(from August, 2022)
I could spend my days weeding the garden.
We all know that that could be an entire life’s work.
Like days, weeds will keep coming back until I am gone and long after.
Where are the profitable, flashy ambitions to which I am entitled?
That have been earned for me.
That I am expected to possess,
Like teeth or toes.
To tend earth, to love children.
To have warm arms.
To do the dishes and tidy up.
How many fought for otherwise?
I want only to surrender to my longing for it:
For all that “not enough”
That just feels like absolutely everything.
I want to drink too much wine on a Thursday
and wake up mid-way through Friday to take a seaweed bath at 1:32pm.
I want the water to be cold and I want to grab the wooden salt grinder from the kitchen
and ratchet it back and forth over the tub until its contents tastes like the sea.
Like I am pasta. Or a selkie. Or just a plain seal—nothing mythological or sacred.
I want to soak in it until I am uncomfortable and then stand up
and take a boiling hot shower with an excess of soap.
Like I am a crusty pot. Like I am a car covered in pigeon poop,
going through the carwash,
suds coming at me from all sides as if from the hand of god.
My life means so much and so little
and it is only a fiction we’re fed
that this is not true for all that live.
Your anonymity, your smallness,
is in no way contrary to
your robustness, poetics and depth.