your collar matches

the jersey blue

of the license plate

my white dress matches the car

the jersey blue

of prison metal

my white dress matches

the cars that pull you over

of prison mettle

the arms that hold

the cars that pull

the white we wear

the arms that hold

the soft of brown

the white we wear

like summer armor

the soft of brown

the license plate

our summer armor

at your throat

I only remember being with my father one time when the police pulled him over. Once is enough. We were driving through the rural south. He was bringing me home from one of my summer enrichment experiences, the academic camps I went to in other states as if school wasn’t school enough. I don’t remember what the pretense was to pull us over, I just remember my father became a completely different person. A person I didn’t recognize. He shape-shifted to save our lives.

All the other times are stories. They start when he was on a field trip with the few other Black boys at his private school and their mentor. Guns drawn on the turnpike. And of course he didn’t have to be driving to get pulled over. Often in New York City, and then in Philadelphia he was stopped and searched and threatened just walking down the street alone or with groups of friends. Those godfathers of mine who share with him the tight edge of jaw that tenses when they tell these stories. The part of them still responding to the fact they didn’t know if they would live through it.

Last time my partner and I got pulled over it was nighttime in Durham. We had the Black Feminist Film School Fellows in the back of the car. Everyone in the car was Black and queer and more masculine than me. I was not driving. We pulled over into the brightest place possible, the parking lot of Hillside High School our historically Black manufacturing site of legacy. Sangodare says I became a completely different person. But my shapeshifting was not useful. It was a panic attack. Turns out I have it too. That place in my body that does not believe we will live through any of this.

In this picture, in this poem I struggle to reconcile the softness of the man holding his daughter who is holding her sippy cup, my father and I posing quite peacefully in the driveway in the broad daylight of my mother’s camera. Our soft white summer clothes that July with the metal of the car in the background. The detail of my father’s open shirt collar with the blue thin metal of the state. How soon and which parts of us turn to metal here?

In my dream this morning my father and I were walking in a river. We were wearing white robes. We were quiet and focused. The morning mist was rising off the surface of the water. In my journal I asked him “What if our ancestors who walked through water to escape enslavement did it not only to evade the tracking dogs, but also to baptize themselves into another vibration. Another reality consistent with their freedom?”

What is the river you need right now? What rededication of your body to another context? How can our evasive survival maneuvers become a baptism, a balm, a source of peace. I am asking for myself as much as anyone. My spiritual teachers have taught me to wear white when I need to be calm in spaces and situations I do not control. And so most days I match this photograph. And everyday the shapeshifters lift me up. Hold me in an embrace soft enough that I can still displace the skin of metal, the expectation of clank. The misrecognition of my bones.

I dedicate this poem to your softest armor, breathing. I open to the peace we can’t imagine. I remember. The river was there before the chains. I remember. The water is older than the state. I remember. My ancestors are all here, riverine right through my veins. The cup is red. But it is in my hands.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. Videos, poem prompts, meditations and more are here for you in the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive. Click the link to learn more.

solar plexus

and when i have to leave

forgive me

when you can

and know

forgive me

for the healing

and know

i had to do it

for the healing

i didn’t do it

i had to do it

when i did

i didn’t do it

until i could

when i did

it was for all of us

until i could

i had to leave

it was for all of us

and you can

It’s the warmth, the multiple haloes in this picture for me. From here it is as if my father is looking me directly in my eye to tell me something, while the youngest part of me still clutches at his chest. Sometimes the break is in our hearts. Sometimes it reaches lower to the solar plexus, we wonder about the the life source that created us, we shut down our solar power in our loss. We question our own power because if we were really powerful wouldn’t we be able to prevent all this loss? If I could do anything I would undo this loss, bring back your heat. Embrace you again. But here I am, on yet another day, and none of that has happened. And deep inside I think it means I can’t do anything. I doubt my power. I feel so acutely disconnected that don’t remember where the circuits are that link me to the sun.

The words behind this poem are the words “right here.” Right here my father says. I am right here. Right here where feel you the most grief, the most rage, the most longing, right here is your connection to the heat the bright eternal. You can. He says. You can. And he means everything. I can embrace, bring back, remember, hold. All dreams I’m protecting myself from. All the healing in multiple directions. You can. The solar plexus chakra is the generator. Our relationship to that energy hub is about what we believe about our capability. What I learn in my longing, my reaching, what I learn in my crying and screaming, is that I am only capable of one thing. Love. It is enough.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. Videos, poem prompts, meditations and more are here for you in the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive. Click the link to learn more.

the other shore

there will be other shorelines

and you will reach them

and you will reach for them

and you will reach them

and you will reach for them

with your small hands

and you will reach them

with your big belly

and with your small hands

you will find your way

and with your big belly

you will breathe

and you will find your way

with all our open eyes

and you will breathe

on through

all our open eyes

you will reach for them

through through

to the other shore

In Black “new world” sacred song “the other shore” means heaven and a return to Africa at the same time. Reaching the other shore is a spiritual goal, it is a communal effort. We offer our breathing to the journey our ancestors must take across everything we can imagine into the unimaginable. The unimaginable past and the unimaginable future become the same place. In the time of this photograph, I was reaching for my mother. A few days before we had stood singing as my great grandmother Sarah surrendered back to earth, buried in the citrus grove on land she worked her entire adult life. We sang that our breathing might help her reach beyond before the sugar trade that brought her ancestors, triangulated to Jamaica from where I’m still researching to find in Africa and Scotland. That she might reach where she was going. The other shore.

But in the time of the looking, right now when I look at this picture, I feel the stretch, the contradiction. My spirit is reaching for my father, even as he holds me, grounds me in my reach. He is the one now who must reach beyond my grasp, but am I not the one who must hold on, not let him fall? I am still reaching. Do I believe that he can fly? What is the holding we learn to do across oceans and lifetimes? What is the letting go we can learn awash in grief and love? What do we let go of when we reach out with our hands? Here at the shoreline, the sound of arrival repeats and repeats and repeats and yet every impact shapes the shore, the water arrives at a different place, made different by the persistence of getting there. When I say grief comes in waves, it is not a metaphor. It will dress my face in salt wherever I am. The other shore is the beyond and it is where we were before and it where we are all going, as the song says, soon. Up yonder across the cosmic tides but also down into the deep letting go that could allow us, intergenerational us, to be reaching home and free across across which is right here. Where we are.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. This is the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.

Devotion

first clue

the Mets shirt

he will love you if you win or if you lose

but he really wants

you to win

and he will

yell about it

second fact

he holds your hand

though you already know

how to walk

and you are not crossing

the street you are

walking on a wide deserted beach

but the ocean is big

third thing

the sunglasses the cap

he’s fully clothed and walking

with you mostly naked children

in the sun of afternoon

what does he clothe his spirit in

to set you free

If you are truly fortunate in this lifetime, you will be loved by a Mets fan, a Knicks fan, or the versions of these lovers in other regions and contexts. What I mean is that you deserve to be loved by a person loyal to their own decision to pay attention, to study you, to bring their full presence, to root for you , to fully believe in you, even though you usually lose when it matters. Because that’s the other thing, if you are like me (or the Mets or the Knicks), you usually lose. It is usually too much, the first period or quarter is more beautiful than the last, fatigue is real, and people keep leaving. The post-season is a mess, if you even get there. If you are like me you know what it is to lose, to know everything and everyone we love will go beyond us at some point. The only way to avoid it is never to love anything, never to want any closeness, and how is that going? You don’t have to tell me. I tried it too. But now I accept myself as a lover and loser. Which means (no offense to the Yankees fans among us) that I have compassion for those who have only practiced loving the winners, who benefit from a fashionable love, a love supported by empire. But I am a daughter of diaspora. So I know that our love will have to be stronger than playbooks and billionaire acquisitions of sweat from abroad. Our love will have to last season after season after season sometimes without any reason for hope. Our love will have to reach across oceans. Our love cannot bank on external guarantees, we will have to regenerate it ourselves. And we will. This is what I mean when I say my father is a Mets fan. Which is not really about the Mets. It is evidence of a particular approach to love that I can see now. An approach to life. Which is why I look past the brave chests of my cousins to my father, in this disintegrating photo, clothed, somewhat subdued, not smiling, but holding my hand while I look at the ground. Because I need to remember that, I need to know that, I need to practice a love that is not based on performance, ease, success. A love bigger than stadiums, countries or time. A love that is its own reason. It is a love I can depend on right now. I can feel it right here, not because I deserve it, but because it offers itself to me anyway while I’m over here losing. Where I thought I was losing. Learning what I was losing. And that it can never be lost.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. This is the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.

communion

for you

i want a life of touching

being touched

the way you want

i want a life of touching

being held

the way you want

to hold somebody

being held

full of the reasons

to hold somebody

free

full of the reasons

sunshine laughter

free

communion

sunshine laughter

being touched

communion

for you

What is touch? What is my father thinking as he watches me reach out to touch another baby. An Anguillian age-mate with whom I have not kept in touch. I wonder. Where is my friend? How is my friend of that moment feeling in this moment. Where is my father? Where is the one who even now holds me up so that I feel safe enough to reach out with these words. Where was he then? What is it like for a person socialized to be a man in a society structured by sexual violence to imagine, reimagine what touch could mean in the life of his daughter? What is my friend’s mother thinking as I reach and she studies her child’s response? What is it for all of us right now to reimagine, reinvent touch after a year of deprivation? Is there something that we learn by not touching the living that recasts our longing to touch our loved ones who have died? Is there something we learn by not having access to touch with our loved ones who have passed on that prepared us for this moment of reach? I don’t know. I do know that I want a world where touch is communion. Not the taken for granted invasion of my personal space as a small femme Black person embodied. But also not this isolation where touch feels impossibly deferred. I want a coming back together differently. Communion. Where the many ways we touch each other, physically, and with our decisions, and what we decide to share and not share and how we listen or do not listen to each other deeply is all reclaimed by communion. Our desire to be together simply different from our fear of what it means to be alone. Communion. Our loving acknowledgement of how our lives all touch each other anyway, our commitment to unlearning the violent ricochet of ignoring our inherent interdependence. Communion, a ceremony. Finding it. A ceremony of noticing how we are touching each other. A ceremony of finding enough safety to notice. To change. To reach. To respond.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. This is the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.

better

my face is your face

take it in your hands

better

take it with your eyes

take my face in your hands

while you can

hold my face in your eyes

forever

while you can

blink and think and carry on

forever

i will live and laugh in your eyes

blink and think and carry on

have as much fun as you can

i will live and laugh in your eyes

‘cause i am a funny man

have as much fun as you can

better

‘cause i’m a funny man

and that’s my face

my heart

and my heart

you have my heart

as strong as water

pounding stone

you have my heart

in your small hand

pounding stone

but soft to you

in your small hand

you’ll keep my heart

soft enough

to squeeze down small

you’ll keep my heart

where it always was

squeeze it down small

into your days

where it always was

as strong as water

you’ll have your own days

and my heart

Better my heart. It sounds like its own prayer. Better my heart. What I am asking for with my repeated return to the repetitive form. Better my heart. The repeating part of me, may this heart sound towards something more and better than I know. This is what loving you does. It betters my heart. Because better is a verb. It does something. This picture of sheer joy at Dunn’s River Falls with my dad and all his teeth and my (gorgeous!!!!) grandmother does my heart good. Does teach me something about what this heart is for and where it’s heading. We do put our faces, our energy, our hearts into the tiniest of hands. Our infinity into these small lifetimes. And the “better” in the title was not originally a verb. It was the redundant reflexive command form. The you is understood. As in when you volunteer to something you have already been assigned to do. And the one who knows they already assigned you to do it says “you better.” Also understood is the “or else” after the statement. “Better” stands between you and the consequences of acting like you don’t know what you are here to do. Who you are here to be. Who am I here to be? Better. Your heart.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. This is the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.

i know

one day

i will

have to

one day

put you

have to

let you

put you

down

let you

go

down

when i

go

leave

when i

know

leave

i will

have to

but

until

then

here is my heart

open to you

and lettered

read it

here is my face

your own

brown window

know it

here are my hands

holding you

safe and strong

believe it

here is my home

breathing

salted warm

eternal

here is my love

forever and fri-day

wear it on your chest

My father was born on a Friday. And so now, every Friday I write to him. I write what happened in the week. I write about whatever I’ve finally realized that I never got to tell him. I write asking for help. I write asking forgiveness. I write I miss you I love you. Every Friday. It wasn’t until recently though that I noticed that in these two pictures that my mother took of my father and I on my first trip to Anguilla I am wearing a bib that says “Fri-day.” Knowing my mother, the fact that I am wearing a bib that says Friday is as good as an almanac. It must have been Friday. In this poem is my father saying that he knows he will have to let me go, or am I saying that to him? It must be both. For me, now, Fridays are a day out of time. I can feel it when I wake up, somehow it takes longer to get into my body, feet touching the floor. I wonder as I walk around in the dark lighting candles if I am still dreaming. I am often already on the mat meditating before I even realize that it is Friday. Forever and Friday. When we say we love each other for forever and a day, we must mean this. We love with a love beyond time moving forward. We love with a love that allows us to go back and be together. We love each other with a love beyond consciousness and breathing. We love with a love beyond what bodies do, hold, be. We love to the full capacity of infinity. And then beyond that. That’s what I mean. I learn what infinity means by loving you.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. This is the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.

My great grandfather John Gibbs was the coal and ice man in Perth Amboy New Jersey. That meant owning a truck and carting coal through the community in the winter so people could heat their homes. In the summer it meant driving huge blocks of ice through the community so people could fill their ice-boxes and keep their food from spoiling. When my grandfather, Jeremiah Gumbs, born on this day in 1913, married my grandmother Lydia Gibbs, he joined the family business. He told me about the time a huge block of ice slid off the truck and how in his haste to impress his father-in-law he jumped off the truck and picked up an unmanagably huge piece of ice (he says it weighed at least half a ton) with the force of sheer adrenaline. When my grandfather took over the business he updated it to become a heating and air-conditioning business beyond the time of coal and ice. He was able to afford to upgrade by going, in his army uniform, to a new base and getting the contract to heat and cool their facilities, and then with that contract in place, and with my grandmother supposedly sounding white on the phone, he got the loans to actually get the equipment he needed to fulfill that contract and also to upgrade heating and air-conditioning services in their own community of Caribbean migrants in Perth Amboy.

When I asked my father and my uncles and aunt about my grandfather they didn’t describe him as warm. They said he was intimidatingly strong, had a booming voice and was always working. As his first granddaughter, my experience was different. By the time I arrived he was retired, he had returned to Anguilla and was swimming in the ocean every day. I can count on my hand the amount of times I saw him wearing a shirt. The distance his children felt because of his constant work was something I pre-empted immediately, according to my grandfather. I would grab onto his long white beard and refuse to let go. They would have to wait until I fell asleep to pry my little fingers open. I had made my claim. But to his own children he was a larger-than-life figure, a hard worker and a strict disciplinarian. “Those who do not hear will feel,” he would say before the spankings he gave which were his children’s only vivid descriptions of touch. It wasn’t until they were adults that they learned about another manifestation of his warmth.

As my father, uncles and aunt grew up and did their own work in the New Jersey and the NY Tri-state area they would often get the question. Gumbs? Are you related to Jeremiah Gumbs? When they said yes the stories would come pouring out. Grown black folks and immigrants of many ethnicities would have tears in their eyes. The stories would come gushing out about how if it was not for Jeremiah Gumbs they would not have made it during this or that winter. Their parents didn’t have the money for coal or heat and he still made sure they were warm through the winter. People would ask sincerely if there was anything they could do for them, the children of Jeremiah Gumbs, to show their gratitude. Their vulnerable opens hearts, a form of warmth moving across the years. Their memories of my grandfather (before he grew the white beard that would make me think he was the prototype for Santa Claus) actually giving them coal, the best possible gift for a difficult Christmas.

I wonder if that warmth could travel backwards to the consciousness of my father and his siblings to recontextualize the absence they felt, because their father was always working. Even on his birthday. My father said that for his father, a good day, was a day that he could work. Work itself was the gift. I have had to balance this tendency within myself, a coldness borne from how much more in control of my emotions I feel when I am living in the context of work. Sometimes I avoid the messiness of actual relationships by imagining that work is the entire world. My grandfather loved his work. He loved the fact that he was able to own his own business and work for himself. There is also evidence that although his business made many things possible in the lives of his family members and for his home communities in Anguilla and New Jersey that he was also not a good businessman. Because he could not, in the face of winter agree that the money a family had was the determining factor in whether they would be warm. He felt that he was the determining factor because he had access to the apparatus to keep them warm and so he made it work. He made many investments motivated not by their ability to provide returns but because of his belief in the community and family members who asked for his support. Many times he felt betrayed by people he had supported who didn’t feel accountable to him after the fact. I have read his correspondence with my grandmother, she would write justifiably stressed out about their financial situation, and he would reply with faith that eventually everything would work out.

Today, on my grandfather’s birthday I am thinking about warmth and what it means to us. I am thinking about how most of us are dependent not on the neighborhood man who is provider of coal, but on a power grid that will perpetuate existing privileges and never have to look us in the eye. We are disconnected from warmth, not only because of the unsustainable infrastructure we pay into, but because we all repeat and believe that we are not the determining factor. We depend on systems supposedly designed to support human life where human life is not the determining factor. I’m a writer. And so here I am working on my grandfather’s birthday. Watching the ice storm out my window, wondering when the power lines will go down. The power company has already emailed to say not to contact them, but to sign up for text alerts if I want to know how long it will take for them to restore power based on priorities I can already predict.

I lit a candle on my ancestor altar this morning for my grandfather’s birthday. I want to cultivate the faith to believe that I could be the determining factor, that we together could determine that nobody is left in the cold not today on my grandfather’s birthday and not any day. I turn to blankets and the body-heat of my partner. I turn to memories and warm thoughts. But I also turn to this work. May it matter that I wrote this. May this be the work that outlives profit. May it be a part of how we learn what warmth actually is. May it support us when we feel bereft. May it light the way as we become determined enough to face our responsibility for everyone’s survival. And in the meantime, I am holding onto you determined as ever with the knowing and strengthening grip of these, my hands.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. This is the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.

That’s Audre in the middle between her sisters Helen and Phyllis.

Audre Lorde was born on a very cold day. February 1934 was one of the coldest months on record in New York City up to that point. Unprecedented snowfall, but on February 18th, 1934 there was no snow, no wind, just a deep cold. Linda Belmar Lorde gave birth to her third daughter under cold conditions. Nothing like the warmth she was born into. Linda’s mother (Audre Lorde’s grandmother) Elizabeth Belmar gave birth to all her children in Carriacou, traveled from Grenada to the small island of her own birth so that her sister, the midwife Annie could hold her, tend to her and welcome her babies. Sometimes warmth is more than a climate.

But in February 1934 during the Great Depression Linda Belmar Lorde gave birth in a cold city at Sloane Maternity Ward, a facility funded by the Vanderbilts and managed by Columbia’s Medical School, testing ground for a legion of white doctors committed to what they thought was the noble sanitizing mission of eradicating midwifery and imposing birth on their own terms. Cold. Institutionalized weather.

Time-traveling back to that day, I want to hold Linda Belmar Lorde’s hand. Hold the back of her neck. Whisper warmth into her ear. I want my breathing alongside her to mean remember. Remember warmth. I want to pace alongside Byron Lorde waiting for the baby who is, quiet as its kept, at least his fifth daughter. I want to look into the eyes of a man so disappointed by his own father that he changed the spelling of his name and say it. Warmth. I want to tell him he was always worthy of love. That he is strong enough to offer more than four walls and the heat bill. He has claim to a deeper warmth.

And now, come with me back to a different hospital, decades later where Audre Lorde is meeting with the surgeon who tells her that since her cancer has metastasized there is only one option, his knife. He tells her that even with surgery she only has a few more months to live. And watch with me in wonder as it flickers in her, warmth. A healing spark that we can recognize in daughter soon to be doctor Elizabeth, named after Ma Liz, Audre’s grandmother. Witness it. The possibility of rebirth as warmth. That night she will go home and write in her journal a promise to write until fire comes out of every opening in her body. She will craft her own second, but really primary opinion through her own research on the liver and “alternative” treatments for cancer. She will leave New York City for the warmth of the Caribbean and gift herself not months, but many years of life. She will form lasting connections with entire new communities of Black women, in the Caribbean, in South Africa, in Germany. Warmth. When the doctors ask she will say “It is the love of women that has kept me alive this long.”

I am writing this in the midst of an ice storm in Durham. Across the United States the human-caused climate chaos of unprecedented cold weather and the cruel capitalist structural neglect of communities of color means that many of us are cold right now in a way we don’t have to be. And so my gift to you on this Audre Lorde’s 87th birthday is warmth. The warmth we need, which is the precondition to the climate healing we are all responsible for in our lifetimes. It is the warmth that comes from remembering how worthy we are of love, how capable we are of giving it. It is the warmth that comes from trusting the healers, especially the black, brown and indigenous women healers in our midst. It is the warmth that comes from reclaiming the externalized authority of systems that never earned our loyalty. It is the warmth we make by loving each other with the heat of more than one lifetime.

Audre Lorde’s birthday is as good a day as any to clarify our relationship to heat, light and possibility. May you experience that warmth that is your birthright. May you move towards what lights you up. May you say yes to the gift already radiating within you. With gratitude to the Lorde our flame, as ever lighting the way deeper into who we are.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is the author of The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde: Biography as Ceremony (forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Continue the celebration with us on 2/21 at 11am EST at Mobile Homecoming’s Sunday Service where I will be doing an oracle in honor of Audre Lorde! https://www.mobilehomecoming.org/live

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. This is the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.

Black Feminist Breathing Chorus Winter 2020-2021

this time i smile down on you, grandma

daddy holds me in his arms

you sink up to your shoulders in this sea

that you call evidence that God’s just showing off

daddy holds me in his arms

and while you both look at my mother

beautiful unlikely gift from God

i look at you instead

and while you both look at my mother

across salt and distances of sand

i look at you instead

my father stands

across salt and distances of sand

photos and mornings of tears

my father stands

taken by oxygen and years

photos and mornings of tears

you sink to your shoulder in the sea

taken by oxygen and tears

so now it’s me

this time

i’m smiling down

on you

Sometimes it’s such a young voice that comes to bring the poems. My grandmother never underestimated me. She thought I was a worthy interlocutor for questions of life, death, afterlife and the unknown. She shared her wisdom and experience with me, but she was not afraid to show me that there was so much she did not know. So much that she wondered about. What she knew for sure? The energy that gave birth to this universe was feminine. What she wondered about? What happens after we die? And our relationship was a relationship of wonder. Wondering what would have her life been if she, the ever curious child, had been born in my circumstances. With a mother less afraid, with a father less constricted and constricting. In a word more receptive to the poems and questions of a Black girl. I came to her over and over with the question “what was it like?” I wanted to know what it was like during the Anguillian revolution. What was it like to participate in direct action civil disobedience in segregated spaces in New Jersey? What was it like to travel with women’s organizations to all the countries she sent back gifts from? What was it like to be a Black student at Pratt Institute in the 30s? But she wanted to know how it was for me. How did it look from my perspective? And how would it be? What could I see that she couldn’t fathom yet. From the age that she could walk, she says, she wanted to go beyond whatever she knew. So maybe our relationship is a study in perspective. It was my grandmother’s passing that made me an ancestral listener. All I knew was that the conversation had to continue.

This picture shows me the shift in our relationship that comes with the difference in my perspective after my father’s passing. The unspoken cliche that she is looking down on me from heaven, might be too directionally specific. She is everywhere. But in this picture and as the person looking down into the photo album I am looking down on her, I have height, because of my father’s act, even now, of elevation. Because of my mother’s embrace of this moment in particular. Because I hold the already disintegrating picture in my hands. What can I see from here, beyond what I let myself know? How completely I am loved. How humble my wise first teacher, be she grandmother or ocean, be she mother or lens of glass be he father or healing heartbreak. How great the height from all this lifting. How full and generous the wonder. How glad for what I still don’t know.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. This is the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.

witness

 From Clyde:

you are how i know

i can give life

make the world better

more beautiful than it was

i can give life

another chance

more beautiful than it was

you are evidence

another chance

when i thought i was inadequate

you are evidence

that i am more

when i thought i wasn’t enough

you showed up to teach me

that i am more

than i ever dreamed

you showed up to teach me

to make a world     better

than i ever dreamed

you are how i know

From Alexis:

recognize

i hold onto your finger

you hold everything

i know who you are

i hold onto your finger

look directly into your eyes

i know who you are

you are me

look directly into my eyes

and spell become

you are me

and you can never leave

and spell become

the language that we speak

and you can never leave

my eyes

my eyes

recognize

the language that we speak

holds everything

What would I give to hold onto my father’s hand and and look into his eyes? These poems, and this whole part of the series layers words onto the wordless connection of care, holding, communing beyond syntax or the logic of language. I would prefer a tangible physical connection, I would prefer an unspoken gaze to any of these words. And so when I read them over, am I crying because the resonate, or I am I crying because they will never be enough? I don’t know yet. What I do know is that I too am moving towards wordlessness. One day (the song says “and it won’t be long” but I hope that it is a long time away) I too will exist in the wordless. The unspeakable beyond. And so will you. Maybe this practice is my way of honoring that while I deeply miss and long for an embodied connection with my Dad, who he is, who I am, who we are was always more than and beyond these bodies. And remains. More than. And beyond.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. This is the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.

leaves

on your heart

break

on mine

on your heart

anachronistic maple

on mine

words i cannot speak

out of time maple

in the Caribbean

words i cannot speak

on my chest

in the Caribbean

where leaves don’t fall

on my chest

but our skin does

don’t fall

don’t break

but our skin does

leaves

Anatopistic. Where it says anachronistic in the poem it should say anatopistic. Not out of time but out of place. The maple leaves on my father’s shirt from a trip to Niagra Falls are out of place on a beach in Anguilla where a maple tree will probably never grow. But I actually mean out of time. This poem is about what it means to be out of time when I want more time in my father’s arms. So yes. Anachronistic. Subject to time and out of it. Like a deciduous tree, seasonal, the leaves will eventually fall. Out of place in Anguilla where the palms and seagrapes and dried seaweed at the shoreline this close to the equator are not interested in the tempering of seasons. They have their own renewal timeline. The palms will wait a generation and then the low branches will dry out with dreams of becoming someone’s thatch. The seagrapes will strengthen themselves with salt. The ocean has already let go the seaweed dried up on the shore. It is just me, not letting go. Out of place in the place I want to be. Staying in place by running out of time. My mother took these photographs and made everyone squint into the sun to get us like this, in the best light, which it turns out is more light than we can bear. The slight glare is not from her camera but from my digitization. For now, I’ll keep it that way. Grainy dissolve texture over my baby hair. Temporary as a kiss.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. This is the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.

the ocean told me

the ocean told me

you would laugh for years

i heard it with my eyes closed

and i knew

you would laugh for years

after i left

and i knew

you would not be alone or bereft

after i left

you would be held

you would not be alone

you would float

you would be held

by more than me

you would float

and then you’d fly

by more than me

the ocean told me

and then you’d fly

i heard it with my eyes

At a certain point, my father started writing poems based on pictures. Many of theme were picture he took at the point in his life where he felt most comfortable behind the camera. He took so many digital pictures we called him Papa-razzi. In his poems he would claim to speak in the voice of the person in the photograph, a way of tuning in, displacing his own ego, a form of intimacy and honoring. I sensed that there was also projection there too. So I read for the aspects that exceeded the projection. Now I read those same poems , all written in the first person, looking for the poet, the photographer, the person finally able to speak while pretending to put someone else out front. At a certain point in this series of poems, based on pictures of me as a young child with my father, mostly photos taken by my mother, I felt my own perspective changing. First I wrote in “my own” voice, the bereaved adult daughter chronicling what I saw, longed for in the images. Then I could hear or imagine my infant self, reaching for memory, what did I know then that I need to remember now. Then towards the end of the process I began to hear my father’s voice. I began to engage the possibility of writing about what I still strongly experience as MY loss of HIM, from his perspective. Not a reversal into his loss of me, still my loss of him, but what he knows about it. What might he have known before all of this about what my life would be like after his. In his coaching practice my father encouraged people (including me one of his most willing experimental subjects) to imagine their impact as far into the future as they could envision, beyond their own lifetimes. What decisions did he make because he was imagining my life beyond his lifetime? What decisions must we make now imagining the lives of our loved ones beyond our lifetimes, imagining this planet beyond our species? Yes. Seems like a good time to listen to the ocean.

If you want to read some of my Dad’s poetry Without Apology: Poems in Honor of Black Women by Clyde E. Gumbs is available here.

If you want support listening to the ocean you can order my most recent book Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals here.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. This is the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.

redding

from Alexis (upon birth)

you my world

of the matching shirt

of the redding skin

the chest

of the matching shirt

of the listening heart

the chest

i am the size of your lungs

of the listening heart

and the blinking wonder

i am the size of your lungs

breadth of your breathing

the blinking wonder

of what could exist

breadth of you       breathing

beyond your arms

but what could exist

past the redding skin

beyond your arms

you         my whole world

air

from Clyde (upon rebirth)

you my air

since lack of gravity

pressed the cavity into outerspace

you my lungs

since lack of pull

done     proved its proof

you my lungs

already were

you’ve proved your proof

mathematics of scale

you already were

calculus of compression

mathematics of scale

put you right over my heart

calculus of compression

give you all my best to keep

put you right over my heart

pressed to infinity

give you all my best to keep

you    my air

We breathe on behalf of so many. I am remembering this moment when I was about the size of my father’s lungs. What can these two beings, the young father and the wise infant teach me now about the breathing that I do now that he breathes no more? These poems are my attempt to bring that moment, photographed by my mother into language for moments like this when I need it. Redding is a verb and an adjective for the heat and urgency of emergence alive and radiant with becoming. Redding is the way our flesh becomes warning intimate limit forces us to learn lessons bigger than us, like what happens to air. How every body seems too small to fit a universe of love. And yet.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. This is the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.

make the loudest sound you can

and don’t apologize

when you celebrate yourself

you are celebrating me

and don’t apologize

to the people scared of love

you are celebrating me

you are celebrating all of us

to the people scared of love

this is the sound of getting over it

you are celebrating all of us

who don’t have flesh to use right now

this is the sound of getting over

the only way to hallelujah

for us beyond the body now

act like you know it

the only way to hallelujah

is make the loudest sound you can

act like you know it

when you celebrate yourself

My birthday (in June) is the day after my father’s and for many years we had joint birthday parties. This picture is from the first one. In this poem I can hear my father telling me rather directly to get my Lucille Clifton on and CELEBRATE. (Lucille Clifton was born in June too, and I miraculously got to celebrate her last birthday with her.) I don’t know if you are like me, but sometimes I feel shy about celebrating who I am, especially in times where so much is hard. There is so much grief. And the fact that grief is undeniable evidence of love, doesn’t mean that I feel like celebrating my losses. In the past I have been called “tone-deaf” (an ableist term) for finding gratitude and something to celebrate in the midst of terrible circumstances.

But knowing that my ancestors and all the no longer embodied can only come be part of this celebration on earth if I create one, a celebration, a portal for their love to stream through for me but also beyond me to you and all of us makes me realize that the work of celebration is crucial. The best offering I have to give my ancestors is my joy. After I find the love and lessons in my sadness (which often takes some time), they are finished with it. Sadness doesn’t keep. It grows toxic if I keep it around after it has already offered its gift. May I open my heart to fresh sadnesses with even more gifts another day. Joy on the other hand can’t wait. If I wait until everything is perfect to feel this joy…when will that be? And so I celebrate my father, I celebrate myself as his daughter. I celebrate all the love that I am experiencing in this time that is also shaped by my grief and by missing so many people whom I love. I’m celebrating you, and I’d love it even more if you would freely celebrate yourself today.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. This is the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.

squat behind the tiny swingset

split the skinny trees

pink and purple sweatsuit smiling girl

your mouth as if you’re saying something funny

behind you concrete wall and splitting trees

leaves on the ground chill in the sky

your mouth as if you’re saying something funny

my smile as if no one will ever die

you left me on the ground      gone          to chill in the sky

cause swingsets swing us only but so high

my smile as if no one will ever die

knows everything and nothing at one time

cause swingsets swing us only but so high

and chariots will come for numbered days

show everything and nothing at one time

the laughing man will wither         fade away

and chariots come for his numbered days

the smiling girl will cry and say not yet

the laughing man will do his best to stay

the curve of life is sure the swing is set

My father passed away the October my first single-authored book came out. This is us also in October on my first swingset, branded by Crayola. Another form of writing, near a wall that will not stop being a wall. What I see in my face is the innocence of not knowing how the pendulum swings and the joy of my father’s silliness. My father, who would make up songs and speak in funny voices. I am grateful for the rhythm of these poems for reaching back. So not single authored after all. Swing low sweet Dad. I hold you in the process and the poems. I love you with my laughter and my tears.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. This is the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.

Alexis:

land air teeth

soft growing

moon guide

laughter

soft growing

words

laughter

my future

words

i would memorize

my future

practice to shape

i would memorize

your face

practice to shape

the sound of you

your face

moon guide

the sound of you

land air teeth

Clyde:

twin suns

both eyes

your mouth

sound of ocean

both eyes

holding mine

sound of ocean

speaking prophecy

holding mine

gold future

speaking prophecy

truest wealth

gold future

poems of hair

truest wealth

what were you saying

poems in your hair

your mouth

what you were saying

twin suns

Every sunrise I meet my father again. I study him, right here in my own face. And then there are my mother’s photographs, my face close to my father’s face and both of us nearsighted. This poem imagines what might we have seen in each other’s faces during my second month of breathing. Dad still in the throes of his Saturn return, that time when all the lessons you have been able to avoid in your life come at you in a form that you cannot ignore. I am that form. And now, with all the lessons I am learning now, especially the visceral emotional lessons of grief, all I want is to look into my father’s face. But what I have is my face. I am in form the energy of he who now lives formless throughout the galaxy. And so I look myself in the eye and form the poem. Sun rise. Again.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. This is the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.

hold (never sold)

i remember your heart

and let me learn your arms

i remember the part

where we are eternal

and let me learn your arms

as cradle as treehouse

where we are eternal

and rooted and rocking and grow

as cradle as treehouse

as live structure reaching

and rooted and rocking and grow

into trees into butterflies

as live structure reaching

through drying out wings

into trees into butterflies

into songs into swings

through drying out wings

i remember the part

into songs into swings

i remember your heart

On the hospital smock that my father had to wear in the hospital on the day (after the all night) that I was born it says “never sold.” This is because the smock is not for sale, it is for hospital use. The smock itself has been present for many moments like this, where someone covers over their regular clothes to be ready to greet the newest among us, a just-born infant. But for me, accountable to my lineage which includes ancestral experience with the violent narrative of sale, of people for sale, my father wearing this smock that says “never sold” when I first get to see him in physical form is also (at least) poetic.

What I see in the photograph is comfort and familiarity. I know this heartbeat. And for me the possibility of infant memory, a form of recognition before the strictures of socialization is related to what it means to create a reality beyond the one in which we still live right now where private hospital laundry notwithstanding, the dominant narrative on this planet at this time is that everything is for sale. Especially our time, attention and physicality. This poem wants to say there is something before that, that we remember through knowing each other as love and possible love. Growth and possible growth. Change and more change beyond that. My relationship to my father continues to change, and it is tangled with the stories I am unlearning about lynching and what violence built here on sacred lands. And what I am learning is supported by my study of trees and butterflies and my reclaimed practice of play.

Though words distinguishing the proper use of property have been with me from the very beginning I am learning to read another way. I am remembering an older knowledge of who you are and who you can be. It is this form of never and before and beyond that will allow me to actually allow myself to feel safe enough with you to be held and beheld without fear of what this world has taught you to steal, siphon off or misrepresent about me. I remember before everything I know now. And I practice surrendering to that inarticulate memory. I remember the part where we are eternal and allow it to hold me here and now.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. This is the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.

this is what i breathe

into the top of your head

your crown

aquatic memory

into the top of your head

where dreams descend

aquatic memory

blowhole opportunity

where dreams descend

and live on earth

blowhole opportunity

to be your life

and live on earth

as if the earth was for you

this be your life

this

      be my love

as if the earth was for you

your crown

this be my love

this is what i breathe

Mama caught this photo of my dad breathing a blessing right into the top of my head. Soft spot of memory. My face in this picture resonates with how I feel today. PMS during #negrosolstice. Pout of a girl who knows that she is loved. The part mama combed between my afro-puffs, portal where dreams come to earth. Path through the tangled places. For the past 21 days I have been limiting my salt intake, clearing a path for more ancestral love to come through, helping myself release whatever deposits have collected from uncried tears and holding it together. If what is within is less dense than what surrounds me, I can float. (Some of y’all hear the aquatic version of your favorite Song of Solomon quote in there.) What do you need to release? I listened to “Let it Go pt.2” by the Beautiful Chorus this morning and allowed their ocean of repetition to unclench me. Those are the only words to the song “let it go.” For me, this is the solstice of the clear path. Not accumulation of powers or skills, but simple release of anything that would block the love shining through. Our superpower is being here, despite everything, as everything. Our superpower is presence, the presence of multitudes in our every breath. The prayers they breathe into our crowns perpetually. The superpower of a beloved scalp moisturized. The portal of every pore cleared. The prayer of your perfect pout, remembered whale spout, let the salt out.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. This is the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.

joy is contagious

i caught it from you

you carried it through

generations of laughter

i caught it from you

held you best i could

generations of laughter

baby waterfall

held you best i could

while you were small enough

baby waterfall

you break ways through mountains

while you were small enough

before

you broke your way through stone

i lifted you

before

you carried it through

i carried you

joy is contagious

Joy is contagious seems like a strange thing to say during a pandemic. But you can see it in the picture, the way joy spreads, the way our connection to each other’s joy teaches us that joy, like any energy, is not individually held but already shared. What if we built our lives accordingly. In this time when many of us are feeling the grief of not being able to share joy in person with the loved ones we have lost, or who we cannot be with because of the safety concerns brought on by a pandemic that never had to go this far and kill this many, it is important to me that we remember that joy is not limited by space or time. Joy moves through us. My father’s joy is here with me right now because it was never only his, just like it will never be singularly mine, it always belongs to all of us. This is a picture of our family trip to Dunn’s River Falls during my very first trip to Jamaica for my great grandmother Sarah’s funeral. It teaches me something that even though the journey was prompted by a solemn occasion, the love that was my great grandmother’s legacy, her mothering impact on her own children but also many grandchildren, daughter’s in law, community members was not closed off when she was buried. Like a waterfall, breaking even through stone, joy comes through. What a gift that all this joy will not be contained to my one life here on earth. What a miracle that I get to celebrate the infinity of that right now.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. This is the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.