I've been poetically a bit stuck recently and have been letting the prompts pile up! Boo-hoo! I'm still only partway through my exercise with "heart," but here is a poem about a choice I was faced with recently.
I've been poetically a bit stuck recently and have been letting the prompts pile up! Boo-hoo! I'm still only partway through my exercise with "heart," but here is a poem about a choice I was faced with recently.
Thank you, A! I'm good, just mad busy and I think that's been disrupting my poetic flow a bit. I've also not been spending as much time as I want to in the comment pages. I think it'll turn around soon, though. :)
I've been poetically a bit stuck recently and have been letting the prompts pile up! Boo-hoo! I'm still only partway through my exercise with "heart," but here is a poem about a choice I was faced with recently.
.
The choice was nothing: pushpins
and a foam board, a simple XY graph.
I was to plot my pulls in two dimensions:
cis-trans on x, straight-gay on y.
.
Mine was the squarest of squares,
I knew that much, minus-minus
in a Cartesian system, but
that wasn’t the exercise,
the exercise was to roam
my continent of self
and map the patch that stuck my shoes.
.
The gallery was empty.
The exhibit wouldn’t open for hours.
I had so much space to decide.
.
My quadrant winked at me
like the Great Plains
before people,
.
and remained untapped.
.
Thirty years since church
and still, when it comes to queerness,
I have the inner world of a quilt:
thick batted layers, stray fluff,
no answer bold enough
to raise a contour.
.
The room filled up
and so did my quadrant,
but not as much as you might think.
The plane has changed –
it is less flat.
How fitting that our kids
should have introduced
the z-axis.
.
To push my pin, I finally
resorted to math.
Here I am in purple,
a few millimeters north of
southwestern cis-het.
.
It was a nothing choice.
It is a start.
“Roam /my continent of self / and map the patch that stuck my shoes.” I love this!
This is gorgeous, Rebekah! I've missed seeing your poems lately and I hope all is well with you. 🧡
Thank you, A! I'm good, just mad busy and I think that's been disrupting my poetic flow a bit. I've also not been spending as much time as I want to in the comment pages. I think it'll turn around soon, though. :)