Consent

Arms across shoulders. A small dance of everything muted but this slight movement of your arm against mine. Hands brushes across hipbones and goosebumps bloom across bodies; an awareness of skin and fingertips. When illicitness was adventure and messiness like being alive, this kind of thing was so much fun. Noticing, not noticing, pretending not to notice, moving, pretending not to move, your hands, your hips. Desire kicks up like a gale. Now, I think, let hands do what lips do, they ask first. I draw my lines with the idea that when you want what you want, you should be able to say it out loud. Honor the risk we take when we speak our own desires. Engage in nothing if it is not consensual. Consent means honesty, realism, a self-awareness of one's possibilities and limitations. How scary it is to move slower, to ask first. But revolutions are built from nothing more than people's relationships with each other. We are all we have. I want to see you in the morning. I want to see you next year.

My lips pray instead of kiss. Make desire easier. Turn the lights back on. Give us ease with which to ask and say. Let us abandon patriarchal methods of communication forever. Let us learn/relearn wiser ways.

communication is the tending of each other's secret worlds

community is an intricate network of relationships

I will never know what's going on for you

unless I ask.

It doesn't exist in a vacuum, it exists in a patriarchy.

If I were to use a simile to describe you, and maybe it's unjust to do so, disrespectful to use someone else's experience metaphorically, but if I were to, I would say that

you are like an autoimmune disorder. You just flare up sometimes and then my body attacks itself.

Here's one of the problems with abuse: it makes you doubt your own (experience memory body). You wonder: am I the crazy one? Maybe I'm crazy, but.

My mom said, if you find yourself asking if you're crazy, that's a red flag. We walk down a well travelled path.

I'm just so angry. Angry at how many of the remarkable women that I know have bodies (minds hearts lives worlds) that have been hurt by the actions of men, by their relationships with men. I KNOW THAT THIS LANGUAGE IS A PROBLEM. Women and men are constructed terms and so many of us have genders that the government (our parents, jobs, lovers) don't recognize. I know that men get hurt and I know that women hurt each other too and the truth is that the more oppression you experience the harder everything else becomes, including abuse whether inside your community or not. I don't mean to use inaccessible language and I don't intend to speak in universal truths, but here is my truth:

so many of the women that I know have been hurt by men.

Sometimes the women I know who have been hurt by men turn out to have also been men the whole time. Sometimes the women I know who have been hurt by men go and confront them. Sometimes the women I know who have been hurt by men write letters to each other to try and understand. Sometimes the women I know who have been hurt by men find healing in loving sex again. Sometimes the women I know who have been hurt by men find healing in never having sex again. Sometimes the women I know who have been hurt by men learn how to name their experience. Sometimes the women I know who have been hurt by men decide it's okay to name their experience whatever it felt like for them.

(I won't say this, but I know it to be true and you know it too: this is your mother, this is my mother, this is his mother)

The space between the times I think about you is getting bigger. Mostly, you come up and then you disappear just as easily. You are an anecdote. You are one way I learned about healing. Sometimes you make the nighttime difficult and sometimes I cry.

But more than that, I blossom. You take beautiful things and break them. But I took what you left me and I am making it whole. I get strong. Not grateful, no, not thankful for any of this, but stronger and smarter, and generous with my love, intentional with my love, useful with my love.

brave and small things

Back then, moonlight woke you up.

It cut across the floor of your bedroom

to pull tides from your body.

Your lovers would say

your heart beats so fast

like all that urgent blood

was for them.

Inside, at work, was an older thing

which took years to name.

when asked if I trusted you, I always said yes

He was once a small and soft baby, he was once a collection of cells.

He used to smell like cedar wood and smoke.

I was in love with the curve of his jaw, his stubble would turn my chin red.

The day after she told me, I chose the floor.
I was mad at my own disassembled state,
but between falling apart or pretending I wasn't,
I chose the realness of melting and said

Look, I understand,
the world has its plans, but I had plans of my own.

I know we are all familiar with the ways loss turns our mouths

into question marks, our hands into.

His mom kicked him out of the car. She said get out of my car, get out, find your own way home. Fourteen, he already had a beard, the older kids asked him to buy beer. Fifteen, he waited until the play had closed before running away. Sixteen, on the road, was it, was any of it true?

He used to tell me stories.
When asked if I trusted him, I always said yes.

Life becomes memories becomes narrative, becomes the stories we tell.

Just like love letters are only paper, burning in the dark.

It all gets smaller and smaller
the farther away you look at it.

When I innumerate my blessings, I find only one resounding

There is good earth in this world. The sun pours down onto the good earth.

Tree branches with new leaves sway in the wind. Their shadows make a

dance on the window pane and on the asphalt. 

Birds dive from the trees, babies learn to walk. Mountains move, but slowly.

All of your ex-lovers try to reckon with the harm you've brought them.

((you are a worm             i don't even know how you love at all                 your

emotional life is a digestive tube                 you just eat and shit out other people's lives.))

people who are too broken to love properly

It is now April and this is 

what happens when you fall in love with starving people.

Starvation is an equalizer. Starving people will do anything.

Starvation has its own rationality which is different than 

our morality. Like how he needed me

with his hands on my body. He had no shame and I had  

no where better to be. I figured, we are children

raised on resurrection stories and I'd never been eaten before.

Is there another way to find out how much you can bear?

I keep learning over and over

that there is a limit to what I am capable of.

survival tactics

Through scarcity

deserts have learned

to let parts of themselves live

and parts of themselves die

in this way, the whole survives.

Forests, meanwhile, are interconnected

not accustomed

to sacrifice

when one part

sickens

the whole forest suffers.

They learned this through abundance.

Trust/wisdom.

When a saguaro cactus has two dead arms

and yet blooms

year after year,

is it less alive?

How do we measure death in this context?

You built a house

with locked doors

no key

under the flower pot

no welcome mat.

An inside place.

The body knows

where the spirit can go

in between joints, under muscle.

You were never not yours

even when you weren't

you were still whole you were

even with part of you dying.

Disassociation is a survival tactic.

There is no such thing as recover

because there is no such thing as before.

There is only now.

Your creativity is an evolutionary advantage.

Your desert heart is the most beautiful thing 

I have ever seen.

we are terrible ancestors

dry earth, down to the bedrock

these empty attics--

the albatross

of settler children

an absence we don't understand

an ache of forgotten ways

dig to the bedrock

turn up the bones

we do not know what veneration means