Silent Night...

(And then this declaration on the way home: "I'm going to shower before we watch Home Alone--that way I don't have to shower on Christmas. Who wants to spend Christmas showering?")






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Train Travel Be Like

And we're back!

H A M I L T O N!

Someone was Prom King and picked prom night over Hamilton tickets we'd had for the past six months the last time we went... but he came this time... he loved it.









Same old balcony seats.  In fact, we looked up the old tickets and somehow, we'd ended up with the very SAME tickets as last time.

And apparently, the show makes me very emotional. First I stomped off when it was mentioned that I was walking slowly and then I left the fancy restaurant before we ordered because all they could offer me was rutabagas. So much drama for one evening!


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A Plan

I'm traveling--or so
I have been telling
everyone--so now
travel--will unravel

Perhaps periphrastic--
or no--logic underlies
my disguised, feigned
un-annotation of terrain

I prep through these fears--
it helps a little that millions
of years of orbital earth will
still spin in place for me

_

In the Old World

I am to reread their wrinkles
search their weeds for memories

even as ancestors' eyes are forced
to close, go masked, invisible.

It will make sense
until you ask about it.

*
They want to open my mind
wrest, twist it wide

then tip it like the overfilled point
of a plate, at the moment when

you're suddenly sated,
free of the desire for it.

*
I mime their scolding for I have no will,
and I am meek. Still they are forgotten

even so, every time--memory by memory
in a language my children will never speak

Aiyo--to think I meant at the start
to hold and shape love

as it pooled its fast and fluid
escape in my heart.

****

Year's End

Arre, what would you do?
You too are split between
this year and the new one

these hopes are damsels
dismal in the silent dark.
I take their place myself

until I am inside myself
--oh, what have I done?
I too am waiting to know.

_

Kin

This was sometime after I'd talked about Harraway and "Make kin not babies!" and C said  gesturing at dinner--"You mean like this? Like you do?" And it felt like this might be the best compliment ever.







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