a book of poems and what it feels like

writing and nursing

I have been working on a chapbook…and it feels like nursing. I eat, I digest, and sometime, mostly inconveniently in the middle of the night, milk and poems pour out of me into the mouths of a very small audience.

I am the moon in this story. But something like the moon in the school play, a cardboard hat, badly applied face paint.

The gravitational pull. The return. Water being pulled all over the shores.

I return. And return. And sometimes you even see me. Like last night, large luminescent, powerful, emphatic.

And like the moon, and the nursing, and the poems, somehow my body knows what to do. It doesn’t mean there wasn’t learning, technique, bruises, chapped bleeding nipples, or tidal shifts revealing everything below.

But it does mean that when the conditions arrive. I make milk. I make poems. I make and I make.

What I’d really like to do is sauna as it turns to spring. I want to lie on hot cedar planks and watch my sweat bead up, pool, and run down my chest and legs. So hot that I become steam. I want to watch my body change and turn to vapor.

And here together, we make this space together. In the midst of the emails about sales, tax reminders, sometimes even a note from a friend there is this strange moment. Sent off with a hope that you recognize your making and that it changes you.

Here is a poem I had published last week from that upcoming book!

And

one more from poet Maggie Frank-Hsu