A Poem Is Like A Prayer

It is April and the air is thick with rain. The full moon in my birth sign of Libra, blush-pink and inanimate; the scales brought back to balance. Venus has nested into her springtime home, and I am arranging the tulips in bud jars. Placing dad’s silver watch on the tray and a glass of water on the sill—small acts of divination for those without real testament. Taking my time with the clearing and moving around the bedroom furniture. Polishing the jewelry, and then learning to take apart the pipes after a diamond earring slips into the drain. The thanks I get for trying.

There are days I wish I knew how to be a delicate thing. To be lamblike; pearly, pillow lace and baby’s breath. As a girl, I had not known I’d one day be asked to prune the tenderness. Maybe I would have been slower to resist the leotards and dresses; my mother’s gold jewelry and flashes of warmth. Thinking of the times I wanted saving and how it was always just the self waiting in the wings. The evening a tire blew out on the Ventura Freeway, and there was no one to call, so I knelt down in the shoulder and got to work. The morning I broke into my own apartment and that first night in Oregon. All the other ways I’ve learned to use my hands.

A friend says, “I’d feel sorry for any sucker on the other side of your fist.” Sometimes, the blood is the only reminder that there is a damsel within. The desire too. Blaming the moods on lunar cycles, the changing tide making me tearful and flush. How much of being a woman feels like hardening yourself, and the body betraying the mind, and the mind running off with the body. How I’d wanted to say I was missing them, but the words came out wrong. Crass and unkind. Simone Harris writing, “I’m going to love you so good you won’t know where to put your hands,” and it sticking. The internet is full of advice for women telling me how to be. There are things it feels like I am meant to know: the cuts of stones and styles of bodice. There is something it feels like I was meant to dream of, and sometimes do.

Iz and I talk about our interiority and the ways one interprets the world. She tells me hers is always in conversation, and I tell her mine is always narrating in third-person—that I’d never realized there was any other way to be. That I am always writing without meaning to, turning the scenes on train platforms and street corners into vignettes; naming the characters and fleshing out their backstories. Every gilded daffodil a poem. Every poem a prayer.

I’ve carried some small hope since I could speak, and it freed me from the burden of tongue. I am a better lover/mother/friend/sister/daughter on the page. The closer I let myself get to the secret reaches of my desire, the easier it is to touch the words and the harder it is to be touched. The riddle of loving something and wanting to be loved in spite of. If we’re being honest, I’ve always hated being called a “poet”, but there is a quiet voice that understands my nature is what nurtures my devotion. If we’re being honest, if, given the chance, I’d name her Evelyn.

Tonight, I jogged around McGolrick as the gust twisted the knife of memory—those devil winds whisking south from the Mojave. Thought to myself, I’d do unspeakable things for a dry heat, would give it all up for a minute of California’s endless sun. They say it’s going to snow again, but the light is spilling across the floor like Heaven’s overflowing. I put on my mother’s diamond earrings and ask to be a woman in every lifetime. Blood and all.

“I’ve come to a horrible realization,” I write to Jane. “I am a poet.”

Attempting to just publish without revising for days. It’s gonna be bad sometimes! Sorry!