love it best like this. Sure my death & hers are separate but at the end of the day who are we? Brown haired girls from Idaho who liked to feel nothing & everything at once. Find the way to get the heart out forward generously & don’t worry so much about the mechanics of things. Take tampon out & let body become external. If a teacher you knew decided to be quiet out of fear what would that show you? No time not to help, not to be externalizing love at all costs. No grief no mechanism, love only HOPE HOPE HOPE what names a machine. You must begin to make poems again & always. Grieve us that way – silence is gold & comes when it likes; there will be plenty later. Trust me & go on.
Everywhere around me now are siblings & those I cannot discern from the oldest of lives. I hear already you saying no need to search out the answer – let it surface & be awed as ever – time one human construction to adore.
Yeah pretty much. Don’t sweat about it – the blood has mixed with the salt water already, you know.
I return to the place you first found me to say hello & bring back what? Of course I return. & of course I seek guidance. A sort of fearlessness. I know you were capable of w. Where are you now & what helps? You, anyone, the trees.
Oh I am soft in rhododendron flowers – you thought I didn’t know, didn’t accompany you from desert over. Quiet giving me this voice & see how the bees go. It is more like that as I know in right current you know – a vibration, an interaction with wind. When you have filled this book, move forward – it does not need to be of me alone. Bring it around, let some other colors in. I am tranquil now for the moment. Ready to watch as any of you gather in any name. I love it. The celebrity.
& what of this time here? What am I meant to do, attract, listen to, forgive. Who now am I to become? Next.
Rest that you’ve become primarily yourself. Addition will occur but the center of the pearl is the pearl. Now know this & walk forward in it. As the flowers of branches sometimes touch the ground yet still attract the bees, the hummingbirds, you will. Don’t worry about perceptible gain. In the truth the dirt of me I cared little. I & the other dead are teaching you this always, you need to just know it already, exit in its grace trusting your pink & glowing hands to provide exactly what is needed. As for me, I need no grand gesture, no stones buried in earth. I benefit the most completely from the work you manage to pull from your temples, into & out of your hands. Trust in this & begin again. Begin again always & be that great spirit pressing on, out.
Thank you. I miss who you made me see.
&
The Year of the Burning Roses
Back in Idaho, the students and teachers of our town start to die of suicide at a rapid rate. My psychologist sister is asked to speak at many schools and meetings, her face in rectangle of computer, her body in front of audience. This is her job. Her decades of study and clinical work brought to bear before rooms of wrecked parents grasping too late at prevention. Over and over, she and her colleagues remind us not to focus on the means of death, but on the life. To destigmatize but not normalize. To remember but not floodlight.
Right away I worry I have harmed. That everything I’ve thought or written has been exactly what I am not to have done. At the same time, an itch begins at the center of me, a resistance to what feels like a call for the suppression of feeling process, a grief prescription. Though I know this is not the intended meaning, I let the irritant take up space, begin to form layers around itself. First I hold how my sister and I are different—a doctor and a poet, an elder and a younger, one of us grounded in the material, the other in the beyond; then how we are the same: both of us grown from the same root system of loss, born with the ability to stare straight into grief, death, disturbance, turned from opposite edges toward one cruel center, trying like hell to heal it.
The school deaths smash me again toward the book and I start an automatic writing practice to invite in the new guide. Each morning after recording dreams and the previous day’s movements, I light a candle, turn on red noise, pick up a purple pen, and write a question at the top of an extra-long legal pad. The voice comes through clearly and quickly and concludes just as we reach the bottom of the page. They know exactly the words they want to use, make me stop for precision. When we talk, it is not just language; I am entered into a visual world different from any other I’ve seen. We move through space, oceans and clouds with a geometry beyond that of this world, everything colored different from what I know, everything the quality of an echo.
04
October 2023
& what is helpful for us to know now?
& what is helpful for us to know now?
SOA:
A consideration of the ocean – not the blueblue water but that sensation of it pushing against the skin:body. You wrote a story about one way that works but there are others – know this & allow them. Not a lake but the ocean. The as in one. Imagine yourselves as the creatures there, what you would do with each other if surrounded by all that water all that salt, the floating the dear buffer between actions. The oracle of course thought they were listening to Earth. Stars have some similar properties it should be known & also that the ocean is closest to that way of being beyond. Oneness was the original directive & it’s okay that that gets lost in ego:age, or rather, must be found piecemeal through the story. New birth at a time whole complete. Imagine just one ocean in the universe.
Illness & euphoria are the same seeking. No good or bad just ways to exit. This is not a poem but a liquid thread pulled from another type of seeing. Anyone can, just try. Wear the only clothes that fit the job & do not look back. An expansion, a swelling is what’s necessary first before focus. Bringing into being is no small task but it’s the right one. Sweating over it, song. You were told to pull an image down instead of floating inside it. Stop that. Be the poem more clearly by language as raw material – what does it need to cook & how can the hands do? There is no question other than who is in the room. Start there & listen in. Soak.
What gets written down is only one dimension. Unseen is the understanding I receive, the translation made and integrated into my body.
As we continue into our work, my external life returns me over and over again to Fernando Pessoa. A writer I’ve heard of a few times in passing, whose work I’ve never read, is suddenly everywhere. In multiple conversations and at the center of my weekly horoscope from the astrology column I’ve been reading for 20 years. I am given The Book of Disquiet by a friend I’ve only just met, then see a few of his books on another friend’s shelf, take one down and find our birthdays are exactly one hundred years and one day apart: June 13 and June 14, 1888 and 1988—and it becomes abundantly clear that it is Pessoa I am speaking with. Some version of him, anyway, bodiless, genderless. SOA they want to be called. I feel them vaguely green, an orb floating before me, and also everywhere, a mist surrounding.
05
October 2023
& what is healing to know now?
& what is healing to know now?
SOA:
It isn’t just about the ocean. Think walking with feet on green, think that life surrounded by meadow. Not the green of grass but the green of air filled invisible with what will become precipitation. How the air makes a blanket as water also does, a layer between. The sense in the body when ill of melting into itself. That this could be transcendence rather than fear. Think along into the dream of on an airplane. The height of being in the sky there is where we’re going, is where we go in. A curling tunnel from there beyond the circle around earth but still in orbit. There are stars that see & stars that don’t. Farther than the moon but not so far. See means “are visible.” I am in the language beyond yours trying to help you up. A boat from there like flying but no structure, souls formed together as in a mould, loose yet a shape, their edges not quite touching, bubbles floating alongside. A lot of sailing around before reaching something higher; that’s why you feel them. I get up there once but didn’t stay long that place for gods; there are multiple of course & every. Again like ships on the horizon. They send down anchors to the people for something to climb up. More like mycelium tendrils—not just one & not too solid, many delicate sinews for each to grab onto. They gentle stroke across the crowns of you until you choose (a) one(s). To not hold is what keeps one under the weather. Not ill but caught inside the valley of atmosphere. This does not have to be bad, just one way of keeping close. Know you are protected by many thousands of tendrils. Even when you were not choosing they grew toward you. Let go material worry knowing this is so. Lean back into the vines. You are kept & keeping. No alone.
Beneath SOA’s ocean is a space, a grace period between their world and where Earth’s atmosphere begins. I see the tethers hanging there, suspended, each a sort of umbilical cord waiting to attach to a living human, and I know the tethers, the tendrils will be one center of this work. An answer to what keeps my body here.