a poem upon my return to the land of Substack and to you my wonderful readers

School has started, people keep threatening me that summer is over, i am a week away from my birthday fighting a head cold, and my body is not done with the long Sabbath of summer vacation

Hello beautiful ones,

It’s been almost a month since i last essay-ed on here. Travel, children, exhaustion, play, wonderment and bewilderment have all been factors. I’m also convinced that my wild and amazing postpartum brain and body continue to evolve at a pace the conscious, thoughtful me can’t quite make sense of, so i’m mostly living into it.

Part of it is how tangential and web-like my writing process has been. Composing anything with a degree of linearity or a thesis statement has felt challenging (my husband thinks jet lag and a cold don’t help either), so as i am working on an essay on voice, i.e. opening our mouths and telling the truth, unashamed of our sounds, our tone and pitch, our strength or our softness, and the histories therein, and as this essay is slow to materialize, i want to share a poem with you, a poem connected to my last essay on which you can read here. Do read it, becasue it will contextualize a bit my obsession with Mary Magdalene, who will weave her way into my writing for a long while, i believe.

Our last trip of the summer was to Lake Tahoe — and here is Emerald Bay 🩵

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Feminine Tense
		after Masaccio’s Mary Magdalene 

Say i didn’t really love you.
Say the world continues its rotation
	around its own tilted axis.
Say we should make nothing of that tilt,
	how the moon keeps it from varying
	no more than a degree. Why worry?
Say we should forget the seasons of us,
	how your hand touched my face
	and it was like you brushed the darkness from me.
	you were always so gentle with all things
	birds, and children, and the falling night.
Say that everyone understood why we loved
	even the crook of each other’s elbow,
	the curtain of each other’s hair.
Say you were a woman inside a man’s body
	and I recognized you, the feminine tense
	of you, the soft fawn eyes you made
	every morning before you truly woke.
Say we weren’t surprised at the short years
	we were granted.
Say you didn’t kiss my feet nor I kissed yours
	the endless revolution of our bodies’ discovery.
Say I didn’t interrupt a meal with your friends
	or your prophesying, or your travels.
Say I changed nothing about your trajectory.
Say that when you died I wasn’t there, hands raised
	not in despair, as they say, but in triumph.
	because you chose your way of leaving 
me, or the body of earth, or the human
places you had claimed.
Say foxes have dens and men places to lay
	their heads, but we had mouthfuls
	of stones, and bleeding feet, 
	and from our ribs we birthed 
	galaxies.