“Empowerment is the perpetual state of the cosmos…Pulsing structure, in full limit…The power is the vessel, itself.” — Joshua Michael Schrei

“The more choices I make the freer my life becomes…Less zigzagging between doing things that are distracting and more doing things that are critically important.” — Norma Wong

today’s the day.
my last poem in our annual 30 day ritual
on this final day in Europe
before boarding a plane bound for the “United States”

— as if

there is something in the return about being challenged by circumstance. constraint. like poetic form, or writing in this lined notebook. like learning a new thing. it will require the container of practice.

we are headed back into the belly of the beast. having practiced, all year, our joy.

having practiced our presence. our desire to connect with our ancestors. to do things differently. to take charge of how our days feel. to try new things. to prioritize rest & fun & beauty & deliciousness. to learn new languages. to not wait for later, but to practice into the world as we would have it be, now.

we have lived light, with few “things” to carry or want for. we have been outside, walking, amongst the trees and the people, almost every day. we have noticed what is fresh and new in each place, in each month, and we have endeavored to taste it, to appreciate it, to enjoy it before it’s gone. we have read and learned histories and seen so very much art.

we have practiced being more than just workers.
we have been human beings, being.

and i am proud of that.

but also still somehow embarrassed at how clear it feels inside of me.

(from my journal, a few months back)

the sun is a fire ball of light. the truth, pouring out, like slow honey. my face, upturned & light. my smile, my big, brown eyes in this aging face — soft lines forming where i have lived. my brightness. total beauty & softness. total warmth. a bouquet of red & orange dahlias, flaring into every direction.

how big & bright i am. how open & pretty.

i am in the sunlight and i don’t wanna step out of it. i like being so beautiful & healthy & strong & moving towards more of it. i am a lightening bolt. i am a diamond. i am the reflection of waves at mid-day. i am opening and spreading and pouring myself out with preference, without hesitation or timidity. i love in waves & particles. i move between everything in ways that cannot be pinned down. i am the resting heart rate of the radiant sun, still beating.

this is steadily (slowly) becoming my truth. even through the loud protestations of my own doubt.

it is also true that there are people being snatched off of the streets in my country and sent to intentionally cruel places. and while i have concerns about my own bodily safety as i return, i also know that my fears are less likely to come to pass than some of my neighbors fears.

perhaps this is what we have in common

the need for companionship in all of the hard things we feel.

i hear the baby crying across the street
and the mother, patting and soothing

and this makes all the difference

between what simply must be faced
and what lands and stays as trauma

a promise that we matter

i’m hearing calls for a general strike.

but Strategies need to take into account the limited, gasping capacity felt by most people and institutions. — Norma Wong

i’m also hearing calls to shift the various subcultures that we belong to so that they allow for the animal-bodied-ness of our nervous systems. shifts that ask us to share the load of knowing and doing, and then resting.

these are hopeful developments.

Asserting and arising
As yeast that cannot be denied
Its potential deliciousness applied
To the stuckness
Of all things fought to a draw

of note:

we all have animal bodies
all of us waiting to cross the same street
to get to somewhere more delicious

the writing that we do together each April is a form of deep companionship. maybe as we move together across the cracked asphalt of our respective pages, we become a third thing. the commitment that we make through the ritual of it is what keeps our practice holy. this adherence to a rhythm which governs how things grow, which is to say, by the sun and the moon.

Her wish for you in the crosswalk.

I hope that you find what you’re looking for.

My God. I’ll never get over it.

May it be so.
May it be so.
May it be so.

This poem is one in a series titled, Becoming the Ones Who Can: Writing at the Edge of Collapse and the Root of Joy, a poetic collaboration for National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) with Samantha Wallen and Michelle Puckett.

To read the next poem in the series click HERE.

To read the previous poem in the series click HERE.

Michelle Puckett, MFA is a poet, Social Justice Coach & Facilitator, permaculturalist, and Co-Founder of Creating Freedom Movements, a school for activists. All of her work aims to nourish the sacred and make it plain in everyday life.

“There is a fraught reflexiveness in these times to define ourselves in some series of markers and in doing so define who it is we are not with maximum judgement.” — Norma Wong

I am thinking about the Call Me By Your Name tour and the stop at the fascist’s house. What it means that there is a stop there. That I was a tourist on it. That our guide takes people — gay, or gay-lovers — to this house regularly, and is welcomed to do so. That the photo of “Il Duce” from the film still hangs there, above a rifle, set sideways on a table below.

He was sitting outside when we arrived, petting his dog on the bench. He was open and warm toward us. His dog and his chicken seemed to be exceedingly well-cared for. Relaxed, even. Calmest chicken I’ve ever been around, for sure. He placed her in my arms, gently, with a big smile, which showed his poor teeth. He is a man who lives his life outside, with animals.

“Farther beyond, buried deep and hidden behind the many identities, our greatest possibilities lie.” — Norma Wong

Tell the story. Let the story be fed by the telling.

Elio knew he was leading Oliver to his “Secret Place” where they could be alone at the berm. He wanted to kiss him there. So first, he pulled over at a random farmer’s house to ask for water. There, in the doorway, hung a photo of Mussolini. Not a prop; a location for filming, left as it was found.

The beauty of the Alps off in the distance, above the curve of the road. Giant clouds above green fields on the way to them. We pulled up where they pulled up. Elio & Oliver, on their bikes, rushing. Racing (panting) in their pursuit of one another. They’d spoken it aloud, wanted it so bad. Feeling it rise. Out of breath, & thirsty.

There is the generosity of the water. Of being quenched, without question. Of being in the world with a bodily need, beside an old woman, snapping peas. Of being met in said need.

In reality, an old man lives there with his dog, cat, and chickens. With his tattooed, bald head and his shrine to Mussolini. Somehow entrenched, left to feel one feeling, over and over again until his whole shirt fades away. A near-black-shirt. The almost-gone face of ‘Il Duce’ on his shirt that’s been washed a thousand times. To understand yourself against that which the outside world rails. To be the one who holds the flame. Lost Cause. What it means to not want to be bested.

“The fight is won because the fight was lost.” — Norma Wong

The completeness of her sentence.

Take a breath. Slow.

So often, our arrogance. How it feels to see where I fall on this spectrum, which is probably not the whole story. Is certainly not the whole story. And yet I hold up my candle to the hollow of it. Look inside & up. Down. The irregularity of the tunnel, going god-knows-where. I am in the mouth of the page, where the rest of it pours out and I am sorting images at a distance.

I went to see it. Didn’t go for that purpose, or even know the story behind it — that it was real, this portrait of a strongman, still hanging — but I was on a tour. Snapped a picture of his picture. And what does it mean to write about him, without his knowledge?

can you resist fading
be saturated and durable
spread so wide it hurts

How to flow around, burrow under, and go ahead, even when it looks like the road is only closed or only open? Only good or only bad? Only far or only right here, now?

“To see ourselves as members of a Great and Humble Human Race. To evolve toward our better selves. To have an instinct to be in relationship to and to be kind and to accept kindness with gratitude.” — Norma Wong

an old work shirt
or the kind the lovers wore
after their first night together

Or some third thing,
rolling around in
Rumi’s fabled field.

This poem is one in a series titled, Becoming the Ones Who Can: Writing at the Edge of Collapse and the Root of Joy, a poetic collaboration for National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) with Samantha Wallen and Michelle Puckett.

To read the next poem in the series click HERE.

To read the previous poem in the series click HERE.

Michelle Puckett, MFA is a poet, Social Justice Coach & Facilitator, permaculturalist, and Co-Founder of Creating Freedom Movements, a school for activists. All of her work aims to nourish the sacred and make it plain in everyday life.

“Following the contours of ‘art is long, life is short,’ we waste no time, even throwing ourselves into the pursuit of the clutter-free path toward our fruitfully entangled future.” — Norma Wong

We watched Call Me By Your Name again in preparation for our long-awaited pilgrimage to Crema this week. This time — though we watched it in bed like we had our first time — we did not stop the movie halfway through to make passionate love. No, this time, love looked like Kevin dealing with all the wires required for jerry-rigging the ‘Telefunken’ TV in this janky AirBnB in order to play the movie in English, via Italian internet, on his computer, but projected on the screen, while wearing a headlamp, illuminating his work with the leatherman to reconfigure the Ikea shelves, so that the TV could reach the plug. All so that we could be relatively comfortable as we watched. Another kind of real love.

We had costumes I’d picked out to match the shirts Elio & Oliver wore the morning after their first night together. The scene where Elio bikes to find Oliver at the newsstand, and they round the corner, stop in a doorway just as Elio asks, “Are you happy I came here?” all vulnerable and longing. And Oliver leans against him and whispers, “I’d kiss you if I could.” We couldn’t recreate it faithfully, of course. We are too close and entangled for that. After all, I left Crema without a tear in my eye. My Oliver was on the train beside me. But it was sure fun trying.

The forecast in Crema called for rain, and all week I worried, but in the end, there couldn’t have been a more perfect day for it. Northern Italian sun, finally giving way to the kind of giant, fluffy clouds that are good for catching the zillions of colors generated by a setting sun.

As we rode away, I listened to a Joshua Michael Schrei podcast about the Hindu story of Kama and Rati, and how, as the personifications of Longing and Consummation, they are married. It was Longing that called the very universe, itself, into existence. In the beginning, according to Schrei, “The universe wanted something.” So Kama, elaborately mustached, and riding a green parrot, with arrows made of sugarcane and flowers, comes into being. It was he who pierced my heart back in 2017, when I first saw this film. After a year of fighting Trump 1.0, I wanted something.

Now, at the beginning of Trump 2.0, just after making Holy Pilgrimage to this site of my awakening, my love and I are deep in our final week in Italy, and we are trying not to become ill. A cold is circling us, even as we are scheduled to be in Bologna for the next two days. Then off to Rome to board a plane home. The end does not look like the beginning. We will have to figure out how to go slower than planned, spend more time sleeping and being quiet, processing the enormity of what we’ve experienced, and are facing. We don’t really know what the hell we’re doing when we get back to the States. There’s so much to figure out and do. (Kevin’s literally interrupting my poem writing to schedule our first dental appointments in over a year right now, and my mom just called to say she’s sick, too).

All the while, as we wrap up here in Parma, I hear the sounds of the neighborhood that has hosted us. The Sikh man who lives across the street, chanting in his apartment. Someone walking by whistling a beautiful, longing song as they go. The little girl next door giggling hysterically with her parents and playing drums on some buckets out back.

stop the parade
it could be as simple as a back yard party — 
let us savor all this goodness around us

This poem is one in a series titled, Becoming the Ones Who Can: Writing at the Edge of Collapse and the Root of Joy, a poetic collaboration for National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) with Samantha Wallen and Michelle Puckett.

To read the next poem in the series click HERE.

To read the previous poem in the series click HERE.

Michelle Puckett, MFA is a poet, Social Justice Coach & Facilitator, permaculturalist, and Co-Founder of Creating Freedom Movements, a school for activists. All of her work aims to nourish the sacred and make it plain in everyday life.

“There is the practice of storytelling, a nearly indispensible piece of the puzzle that unlocks our barriers and expands our capacity. Storytelling is an early muscle that may have gone flabby over the years…Exercise that flabby muscle! Interrupt the editing toward perfection! Just practice. Facile. Finito. Choose one. Begin.” — Norma Wong

I am in the middle of a workshop I’m taking on attention
 — how to choose where to put it — 
& it feels fated that it straddles my final few weeks in Europe
and what will be my first bit back in the United States after a year away

I log onto Facebook to post our poems each morning
and am gripped by the stuckness of our stories
 — log off, quick!

Back to Norma’s book.
“To create into the emergent worldview
is about re-imagining how a whole world would work.”
Try again to see it.

The workshop asks me to write about a time
when the “stuck story” wasn’t so.
I finger a fear that I cannot have pleasure,
and others in close at the same time,
because showing joy sometimes feels
like painting a target on my own back

People have not always been so pleased to see me happy

But then I hate this fear because it turns everyone
else into a potential adversary in my mind
Not my idea of a good time.

As I begin to write, I remember my 40th Birthday
 — a Dirty Dancing Carnival I’d dreamed of creating
with my sister and neighbor back when I was 11 — 
So many friends came forward to love on me publicly,
just the way I liked it, to help raise money,
work the booths, project the movie, pop the popcorn,
dance the dances, and have the fun of it all,
right there beside me

Ok, so this works, I tell myself.
The stuckness has not always been so.

Next question, “What does she want now?”

The answer comes quick:
To celebrate all of the beautiful dates of the year, with others in close.

Not just my birthday, but all of yours, too.
And all of the Death Days
and the Feast Days
and anniversaries
and remembrances
and the cross-quarter holidays, in between, too

She wants to bring in the harvest with a glad heart,
in time and in tune with
the Everything
that is beyond Holy,
but, also, Fun

Delicious.

She wants to gather primroses just when it is time & bake cakes of them
She wants to harvest honey with her cousins
She wants to make elderberry cordial and then sip it beside you
She wants to dance Flamenco with children,
whipping their ponytails around in self-satisfaction
She wants to swim in cold waters under a blazing hot sun

She wants to dance, real slow, while the meat smokes
& then tear off a fatty bite and feed it to her lover
& then share it with friends
& then grin a greasy grin into the faces of her family
& to have them grin theirs back at her

There you have it.
My flabby muscle,
exercised, for the day

See you back here tomorrow.

This poem is one in a series titled, Becoming the Ones Who Can: Writing at the Edge of Collapse and the Root of Joy, a poetic collaboration for National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) with Samantha Wallen and Michelle Puckett.

To read the next poem in the series click HERE.

To read the previous poem in the series click HERE.

Michelle Puckett, MFA is a poet, Social Justice Coach & Facilitator, permaculturalist, and Co-Founder of Creating Freedom Movements, a school for activists. All of her work aims to nourish the sacred and make it plain in everyday life.

“Faith is what we have when we believe in ourselves and what it is we are about, the tangibility of our horizon story (not the probability).” — Norma Wong

woke to the news
of the death of
the Pope

felt sideways
the slide of
what’s slipping

water’s moving fast
now
rushing through

the vacancy
 — room in the heart
of what’s decaying

someone i love’s
doing time
writing a treatise on angels

as the earth
has her day
& folks try not to fall in

to what’s still solid
as the day
we were born

This poem is one in a series titled, Becoming the Ones Who Can: Writing at the Edge of Collapse and the Root of Joy, a poetic collaboration for National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) with Samantha Wallen and Michelle Puckett.

To read the next poem in the series click HERE.

To read the previous poem in the series click HERE.

Michelle Puckett, MFA is a poet, Social Justice Coach & Facilitator, permaculturalist, and Co-Founder of Creating Freedom Movements, a school for activists. All of her work aims to nourish the sacred and make it plain in everyday life.

“Our expectations differ when there is no value of extended kinship and there is/are instead my family, my friends, my community, and your family, your friends, and your community with which we may have allyship or respect or tolerance or estrangement or disgust.” — Norma Wong

Kin,
I weep for what in us
Looks on your suffering, hard-hearted as Pharaoh,
More intent on feigning might than
Accepting the plainness of our affiliation — dumb pride in the deafening
Roar of our relation

Artificially, we may mouth reverence to The Way of the Cross
But we don’t capitulate — for
Redemption
Expects atonement— &
Goddamn those who cry out for succor
On the shores of these shining lands

Grace is only ever
Afforded to the
Richest and most-highly-cloistered
Chastening us all, pitilessly
In this still-orphaning land we keep calling Our
America

*As an acrostic, the first letter of each line of this poem can also be read vertically. Written for Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and everyone who loves him.

This poem is one in a series titled, Becoming the Ones Who Can: Writing at the Edge of Collapse and the Root of Joy, a poetic collaboration for National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) with Samantha Wallen and Michelle Puckett.

To read the next poem in the series click HERE.

To read the previous poem in the series click HERE.

Michelle Puckett, MFA is a poet, Social Justice Coach & Facilitator, permaculturalist, and Co-Founder of Creating Freedom Movements, a school for activists. All of her work aims to nourish the sacred and make it plain in everyday life.

“The values, the ways, the spirit mechanisms defining the world as we would have it be, matter. The pause to take a breath and lift our eyes to the horizon, the mountain-scape, beyond the edge of the desert or ocean, is to tell a story that is beyond the moment’s fierce fights and to say — in story — the manifestations of the values, the ways, the spirit mechanisms of the world as we would have it be.” — Norma Wong

You asked (among other things)
What do you dream about now?
and I had already been chewing there,

trust me.

I cried the morning after
writing a recent poem
with my beloved over breakfast
because I know just how parched the world is
for our visions of what could be

— for what Norma Wong calls the “horizon” —

& how unpracticed
I, and so many of us,
have become in our aging

We once knew how to want deeply
 — in full color — 
to tell the story of it
& make it real
back when we played “pretend”

After listening to my feelings,
my partner expressed how much he wants
for me to give the best of myself
first, and foremost,
to my poetry
To what I want for me,
instead of giving myself to things
that pull on my attention,
even if they seem worthy

And I felt so supported and loved that I could’ve burst

Instead, we walked over to the Parma Farmer’s Market
to buy fresh ricotta & pecorino,
plus bitter greens from a local farmer,
as a pot-bellied Italian man wearing a 10-gallon hat
yodeled Ralph Stanley in English,
& a few country songs in Italian, too

I tossed some euros into his can
and told him how good he sounded
 — a big grin spreading across a sweet face
when I said, “ — And I’m a Texan!”

Delightful.

Next, we stopped by the bakery for some focaccia,
and — let’s be real— so that we could “Tramp.”
This is what we like to call it
when we stop at the windows
of pasticcerias to imagine the treats
we’d most like to eat

Yum.

Finally, we popped into the macelleria for meat.
They had chicken, geese, & rabbits hanging
 — all with their heads still on.
Bunnies with eyes wide open,
and tongues sticking out sideways
like a cartoon

Whew.

I went with chicken quarters
so I wouldn’t have to decide what to do
with a head, just yet.
Someday… I told myself, as we walked home

In the kitchen, I left the window open to the Maple out back,
listened to the doves coo
& the neighborhood Saturday-ing,
as I washed and cut and cooked our lunch

Pesto pasta salad with fresh tomatoes and basil

After, we sat down to figure out some final travel plans
He got our train tickets to Rome the day before we fly back to the States,
and I made plans for our pilgrimage to Crema next week
to visit the filming locations of Call Me By Your Name
 — our final adventure in this epic year abroad of ours.

Quickly, he noticed that I seemed embarrassed
about geeking out so hard over this film,
a piece of art that so thoroughly blew apart my life
as it had been, seven years ago

— in the most unsettling & wholesome of ways —

which helped open up my heart
& prepare a place for him beside me
in this life we are now living

A story I told myself was possible,
by watching it over and over again,
until it was true

That I could be loved
so completely

That my desires
are good

That the world wants to become
what we most need

I vow to leave behind
being embarrassed by my wanting,
and to endeavor in it’s direction,
instead,
like I already do

This poem is one in a series titled, Becoming the Ones Who Can: Writing at the Edge of Collapse and the Root of Joy, a poetic collaboration for National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) with Samantha Wallen and Michelle Puckett.

To read the next poem in the series click HERE.

To read the previous poem in the series click HERE.

Michelle Puckett, MFA is a poet, Social Justice Coach & Facilitator, permaculturalist, and Co-Founder of Creating Freedom Movements, a school for activists. All of her work aims to nourish the sacred and make it plain in everyday life.

“A fact exists not in and of itself but as a data point in a field of what it is we believe. The field is a field, a tapestry, a bowl of stew, a story of many chapters that come from a cohesive collection of stories — not a single data point. The data point is evidence, a tiny window into an entire world.” — Norma Wong

1. My sweet friend’s wet eyes for her kitten, perhaps on her deathbed already, after only 5 days of loving one another. How fast our hearts can open!
2. The two Sikh boys, busily sweeping their balcony across the street from us. One wearing a Christmas shirt, the other a Halloween cape. Their smiles and shy, “Ciao!” as I wave at them.
3. The trash collectors in Venice, wheeling small carts over stairs and bridges, through narrow streets, picking up rubbish. How much better they make the world, every day, with calloused hands.
4. Already, the trees have gone from spare to lush. Only 15 days into April. How like them we can sometimes be.
5. An email I received today from two lesbian farmers in Scotland. Their love for the cow they just had to slaughter. How they are tanning her hide, and eating every bit of her meat to honor her life. That farmers like them decide to grow in slow time.
6. Noticing that I can still love — and even wish well — people who have harmed me on purpose. Surprisingly easy.
7. The generosity of strangers we met while visiting the town where Kevin’s great-grandparents were born. One took down his family name, then called to say he’d gotten more information about his ancestors from his buddy at the municipal records office. Amazing!
8. Being best-writer-friends with a poet who loves me, and who reminds me with her beautiful poem that I’ve faced the IRS before, and have remained powerful. Even happy.
9. That, though I pay taxes which (for now) funnel money into all manner of things I don’t agree with, I also get to pay my Shuumi Land Tax to the First People of the land I live on. A blessing, and also a reminder that we can always take a step towards making things right.
10. Seeing a marker commemorating the workers of Oltretorrente, the neighborhood where we are staying. In 1922, they erected barricades, rather than capitulate to the Fascists. Guido Picelli, the leader of the resistance said, “Our city…has remained an impregnable fortress, despite the attempts made by the adversary. The proletariat of Parma has not bowed and does not bow.” Duly noted.

This poem is one in a series titled, Becoming the Ones Who Can: Writing at the Edge of Collapse and the Root of Joy, a poetic collaboration for National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) with Samantha Wallen and Michelle Puckett.

To read the next poem in the series click HERE.

To read the previous poem in the series click HERE.

Michelle Puckett, MFA is a poet, Social Justice Coach & Facilitator, permaculturalist, and Co-Founder of Creating Freedom Movements, a school for activists. All of her work aims to nourish the sacred and make it plain in everyday life.

“We must interrupt the strong adherence to the known and choose into creation that which, by definition, is yet to be known.” — Norma Wong

History
also reflects

pulses

a void where
to carry is too heavy

Become a wind chime

where others are gatekeeping
come back into the circle

Are you really as confined as you think you are?

bring to the surface
honest self awareness

don’t seal off and hunker down

but this time she laughs
twists and rises

if only I could —

it was too wordless
in bloodshed

Courage,

any old nun
in the rain

a smooth, compact, mauve-colored and soft residence

the dilemma
expressionless as a plate

Do sentences rise from the surprise in you?

of use only when
they’re cunning

turned inside out

a dead man’s
tenth century Byzantine silk monopoly

a new company

better go and see
afraid of your own

feeling

we pour ourselves into
wisdom

veil of a higher

forehead
for existing

the tide is coming to sweep away the known world

almost impossible
this greediness of the body

Unexpected.

*with gratitude to the Slow Holler Tarot Deck, Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride, the Wikipedia page for Parma, Italy, which quotes Proust, and my bowl of ancestor cards. This poem is a cut-up of lines and words from all of them.

This poem is one in a series titled, Becoming the Ones Who Can: Writing at the Edge of Collapse and the Root of Joy, a poetic collaboration for National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) with Samantha Wallen and Michelle Puckett.

To read the next poem in the series click HERE.

To read the previous poem in the series click HERE.

Michelle Puckett, MFA is a poet, Social Justice Coach & Facilitator, permaculturalist, and Co-Founder of Creating Freedom Movements, a school for activists. All of her work aims to nourish the sacred and make it plain in everyday life.

“Creation requires just that — both the imagining, and the hard work of making it true.”
 — Norma Wong

So
many
are
being
bottomed out
by
outrage
grief
& attack

(Inside a pattern)

While
somewhere
a mother
sits

Tender
& fierce

close enough
to newness

& the edge
of
reality

to rock
the newness
into
something
more real

fed on
her

far-sighted
relation

To the unfathomable.

This poem is one in a series titled, Becoming the Ones Who Can: Writing at the Edge of Collapse and the Root of Joy, a poetic collaboration for National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) with Samantha Wallen and Michelle Puckett.

To read the next poem in the series click HERE.

To read the previous poem in the series click HERE.

Michelle Puckett, MFA is a poet, Social Justice Coach & Facilitator, permaculturalist, and Co-Founder of Creating Freedom Movements, a school for activists. All of her work aims to nourish the sacred and make it plain in everyday life.