A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit

"Disasters are, most basically, terrible, tragic, grievous, and no matter what positive side effects and possibilities they produce, they are not to be desired. But by the same measure, those side effects should not be ignored because they arise amid devastation. The desires and possibilities awakened are so powerful they shine even from wreckage, carnage, and ashes. What happens here is relevant elsewhere. And the point is not to welcome disasters. They do not create these gifts, but they are one avenue through which the gifts arrive. Disasters provide an extraordinary window into social desire and possibility, and what manifests there matters elsewhere, in ordinary times and in other extraordinary times."

A Paradise Built in Hell : The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster
Rebecca Solnit, Viking Penguin, New York, 2009

Thanks, by W. S. Merwin

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions
back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you
with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

A Plagued Journey, Maya Angelou

There is no warning rattle at the door   

nor heavy feet to stomp the foyer boards.   

Safe in the dark prison, I know that   

light slides over

the fingered work of a toothless   

woman in Pakistan.

Happy prints of

an invisible time are illumined.   

My mouth agape

rejects the solid air and

lungs hold. The invader takes   

direction and

seeps through the plaster walls.   

It is at my chamber, entering   

the keyhole, pushing

through the padding of the door.   

I cannot scream. A bone

of fear clogs my throat.

It is upon me. It is

sunrise, with Hope

its arrogant rider.

My mind, formerly quiescent

in its snug encasement, is strained

to look upon their rapturous visages,   

to let them enter even into me.   

I am forced

outside myself to

mount the light and ride joined with Hope.

Through all the bright hours   

I cling to expectation, until   

darkness comes to reclaim me

as its own. Hope fades, day is gone   

into its irredeemable place

and I am thrown back into the familiar   

bonds of disconsolation.

Gloom crawls around

lapping lasciviously

between my toes, at my ankles,   

and it sucks the strands of my   

hair. It forgives my heady   

fling with Hope. I am

joined again into its

greedy arms.

  ~~ Maya Angelou, A Plagued Journey

Heavy, Hieu Minh Nguyen

The narrow clearing down to the river
I walk alone, out of breath

my body catching on each branch.
Small children maneuver around me.

Often, I want to return to my old body
a body I also hated, but hate less

given knowledge.
Sometimes my friends—my friends

who are always beautiful & heartbroken
look at me like they know

I will die before them.
I think the life I want

is the life I have, but how can I be sure?
There are days when I give up on my body

but not the world. I am alive.
I know this. Alive now

to see the world, to see the river
rupture everything with its light.

 -- Hieu Minh Nguyen, Heavy

Cake, by Noah Eli Gordon

Look, you
want it
you devour it
and then, then
good as it was
you realize
it wasn’t
what you
exactly
wanted
what you
wanted
exactly was
wanting

 -- Noah Eli Gordon, Cake

The Trauma of Everyday Life, Mark Epstein

When we stop distancing ourselves from the pain in the world, our own or others, we create the possibility of a new experience, one that often surprises because of how much joy, connection, or relief it yields. Destruction may continue, but humanity shines through.


We’re all traumatized by life, by its unpredictability, its randomness, its lack of regard for our feelings, and the losses it brings. Each in our own way, we suffer. Even if nothing else goes wrong -- and it’s rare that this is the case, old age, illness and death loom just over the horizon like the monsters our children need us to protect them from in the night.


Ajahn Chah met with us after we share the monastery lunch. We asked him to explain the Buddhist view. What he had learned …. What could we bring back and share with the West?

Before saying a word, he motioned to glass by his side. “Do you see this glass?” he asked us. “I love this glass. It holds the water admirably. When the sun shines on it, it reflects the light beautifully. When I tap it, it has a lovely ring. Yet for me, this glass is already broken. When the wind knocks it over or my elbow knocks it off the shelf and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ But when I understand this glass is already broken, every minute with it is precious.”

What was he referring to exactly? The glass, the body, this life, the self? …

Ajahn Chah was modelling a different way of relating. We could use, appreciate, value, and respect the glass without expecting it to last. In fact, we could use it more freely, with more abandon, with more care …

-- Mark Epstein, The Trauma of Everyday Life 

Another Poem, by Geoffrey G. O'Brien

I bypassed all the compromise,
The first ten problems of speech
And the latest, the sharpest, the contest,
Then began, having already fallen,
To rise just less, weaker than
My chore, yours, made else
By othering, by day by day,
The schedules, the routes, task
Whose claim I forgot to throw off,
Rising less but somewhat up anyway
With a kind of strength for having
Done so several times before.
I mean all times so far
Which is the taste of coffee gone
This latest one, and that it sticks
Like nothing else has ever done.
It isn’t a calamity so much
As a disaster that it’s not one.
Things already were real, are
Never just. Did not just get,
Can’t help being so. This
Massive ordinary cloud
Where I surrendered to
Filling out a form in the rain
That doesn’t come or does,
Sent down or kept in overplus
Till the next storm’s approved,
The face notified of its context,
The sequence continuing west
West I said west, turning up
To receive some all,
To celebrate that share of sense
Breaking into day then run
After it as through gray games
I plan to win by losing only
Every time but one, the next
To last or after that, though
What it’s called when it comes
I don’t, I do, pretend to know.

  -- Geoffrey G. O'Brien, Another Poem

We Were Emergencies, Buddy Wakefield

We can stick anything into the fog and make it look like a ghost.
But tonight let us not become tragedies.
We are not funeral homes
with propane tanks in our windows
lookin’ like cemeteries.
Cemeteries are just the Earth’s way of not letting go.
Let go.
Tonight, poets, turn your ridiculous wrists so far backwards
the razor blades in your pencil tips
can’t get a good angle on all that beauty inside.
Step into this
with your airplane parts
move forward
and repeat after me with your heart:
I no longer need you to fuck me as hard as I hated myself.
Make love to me
like you know I am better than the worst thing I ever did.
Go slow.
I’m new to this,
but I have seen nearly every city from a rooftop
without jumping.
I have realized that the moon
did not have to be full for us to love it,
that we are not tragedies
stranded here beneath it,
that if my heart
really broke
every time I fell from love
I’d be able to offer you confetti by now.
But hearts don’t break, y’all,
they bruise and get better.
We were never tragedies.
We were emergencies.
You call 9 – 1 – 1.
Tell them I’m havin’ a fantastic time.

  -- Buddy Wakefield, "We Were Emergencies"

Amor y la Mujer/Love, by Lola Haskins

Amor y la Mujer

Se lo prueba, como si fuera un vestido.
Decide que no le queda,
y empieza a quitárselo.
Su piel se desprende, tambien

Love

She tries it on, like a dress.
She decides it doesn't fit,
and starts to take it off.
Her skin comes, too.

from: Bel Canto, Ann Patchett

“Most of the time, we're loved for what we can do rather than for who we are. It's not such a bad thing, being loved for what you can do.'
'But the other is better.'
'Better. I hate to say better, but it is. If someone loves you for what you can do then it's flattering, but why do you love them? If someone loves you for who you are then they have to know you, which means you have to know them.” 

  -- Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

Echo's Bone, Samuel Beckett

Women in particular seem most mutable, houses of infamous possibilities.... An almanac of his inconsistencies was not unthinkable. But these women, positively it was scarcely an exaggeration to say that four and twenty letters made no more and no more capricious variety of words in as many languages as they, their jigsaw souls, foisted on them that they might be damned, diversity of moods.




Sometimes he feels as though this old wound of his life had no intention of healing.



 -- Samuel Beckett, Echo's Bones

Many excerpts from: A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki

Excerpts from, Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine

Perhaps this is how racism feels no matter the context -- randomly the rules everyone else gets to play by no longer apply to you, and to call this out by calling out "I swear to God!" is to be called insane, crass, crazy.


You don't know. You don't know what she means. You don't know what response she expects from you nor do you care. For all your previous understandings, suddenly incoherence feels violent. You both experience the cut, which she keeps insisting is a joke, a joke stuck in her throat, and like any other injury, you watch it rupture along its suddenly exposed suture.


Yes, and in your mail the apology note appears referring to "our mistake." Apparently your own invisibility is the real problem causing her confusion. This is how the apparatus she propels you into begins to multiply its meaning.

What did you say?


Not long ago you were in a room where someone asks the philosopher Judith Butler what makes language hurtful. You can feel everyone lean in. Our very being exposes us to the address of another, she answers. We suffer from the condition of being addressable. Our emotional openness, she adds, is carried by our addressability. Language navigates this.

For so long you thought the ambition of racist language was to denigrate and erase you as a person. After considering Butler's remarks, you being to understand yourself as rendered hypervisible in the face of such language acts. Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that you are present. Your alertness, your openness, and your desire to engage actually demand your presence, your looking up, your talking back, and, as insane as it is, saying please.


Another friend tells you you have to learn not to absorb the world. She says sometimes she can hear her own voice saying silently to whomever -- you are saying this thing and I am not going to accept it. Your friend refuses to carry what doesn't belong to her.

You take in things you don't want all the time.... then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn't be an ambition.


To your mind, feelings are what create a person, something unwilling, something wild vandalizing whatever the skull holds.


The world is wrong. You can't put the past behind you. It's buried in you; it's turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you.


The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow.


Yes, and you do go to the gym and run in place, an entire hour running, just you and

your body running off each undesired desired encounter.


You can't drive yourself sane. You are not insane.


This is what it looks like. You know this is wrong. This is not what it looks like. You need to be quiet. This is wrong, You need to close your mouth now. This is what it looks like. Why are you talking if you haven't done anything wrong?

You are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description.


The world out there insisting on this only half concerns you. What happens to you doesn't belong to you, only half concerns you. It's not yours. Not yours only.


How to care for the injured body,

the kind of body that can't hold
the content it is living?

And where is the safest place when that place
must be someplace other than in the body?


The worst injury is feeling you don't belong so much
to you --


What feels more than feeling? You are afraid there is something you are missing. Something obvious. A feeling that feelings might be irrelevant if they point to one's irrelevance pulls at you.

Do feelings lose their feeling if they speak to a lack of feeling? Can feelings be a hazard, a warning sign, a disturbance, distaste, the disgrace? Don't feel like you are mistaken. It's not that (Is it not that?) you are oversensitive or misunderstanding.


Every day your mouth opens and receives the kiss the world offers, which seals you shut though you are feeling sick to your stomach about the beginning of the feeling that was born from understanding and now stumbles around in you -- the go-along-to-get-along tongue pushing your tongue aside. Yes, and your mouth is full up and the feeling is still tottering --


And yes, I want to interrupt to tell him her us you me I don't know how to end what doesn't have an ending.


-- Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric

The Intimate Nature of Knife Fights, Wishes, Steve Connell

Three nights with which to wish three wishes.

On the first night I wish for love.

It is a love not like I've had, but like I've always wanted. One with the sturdiness of steel to support us. One chipped out of ice that withstands the hottest flames we can throw at it without melting. It is a love of grand design, immaculate, like I was told love was. Like a spider's web, infused with air and light, weaved with spontaneous precision and set off perfectly by crystalline drops of water. refraction. and twilight.

But alas, wishes are for make-believe, so the wish did not come true.

Three nights with which to wish three wishes; now I'm down to two.

Three nights with which to wish three wishes.

On the second night I wish for love.

A perfect love born of two imperfect souls. A love that surprises you with flowers and rubs your feet when you're tired. A "good morning my lovely!" type love. A love that has headaches and argues over movies but still holds your hand and gives you the last bite, that kind of love. The love that goes to work late, stays in your arms. The love that tells secrets over ice cream, a laugh out loud to the sweet spinning sky and dance on the side of the road because "that is my favorite song!" type love.

An embarrasing, awkward, imperfect love. A limpish, gimpish, lame little love with no need for "excuse me" and no time for polite. That gets messy and sloppy and has fun in the doing so. A wonderfully perverse little unique little lovely that takes pride in the clumsy-um-umsiness of peanut butter and limericks and dances badly, so gladly, so badly from the inside of a mirror. That is the love I rolled down hills of wishes for on the second night.

But wishing is for children who haven't learned to not have fun.

Three nights with which three wishes, and now I'm down to one.

Three nights which with to wish three wishes.

On the third night I wish for love.

Hard earth love. Early morning cold love. Love of chapped lips and running noses, "make do with daisies; I can't afford roses" type love. A love of give and burn, live and learn, spit and rage and get better with age. That is the kind of love I am looking for. A love that is up all night with tears or with secrets. A love that finds solace in the heartache of fighting, knowing it relents like wheat against wind and moonlight and soft apology and gentle kiss. This is not love that needs the sunset nor weeps only from extravagance but rather in brightest day or darkest night, roof of steel or floor of mud, take shelter in my arms and my promises, take nourishment in the succulence of my lip and measure the horizon by the nearness of my gaze.

That is the type of love I fractured an eyelid wishing for on the third night.

Three nights with which to wish three wishes, now what'm I to do?

I wish for someone to send me love, instead they sent me you.

And now I got no more wishes. All I got is you.

I got no more wishes. All I have got is you.

I got no more wishes; all I've got is you.

Huh, sonofabitch. Realization.

My three wishes came true.

 -- Steve Connell, Wishes, The Intimate Nature of Knife Fights

Sonya Renee Taylor, unknown source

Economic disruption has always impacted political decisions. That was the Boston Tea Party, right? Destroy property for political protest. It is as old as this country. Secondly, what you are seeing is eruption of anger and exhaustion. Anger and exhaustion are not always ‘strategic" or “thought out” they are manifestations of pain. What you are seeing is people in pain. What the world is being asked to look at is the Black community in anguish. Imagine someone you love profoundly, your child, and imagine they were killed and not only was the person who killed them allowed to walk around with no accountability but then they were allowed to kill new kids in your community every week and all the news ignored it or said it was your kids fault. No imagine your pain. Really imagine your pain. Then imagine someone asking you again and again to be calm and rationale. To think of everyone and everything but your child and your pain. This is what this country asks of Black people. How absurd it would be to ask that of you. Right now, no one has been killed except Freddie Gray in this incident. So destruction of property is happening yes, but violence is severing a man’s spine and crushing his voicebox. Violence is 5 bullets in the back of a man running for his life. Violence is 4 bullets in the chest of 12 year old playing with a toy gun. Violence is choking a man to death on a new york sidewalk. Violence is shooting a woman in the back of the head in a dark alley. That is violence. Breaking windows in CVS is not violence. It is pain.

-- Sonya Renee Taylor

Elbows, The Intimate Nature of Knife Fights, Steve Connell

It has nothing to do with sex actually. It has to do with developing an intimate knowledge of elbows. Sex without that is meaningless. It's an activity, like playing Nintendo, merely hand-eye coordination, cause-effect relationships, and lasting. For most people the first person they had sex with serves no importance, save being the first. He's an asterisk, footnote of a young girl's journal, an afterthought. Beyond the first is less, it's midnight fumbling and stains on the rug. Incidental blurs of skin. Lying alone: with someone beside you. Memento. I want to more than last....When you breathe... I forget to. I do not want to be incidental. It's not enough to be noteworthy. I want to know every freckle on your body. I want to know from the tone of your voice that you need another blanket. I wanna be unextractable. It is not about sex. And it starts with the elbows.


 -- Steve Connell, Elbows, The Intimate Nature of Knife Fights

To Be of Use by Marge Piercy

The people I love the best

jump into work head first

without dallying in the shallows

and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.

They seem to become natives of that element,

the black sleek heads of seals

bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,

who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,

who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,

who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge

in the task, who go into the fields to harvest

and work in a row and pass the bags along,

who are not parlor generals and field deserters

but move in a common rhythm

when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.

Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.

But the thing worth doing well done

has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

Greek amphoras for wine or oil,

Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums

but you know they were made to be used.

The pitcher cries for water to carry

and a person for work that is real.

  -- Marge Piercy, To Be of Use

Excerpts from: Sputnik Sweetheart, Haruki Murakami

Moving Water, Rumi

When you do things from your soul, you feel a river
moving in you, a joy.

When actions come from another section, the feeling
disappears.

Don't let others lead you. They may be blind or, worse, vultures.

Reach for the rope of God. And what is that? Putting aside self-will.

Because of willfulness people sit in jail, the trapped bird's wings are tied,
fish sizzle in the skillet.

The anger of police is willfulness. You've seen a magistrate
inflict visible punishment.

Now see the invisible. If you could leave your selfishness, you
would see how you've been torturing your soul. We are born and live inside black water in a well.

How could we know what an open field of sunlight is?

Don't insist on going where you think you want to go. Ask the way to the spring. Your living pieces will form a harmony.

There is a moving palace that floats in the air with balconies and clear water flowing through, infinity everywhere, yet contained under a single tent.

  --  Rumi, Moving Water

Negotiations, by Rae Armantrout

      1

The best part
is when we’re tired
of it all
in the same degree,

a fatigue we imagine
to be temporary,
and we lie near each other,
toes touching.

What’s done is done,
we don’t say,
to begin our transaction,

each letting go of something
without really
bringing it to mind

until we’re lighter,
sicker,
older

and a current
runs between us
where our toes touch.

It feels unconditional.

      2

Remember this, we don’t say:

The Little Mermaid
was able to absorb
her tail,

refashion it
to form legs.

This meant that
everything’s negotiable

and that everything is played out
in advance

in secret.

  -- Rae Armantrout, Negotiations