My poem:

hold

And here it is morning again, and despite the earnest attempts at keeping the cat from waking you up in the middle of the night the cat woke you up in the middle of the night and not just once and the second time was worse because the second time it was because the cat was puking loudly in some part of the room you couldn’t see on account of the darkness which meant at some point when you actually got out of bed there was a chance you might accidentally step in the puke pile because you wouldn’t have had your contacts in so you were lying there wondering where in the room you might avoid stepping when you got up to get your coffee which was still a couple of hours away and that’s what you’re thinking of right now with the coffee finally in your hands because you’re thinking of how it used to be before cats and maybe before whatever came before cats and how there is still this part of you that clings to that before and a lot of other befores and how in the middle of the night when the cat is walking on your face or puking in some part of the room you don’t know you travel back to some other time when you could see your entire apartment no matter where you stood and how while on some days that felt kind of a puny because it wasn’t a big apartment and add to that those sad grey kitchen cabinets and how expensive it was to live in the city and how in the afternoons it got so foggy and cold you almost couldn’t see out the windows but even then it was a kind of comfort this way of living which is to say you knew where the edges were around you and it felt like a kind of life preserver the walls you’d painted dark blue and the off-white carpeting that you’d make zigzags on with the vacuum and the 23 stairs you climbed to get from out there to in here and how the arrival always felt like you’d survived something even though those last few months were kind of awful and you knew it was time to leave but weren’t sure where to go or what you wanted to do once you got there but you understood how the smallness of that space had kept you safe for a little which is to say you recognized you were outgrowing something that wasn’t growing with you and that couldn’t grow with you which is what you are thinking about now this morning with the coffee and the cats and which is maybe something that’s always a little at the edge of your thinking this thing about growth this itch you carry this looking around at the walls and the floor and asking yourself is this big enough is this big enough to hold me.

The responses:

My office is overflowing with three-dimensional representations of vulvas that I use for demonstrations with my clients and during presentations and sometimes my kids have wandered in over the years to talk to me and they see the vulvas and pick them up absentmindedly like they pick up books off the coffee table when I’m not looking and flip through Let’s Talk About It and Pleasure Activism and they are learning accidentally and sideways about the pleasures of the flesh that so many of us are scared to talk about and talking about pleasure is my life’s work as a human and a woman and a mother because we did not come here to suffer and then die we came here to live and experience joy in our bodies smashing cupcakes to our faces and letting our fingers find our sensual places and pressing our flesh against another’s flesh and squishing mud between our toes and watching sunsets and swimming and bringing coffee to our lips we came here to overflow.

- Brandie Sellers

Heat

It’s the first day of October and it’s 96 degrees outside, blistering really, and we’re all in shock because we’re used to undemanding foggy mornings and chilly nights, with just a peak of welcome warmth in the middle of the day to have one’s lunch with, so this is not authorized, gosh, even the giant black figs are begging to be plucked from the tree, but it is always this way, the gradual slide into autumn is interrupted with a heatwave that has us all huddling inside with the shutters drawn gasping like giant speckled coy because we bay area folks cannot handle the heat, and then the body memory strikes me of the same time last year, when every relative and every friend had arrived in town for the wedding and everything was already tense and I was at my hostessing limit three days in, with the new family members from India needing to be fed homemade food three times a day, and then the mercury spiked like a blast furnace from hell itself and the tension increased to shit show level and the four hundred dollar’s worth of giant orange and pink roses, normally indefatigable alstroemeria, and dozens of red, yellow, and fuchsia gerbera daisies were languishing in buckets in the TV room, usually the coolest room in the house, as we misted them and prayed that they (and we) would not wilt beyond recognition before the ceremony was over in two day’s time, because truthfully it was iffy for us delicate coastal dwellers and sundry elderly relatives, but the good hearts of the bride and groom and all the assembled well wishers did come through in the end and the bride was splendid in a gold and purple lehenga and the groom wept as he walked down the aisle to meet her, and the heat was forgotten then and there as poignant tears fell to the strains of Bruce Springsteen asking her to wait for him if he should fall behind— alas, it was just weather.

- Colleen West

Cooking Chicken at Dawn

4 am thoughts come crashing so I head to the bathroom, rain lashing, and I’m thinking how months ago now, no one could remember such a cold, wet spring - not the ladies, landed like a little flock at the counter, hands clasped around mid-morning coffee in the charity shop we visit every Tuesday since my father died, or the man we passed in the car park, searching for his car, something dull and grey gathering at the corners of his eyes that for some reason, warranted you reaching for my elbow, or the woman in the nursery who took payment for the cut-price hydrangea I couldn’t resist but despite my attempts to coax it into flourishing with a high-potash tomato feed I’d googled, never really got going all season - then I head downstairs, careful not to trip, or wake the kittens I never imagined we’d have because I never imagined Fatty would die so quickly, so soon, at barely a decade, when all the other cats I’ve loved lived so much longer lives, like my mother and my grandmother before her, who I think of now with her neck craned over the counter, in a pleated skirt, smiling, lightly dusting flour over chicken, as I am now, and heating oil and butter in a skillet to get a good bit of colour on the chicken before tipping it into the crock pot with some stock, so the men in my life - my husband, my sons - have something hot and wholesome later when they come and go, as they do, at different times, and I hit that time of day when the light changes and I grow tired from the early start and I’m not sure if I need a nap or a walk, even though I know no one ever felt worse after a walk, or a nap for that matter, and that, in spite of my needs, what matters is this simple act of love, cooking chicken at dawn, for those closest to me, while I can, because it won’t be long before they leave me, my sons, and I feel it’s getting too late, not in the way it’s too late to sow brussels sprouts to have on Christmas Day, or that, though my bmi makes my doctor wince, I went for a second slice of toast, not out of needing it, but for the pure buttery hell of it, but late knowing, and that even though I know it’s too late for things to stay the same, things won’t change fully, in the way I want them to, and that it’s okay because before you know it, however cold, however wet the autumn and the winter get, light will follow, and spring will come crashing in all its fading glory, once again.      

- Leanne Simmons

I’m sorry I broke your horse.

The living room in the Manhattan apartment seemed larger than it was, which was a liability, because I never told you until this very moment
that I knocked your precious antique wooden horse from the Han dynasty you bought when we were in love
and visited Paris
and you called it "Sus"--which means “horse” in Hebrew, but anyway
you were off shopping or whatever,
and I was going to surprise you and clean the living room,
and I was listening to Counting Crows
and I knocked Sus with the vacuum cleaner hose
and Sus went everywhere, splinters, head, front leg, back leg,
and I felt the head on collision of shock
and shame which you never knew about because I hid it like I hid so many shameful
and shocking collisions from you
and I sat on the floor with the pieces of Sus in my lap
and cried,
and even though he had a metal pole built in so I could put him back together again,
and even though he looked
and you looked the same
and even though he was
and you were so beautiful
and faded
and strong enough to weather wars
and crumbling dynasties,
he was
and you were also so light
and so very fragile
and I knew he wasn’t the same
and you weren’t the same
and knew I would always be ashamed of what I had done
and I think of you like that antique horse sometimes
and now, dynasties later, after you’ve been gone so long
it makes me reel
because I can’t get to you
and say I’m sorry I broke your horse.

- Kevin Varner

It is always such a good though which has to walk through multiple stages you know like first having the idea of spring cleaning even in October so the idea has been rumbling and just tapped me on the shoulder again so I make mental not which is not very reliable to begin with the short stacking pants, mostly crop that are blessedly sizes too big which I know for sure because I was going to wear a pair as I sat doing Favetime with a writer friend and as Inpulled them out I was delighted how almost mammoth they look now so tomorrow while Dave so efficiently does the laundry perhaps I will begin a new pile or even start to fill a plastic bags since there is a Thrift shop nearby that surely will be able to use them while I can keep at least one eye out for shoes, surely books and what about the short pile of puzzles sitting practically in the middle of our dining space and zi can already imagine what we can start again to fill that space because after all spring cleaning when the spirit strikes!

- Carolyn Sargent

The Truth

The pleasing of others ends by saying goodbye to family dinner the thoughts of what I will make tonight and tonight and tonight adding up to hours of a life but not this second half of life that I wish to enter without resentments against teenagers refusing to come to a table when food is hot because of video games or not coming home for hours after the meal is made then expecting instant service or the hours spent crafting a meal that feeds one who eats only three things and one who has no interest and one who throws half of it to the chicken then goes and eats something else while the only kid who enjoys the meals is in her own space now so I have said goodbye to family dinner that iconic thing we are supposed to cherish but only sends me ruminating about how long my life has been spent feeding those who don’t want to be fed and creating meals I can’t even eat just to please to please to please those who will not be pleased and so they can pull out the bread and peanutbutter and jelly and use the air fryer and all the cleaning up I have done on my own with no offer of help is now theirs to complete without me and I am rejoicing in this decision to let that thing we are supposed to love go as it moves me to find other resentments like the troubled relationship I have raising the kid who belongs to another woman and the taboo of talking about step children which is hard and unfair and hurtful and he feels it and I feel it and being in my house with this kid makes me unhappy as the hours tick into this second half of life and I try to solve this unhappiness try to solve all the ways that I can let go of pleasing while explaining why it is how it is and feeling all the failures and holding my breath until the moment it can change which is why I no longer sit at a table with a kid who won’t talk to me or look at me or act like a short order cook while I lean into the love that floats all over the house in other ways in the I love yous the stories of teachers and gym workouts the man who loves to sit with me and eat anything I place on a plate and when each of them has left for the day I make a meal light a candle put water into the most special amber goblet and sit with myself my coffee the food I love to eat and please no one but the quiet around me as the anger of what they call midlife the truth of how it feels swells in my belly like a life raft to float me away until it all changes again.

- Hannah Marcotti

the rain falls

and I am waiting
for it to stop 
and for you
to come back
to me this afternoon
to tell me 
you rediscovered
the treasure
that we found
on that night in
winter,
after the football game
we watched together on TV,
a first date(?),
rooting against eachother’s teams,
but FOR eachother at 
the first wisp of love
swirling in the cold wind,
the dark path where we stumbled
towards
a nightcap beer, 
a love that might last

- will b tracy

Where do those two and three sometimes four freshest hours of the day go every new morning and why is it that they are mostly usurped by powering through the pile up of regaining and maintaining enough order to suit my pursuit to push into what I have put off as I desperately want to move forward toward all those conjurings that visit me in the early daylight when my best energy has arrived to meet me in the reboot of web strings spun from non-stop synapses and grand ideas for the future meanwhiles that will likely never quite happen because I perpetually turn left then right into the body memory of moving woman mode which at sixty-six I recognize is a pattern I must break so I can  protect myself from myself by simply stopping and breathing into a meditation medication surrender that frees my busy brain from its endless yearning to do more instead of wisely accept how nothing ever gets completely done in this life work happening here now and then again and again.

- Karen Ogg

You understand how the space has kept you trapped only when your friend stands marveling at your beautiful home and you can’t muster up the same enthusiasm because you’re starting to see that this home is actually your prison and it’s all so simple to him that you could leave your family for her, this woman you are so in love with, want to be with more than anything, but can’t be with because you are married and don’t know how to leave your husband and your kids but it’s all so simple to him, this friend of yours that you only see once a year, because he left his wife and baby and spent five years living in a tiny apartment far away from the love of his life, the woman he left his wife for, but it was worth it because they were still together, still saw each other as much as they could, and then, in the end, there was a terror attack and then there was a war and then he and his lover finally moved into together and because they trusted the universe in a way you used to but don’t anymore, they trusted that there would be a way to make their love work and because there was a war, there was a way, and now his lover spends her days making their small apartment beautiful because she believes there is a way and when she needs money she will find it just like when she needed to move in with him there was a war and that gave her the excuse to uproot her life, and yet this isn’t about them it’s about you standing in your expansive home not knowing how to tell your husband that the walls are closing in and you don’t understand yet that there is a way out but like an animal caught in a trap, you are ready to gnaw off your own arm to get to the woman you love.

- Alice Holm