Found this in a flowering tree on Don Gaspar near the Roundhouse. Not sure who made it, but I thought it was a pretty sweet little piece of guerilla love art. Photo by Lori Leslie 2014.
Spot the tiny fragile earth nestled inside. Photo by Lori Leslie 2014.
© Te Zanghi
© Te Zanghi
© Te Zanghi
© Te Zanghi
© Te Zanghi
Where does all the garbage go?
-or-
A Week in Grief
by Kira Jones
Really, I am gasping for breath through the sorrow, the rage, the anxious fatigue.
Really, I no longer know which battle to wage.
(Really, I do.)
My ears are clogged with juniper dust and my daughter is trying hard to stop telling lies.
I pause, cold coffee in hand, to photograph the morning light.
I dream of beaches, always beaches.
The beaches are covered in garbage, in waste.
I cannot find the sand, I cannot find the shells, I cannot see the SEA.
I wake up sweating.
I dream of my daughter at age 13.
She is frothing at the mouth like a rabid dog.
She is screaming at me through the tears and the spit.
She has FOUND ME OUT.
She has found ALL of us out.
She knows, now, that I am complicit.
That WE are complicit.
That the earth was burning UP and coming unDONE and we did NOTHING.
Really. Nothing.
Where does all of the shame GO?
Internal landfills past present and to come.
Some say Jesus was a schizophrenic.
Where does that leave Noah? Who do we take on the Ark NOW?
A friend says she would take the people who are on five kinds of antidepressants, the crazy people, because THEY’RE the ones feeling the pain.
No dumb, happy people who aren’t feeling anything. Nope.
“Feeling fine?” she says. “Fuck you.”
Complacency beckons, like a narcissistic lover.
The beaches ARE covered in waste.
What NOW?
(So beautiful. So broken. We are both.)
Reverie on the frayed world
–Barbara Rockman
Moths gnaw hung fabric as I sleep.
Shaken out into morning, the once tight-knit is
chapel of bombed glass, windows grilled
with what thin fibers sag and sway.
open weave unravel give way
When my small daughter studied the roiled clouds
and spied a snatch of blue at their center she said,
God’s room. Daily, I walk a reckoning
with what prayer and language can do.
re-configure break re-align split
My closet is bitten; every woven thing chewed open.
I never taught my daughters to mend and darn, backstitch, hem.
Is it too late to set them at my side, thread a needle, snip a patch,
hum them toward how the world works?
knot repair render whole
My list of grievances, like yours, is long;
world weave so strained it may not last and I too
harbor a gluttony of regret, trunk crammed with musty might-have-been
but today in the shop of scissors and patterns: coat, costume, dress,
I study tiered spools, graduated shades, lineated dawn to night.
And heaps of looped and braided yarn, a hundred heathered tones.
I choose swatches of bright fabric that ache
to fill gnawed space, choose
to address my daughters’ awkward hands:
No, not perfect, no matter. Always
consider shrink and give;
leave extra thread in case.
We steady the needle’s eye,
enter failed fiber, suture the impossible, exhale.
Still, one daughter will choose the jacket whose elbows are worn to air.
The other will replace every flaw with a silver coin.
I choose sunderings
moth wing house of god thimbleless and bleeding
pen an offering that might hold.
–Barbara Rockman
Group discussion: socially engaged artists must provide enough friction to wear down neoliberal multicultural hegemony while allowing for vibrant diversity and dissent.
Llano Park
Sara Zink 2014
fraypoetry 