Day 19 of #the100dayproject - Mirrors

Mirrors

Trees know what we don’t know:
To live fully, they just need to stretch
up to the sun & reach down into bedrock.
Air & anchor, their branches & roots
mirror each other and fan out
like hair on a pillow, extending
towards the sun & the earth’s center;
every inch of growth closer to their temple
is an act of worship, a pilgrimage of living.

Day 18 of #the100dayproject - The last day I wrote poems in a café

The last day I wrote poems in a café

The café was full of people dripping
from the rain outside. I sat at a long table
flanked by many different people
sipping their coffees and eating pastries.
I talked to the woman across from me,
asked her what she was writing on her laptop.
She wrote content for hospitals and the CDC
and she was writing about this new virus.
She was worried about it, but she nor I
knew that this would be the last time
we would sit down in a café to talk or
strike up a conversation with a stranger.
We didn’t know that it would be the last
time we would see other faces without a mask,
or exchange breath as if the air we breathed
wasn’t shared between everyone in the café,
as if our breath was ours and ours alone,
but just like the long table, our coughs, sneezes,
sighs, laughs; everything was communal, collective.

Day 17 of #the100dayproject

 Today I have just a quick bit of wisdom...Photo is at Zion Natl Park in Utah and features my husband Ashish.

Day 16 of #the100dayproject

Hibernation

It is hard to untangle my limbs from yours.
The morning weighs heavier than our comforter
and the sun is not the sun, but a diffused gray
like fluorescents flickering through shuttered blinds.
I do not want to move, but I move, my feet touch
the floor in a shuffle of warm skin on cold hardwood.
I am always the first up and the heat must be turned on,
the coffee made, the toilet flushed, the naked body
weighed on the scale. I am too much of myself.
I will not relent, but I want to crawl back into bed
and only weigh the same as the air between cover
and sheet, slip my feet beneath the mass of down,
hide my head until like a fever, the clouds break,
until winter breaks, until the world is worthy
of my presence and the sun shines through the window
perspiring my forehead and the slope of my upper lip.

Day 15 of #the100dayproject

Mirrors II

All mirrors are charades, deceptions,
it can show you what you are, a body,
but itself shows a body without volume
a body that doesn’t take up space.
Wafer like or like a waif, my mirror-self
a malnourished doppelganger, a shadow,
never a whole. And I wonder sometimes
how much envy my second self holds
always the mirror, but never the mirrored.

Day 14 of #the100dayproject

Mirrors I

My old house came with an art deco mirror;
spotted with age, losing its silver backing.
It leaned elegantly against the basement
wall, elegant and fragile like a snowflake
that could melt or if cold enough, keep shape.
Each time I descended into the basement,
I would look like a ghost had inherited my body.
My eyes were not mine, my mouth thin,
and my hair flowing as if I held a static charge.

Day 13 of #the100dayproject2021

Body Parts II

Having hands is to have purpose
to do, make, destroy, take, give.
Each point of a finger, each flick
or pop of a knuckle. Every hand
contains a universe of skin, bone,
muscle. Bone moves like piano keys
trying to breach the surface of skin.
These fingers like hammers, pens,
spoons, wrenches. All of them dancers
who have rehearsed and rehearsed
and finally ready for the show.

Day 12 of #the100dayproject

Body Parts

My feet, how forgotten they are,
those joints and strange bones.
Crustacean like, born in a paleo-
lithic era, no mouth, eye, nose, or ear;
just creatures carrying all that weight,
like Atlas holding Earth on his shoulders.

Day 11 of #the100dayproject

Grit

I carried three gallons of water
On my back, descending
Into the cradle of Coyote Gulch,
And I carried my blood, sweat,
& tears out, climbed up red sand dunes.
I walked until my feet blistered
& bled, until I thought my body
could not take any more pain.
I kept walking, still I moved.
Night closed around me.
I walked through the desert,
The stars opening the sky
Into a charred lace.
I was not afraid,
I was sure.
I could not leave this earth
without sharing the sacred,
my pilgrimage through
our planet’s temple.

Day 10 of #the100dayproject

Landscapes of the Body

I’ve been to dressing rooms,
tried on bras, dresses, pants,
& blouses. Each article of clothing
like trying on a different self:
Who I could be, what I would be.
If only I could fit this body
into a new self.

Day 9 of #the100dayproject

Late night walk

I walk through the snow
and sit down on a bench,
watch the snowflakes
illuminated by street lamps,
falling like feathers
tossed from a pillow.

Day 8 of #the100dayproject

Winter

Snowflakes fall on the city;
powerlines, buildings, cars
and roads paved white, smooth.
Beautiful. And the homeless are cold.
The homeless have nowhere to go.

Day 8 & 9 on hold

 Hey all,

I have not been well and will be catching up when I feel better!

With love,

Britt

Day 7 of #the100dayproject

ingesting the fragments of creatures

I eat flies everyday,
milk and black, their wings
a textured cereal, their legs
the bran, whole wheat.
From my tongue, I can tell
where they lay their young,
where they fly from one
rat infested gutter
to the garbage heaped
outside the front gate.
I guard my mouth
as I guard my body,
but thousands of legs
and wings ingested,
a war field of body parts
shimmering in bags
of rice and flour,
the many eye balls
of sweltering insects.
No matter how hard
I try, I eat the world
and the debris
of its creatures;
I lick my lips, wash
their brine and death
down with wine.

Day 6 of #the100dayproject

 

Day 5 of #the100dayproject

 

Day 4 of #the100dayproject

To Debate a Memory

I was in the field, then I wasn’t in the field
I was in the moss, under the cedar, but
It wasn’t a cedar, but a redwood and
I wasn’t wearing mary-janes, but always
In my mind, I’m wearing mary-janes.
I probably was barefoot, but I cannot
Say for sure. I was there, my skin pale
Against the wet green of the trees,
I was there, but maybe I wasn’t.
Maybe it was a dream, multifaceted.
Reoccurring, maybe I walked there, but
I was naked and it was not daylight
Maybe there was the moon silvering
The dew on the grass blades.
I know I was me, I know I had a body
But I do not know my age, I look back
And my body is like water, flowing
Changing, I am never the same,
And the me that was in the field,
Or in the moss, was that me or
Was that another version of me?
Maybe all this time I am someone
But not myself, only in the present
I am me, but in the past, the person
That was me is not me, only pieces
Of a body and a mind that if put together
Might look like me, but isn’t really me.

Day 3 of #the100dayproject

Rose City

All those years of awe for the city, my city.

Walking down the park blocks,

I watched protesters setting camp in the grass

under the cedars heavy with rain.

Occupy Wallstreet in the Pacific Northwest.

I would take the tram into the Pearl to find

abandoned warehouses turned into shoppes

and five-star bars and restaurants.

The bookstore on Burnside 

still rough on the outside, but inside

color and gloss to appeal to Raleigh Hill clientele.

I was a college girl who stopped at the smoke shop 

and leafed through the lit mags smelling of tobacco. 

I could never afford to buy any of them.

Now that I’m back, the store smells more like e-cigarettes 

than cigars, its windows broken by the riots,

boarded up by rain-soaked plywood.

I used to think anything was possible.

I used to find inspiration in the rain 

and in the graffiti on the brick buildings.

But now I realize ‘possible’ is anywhere I am; possible is in me.

When I left those years ago, I found what I was capable of.

I found myself to worship, day after day I built myself from the ground up. 

Nothing in life is easy, but when I visit an old place 

I look back at who I was and who I am,

and I’ve found that I’m always the sum of both parts.

Day 2 of the #the100dayproject

The Riff

Here I lay in my bed

Heart beating out of my chest,

Pulsing outward so deep

That I friction the air

The rain stops,

The clouds part

And a stripe of blue lays

Across the sky like a scarf

Rippling in the wind.

I am not of the kind

To change. I would dig

My heels into the ground

Fight with bloody knuckles

And skinned knees. But every

Raw hurt is a wound to heel

And new skin to grow

Over the old. No matter 

How much I fight, 

My body always finds

A way to fill in all this blank space.

Day 1 of the #the100dayproject