The Exchange

“I want to give you something, or I want to take/something from you. But I want to feel the exchange…” - Ada Limon, “How Far Away We Are”

Whenever I miss smoking it’s because I don’t know what to do with my hands. There was always something so satisfying about the ritual, a singularity of purpose. Come home, dig through the heap of dirty laundry for the lighter stashed in some back pocket of some pair of jeans, wait for the landlady to be settled upstairs, because I hated when she’d surprise me in the backyard. I’m not great at making conversation when I’m caught off guard. Sometimes it was the only deep breath I’d remember to take, that first drag sucking the smoke into that aching chest place.

I have been shouting into this void with increasing unreliability for almost six years now. Almost as long as I’d been smoking. 192 posts, at least a hundred thousand words. A handful of relationships, two cities, one notoriously rotten cat; this blog is a life that’s doing its best to look like mine. Whenever I miss this writing it’s because I don’t know what to do with my mind. With my heart.

This afternoon I woke up from a nap to the earthquakes in my blood rocking me awake, but gentle. Not like a disaster, but like waves, and it made me lonely for last summer, how water and moonlight seduced us. How it swallowed us up, naked and rum drunk, burning with something we didn’t understand quite yet, while our friends watched from the banks. I swear, earlier this was poetry. I could feel it thrumming in my fingertips. There were strident verbs and resonant nouns, and so much musicality, but now there’s just my brain feeling all soft and bruised around the edges.

I text T to ask her who left the gravity running on high all afternoon? When did everything get so heavy?

This semester I’m taking a manuscript class, which means doing this terrifying thing: letting people read and critique my poetry. Now, obviously I understand that I’m in a poetry program, so this comes with the territory. And yes, of course, people have read and critiqued my work before. But there’s something different about compiling these pieces, stringing them together. There’s something about holding the thing, feeling the actual heft and weight of it in my hands. I called it Poverty, and didn’t fail to notice the irony in how much it cost to print 14 copies.

After reading it, my mentor asks What does home mean? Why do you spend so much time looking for it?

This year I’m living in split screen. Home, on this street, where the addicts next door scream on the weeknights until police lights burst like blossoms on the outstretched splays of the front yard succulents. Where coyotes lurk in the shadows of the carport, their breathing hushed like the rush of traffic on the interstate. Home 1,092 miles away. Home, always something outside of me, something to get to. Something to make, or to search for. I say I don’t want to live here and the Sensai Bear says give it three years. She says You are stronger than you believe. Always have been, always will be, or something to that effect, and I’m reflecting back on Mary Oliver and her wild geese. This need to let the soft animal of my body love what it loves, even if it means bared teeth and savagery to protect the softest parts of me. I am tired of men taking my poetry like they’re doing me a favor. I am ready to jealously guard these things I am shaping as they shape me.

I want to give you something. I want to take something from you.

Xoxo 

-b