Dinner Leftovers #2

A collection of stream-of-consciousness poetry, excerpts from unfinished drafts, & word vomit from years past

Show and Tell

2022

I do this exercise with my clients called "show and tell" where I ask them to quickly collect 3-5 items from around their home that bring them joy. Then, I invite them to become an excited kindergartner and tell me all about these objects, delight in their beauty, and explain why they love them. Even if they never use these items for anything practical, "I love this egg cup because it's so cute," is as valid a value as any other.

Afterwards, I have them artfully arrange the items on the ground and appreciate the way they look as a collection. "The way these items look/feel in harmony is a reflection of your true aesthetic," I tell them, "Your entire home can be like that."

In a consumer culture, we are taught to be overly precious about material goods without being precious enough about material goods, trapped in our own inner tension between unconscious scarcity and disillusionment.

We do not examine our relationship to things, because we are used to cheap, mass produced goods being readily available, and we have internalized a vague notion that it's superficial or part of the problem to be "materialistic."

Materialism is morally neutral. It's HOW we relate to the material world that matters.

Enhancing our relationship with things--treating things with reverence and irreverence, appreciation and non-attachment, intentionality and playfulness--is one of the most anti-consumerist things we can do to create a healthier culture.

A Little Spilled Milk

2023

You are not the cycle breaker.
You come from a long line of cycle breakers
If all they could break was their own back
From the weight of the welts of their father’s belt
They spared their own child one day
In favor of every moment of grief they never felt
Exploding the moment the milk hit the floor.
I wish you could cry
Over a little spilled milk.
I wish I could stop crying
But I can’t
Because I am crying for at least five generations
Of cycle breakers who knew not to cry
Only knew to get on the boat that took them so far
From home 
Their great-grandchildren would be safe from the next plague
Or famine or war or tyranny.
If only.
Now, we restore the alters to forgotten gods and goddesses
That do not answer our prayers
Only allow us to release ourselves
Just enough
To leave room
For spirit to exhale into the empty bed
Where your grandfather once did unspeakable things to your grandmother.

Artist: Becca Stadtlander

Follow the Red Thread: 4

2024

My love,

I have finally found the thread where you dropped it (and it will not be in the dark but in the dreams). I have followed it into an empty room. I have followed it into sound. I have followed it into sleep.

Can we lay here and sleep? I want to cry and sleep like a child who knows you are not my father or my mother, but only long enough for you to remember home. I do not need anything but sleep–with you. (If you’ll have me wrapped around you with red thread, the crumpled tapestry at our feet.)

Sincerely.

Artist: Katie Scott

Mother Lover

2021

“Find you a man who
Loves his mother,”
They say,
Forgetting his true mother
Is the earth herself. 

“Find you a man who
Loves the earth,”
They say,
“But not with prophecy
Not with vigilance
Not with the clear-eyed
Adoration of a babe.

But one who loves 
The earth so well
He drinks her blood
He remakes his body from mud
Becoming where the sky kisses
The stars.
A gardener.
A priest. 
Who knows his devotion
Will fill his belly.
Who does not shy away
From her pain or 
Her ambivalence. 
The mother who eats her
Own young.
He was made from her, will
Return to her,
Will create her again.” 

This is true love,
When a man is not a man at all.
A woman is not a woman at all.
He is every man who has ever existed.
She is every woman who has ever existed.
He is his own mother.
She is her own father.
Together, they can remember where they came from. 

The Baby Was Mine & Everyone’s

2021

One time, years ago, I was lying in a bed with a man who was not my boyfriend (my boyfriend and I had separated but left things unfinished, and I was skirting lines, like I do) and as he gently caressed my arms, waist, and stomach, I confided in him that my boyfriend wasn’t interested in my child. He didn’t so much as change his diaper. My child’s biological father wasn’t interested, either. My baby was two-years-old by this point, and each year his biological father became more and more absent.

All in all, I was left with raw, luminous, innocent confusion in the reluctant confrontation of a harsh reality. Men wanted my body and wanted to possess me, but did not want the responsibility of a baby my body created with their material--legacy and life and death they placed inside of me to carry, birth, and breastfeed. To rear in human form. They could walk away in a way I could not. They had choices I simply did not have.

It didn’t matter who the baby belonged to, really. The baby was mine and everyone’s. I had a baby. Having a baby was part of being with me. It was part of being with me both before and after the conception. It is part of making love to a person with a womb.

Wanting the pleasures of a woman’s body without any of the responsibility, is the original sin committed against women by men. This is how it all began: when men decided to harvest women and throw them away when they were finished with them. When countless women and babies were left in the gutter, raped and pillaged, burned and scorned. Slurped up like wildflower essence. Pinned like dead butterflies.