ampersandthenwhat

[ampersandthenwhat]

The worst part about not really believing in god is that there is no one to barter with

when my dads’ cancer drugs

make him too weak

to lift his arms

he says to my mother,

‘don’t worry’

manages a smile

I imagine

Why

would a sentient god disappear

a man like that?

if I had god

to believe in

I wouldn’t wake up panicked

haunted by the likeness

in our faces

(his looks less like mine every day)

What’s the word for missing something before it is gone? someone before they go?

[ampersandthenwhat]

It is a widely known fact that sunflowers bend towards the sun

but it is also a fact that when they can’t find it,

they turn towards one another.

As my friend bikes across the entire city so we can trade books

and sit six feet apart,

I’m sure we do the same exact thing.

In a pandemic, there are still poetry readings

and celebrations.

In this poem, I am celebrating

every way I have so far this Spring, this summer, this fall, nearly this winter

and in this poem, I am doing it all at the same time.

I am slow dancing to records in my dining room

still in bed on a picnic blanket

in the park, baking

while I facilitate restorative justice work

I am smelling every rose bush I walk by

and I’m performing right now while playing

video games

in doc martens

stomping

on the crunchiest leaf pile I can find.

My dad and my partner are in the background

crying every time they hear this poem

as I video chat with my therapist in the bubble bath

where I have just realized you can use tupperware containers

to make floating snack trays.

I am hiking, staring at the ocean

I have spent hours driving to

for this simple moment of thinking

I am so ephemeral

and timeless

when my partners’ smallest human affirms my gender-fluidity

by saying, “I’m 50% boy and 50% girl,

so I guess… we’re 50 twins.”

and feeling so whole

when his oldest and I make crafts

or dance together

when she holds my hand unexpectedly

while I’m opening care packages from my parents

and freshly staining my shower curtain with hair dye

in the middle of a living room photo-shoot

binging Netflix

sipping coffee

in professional clothes

from only the waist up

watching someone’s toddler or baby sister

run

unabashedly

through the zoom call I fell in love on

knowing

there are so many ways

to be held

to hold

to turn towards

even now.

[ampersandthenwhat]

I think about you across dimensions

I don’t know if I believe in.

I wouldn’t be shocked if you told me

we met in five lifetimes

before I had collected enough nerve

to consider holding your hand.

What if that’s what chemistry is?

the interlacing of everything that came

before this

before now

before us

we were standing shadows

we were stained glass panels

without the sun

we were

and now we are

in love so present

yet ancient

like sunlight,

language,

kissing,

and collective living.

we don’t know everything

about how it found us

but we welcome

each other home.

[ampersandthenwhat]

I think of myself as a ghost in training

working up the courage

to haunt myself something terrible

to sing myself something true

Mental illness has a face

I do not know but a heart

I do know

and it costs me

my weight in worry

in unwritten poems.

I am afraid

the art I make will be good

and I will have to be good at things.

I am afraid the art I make will be bad and I will know for sure

that I am bad at things.

What’s funny is

I don’t believe in good or bad really

but I forget to tell myself that

I am unwinding

I am rebuilding

I am fixing

to settle into myself

and it is okay

that it is taking so much longer

than I thought.

My ex said, ‘you’re so full of yourself’

And I thought yes,

I am

Full.

[ampersandthenwhat]

Today my anxiety

a season all to itself

builds a castle of a haunting.

I sit and watch

dazzled by its’ many hands

all grasping at something

but never extending towards others.

Interdependence is necessary

to move forward

to move

there

is what we need

in moments of torn trust

and there is what we want.

sometimes those concepts

dance beautifully together.

other times, the brain says go

when the heart says

please, wait

just a moment.

[ampersandthenwhat]

I’m trying to train the part of me

that accesses wonder

awe

and play.

I guess it has been working

because he commented

on my skipping

moments later,

we both shrilled in delight

at sprigs of yellow and white flowers

the walls of which found us uttering

an iteration of,

“They’re so fluffy!!!”

just like that

wonder,

play.

[ampersandthenwhat]

How to stay alive when you don’t want to:

Sit on the kitchen floor

Put your feet on the knife drawer so you don’t open it

again

Sing something

Be easy with your body

(It has had many hard happenings

happen

and now you risk

being another

violence to yourself)

Think of your mom

(unless she sucks,

then think of my mom)

I know that right now it feels impossible

but this is a haunting you can unlearn.

[ampersandthenwhat]

Men ask leading questions

peg me as ill villain

while becoming monster

They say, boldly,

(without saying,)

‘well,

it was only a question.’

sigh and imply,

‘your anger is not justified here.’

Men pretend to be psychologist

when they are often without one themselves.

Men touch me without asking

(as I recoil repeatedly

mumble “no” in a low octave

half-awake)

and then they wonder where is their gratitude for doing so.

Men cannot see being called out as being called in.

hungry

so hungry

some men

often men

they trip over their own power.

[ampersandthenwhat]

To the wind

that reminds me of body

of time

of space

of presence.

that which hits my skin and outlines me

something beautiful.

something seen.

something right

right here.

[ampersandthenwhat]

I.

Your twitter feed before we met

was a landscape of wanted ads

for a cuddle buddy.

My IG feed before we met

was a heap of heartflet posts

about partnership with the heading,

“now accepting applications”.

I don’t know if the universe had a hand in this

or if it was just us leaning on luck

when we matched.

when we decided we might

like to like each other

behind two phone screens

a ten minute drive apart.

II.

whenever I like someone new I ask myself,

“Where did you come from?”

this time the question doesn’t turn up.

sometimes the how doesn’t matter

sometimes the why doesn’t matter

when the what is this serendipitous.

[ampersandthenwhat]

My hands asked the question,

‘where do we go?’

Your back, in response,

‘where haven’t you been?’

[ampersandthenwhat]

If I were the ocean

I think you’d be the shore I keep petting,

the laughter of a salt-water-lover

playing in me,

the splashing,

or the calm brought on by the splashing.

the awe that we all find ourselves in

when we stand beside.

you’d be whatever

makes us so captivated

by her in the first place.

If I were the sun,

I think you’d be the sensation on skin

after basking

(or the reason you feel like basking at all).

the part of you that says

get outside and be with her.

you’d be the long awaited friend at the door

begging, ‘come play!

come play

in me.’

[ampersandthenwhat]

You know I’ve been waiting for this

to meet someone who skips stones

on the soft lake of my heart

instead of drowning in my depth.

my astrology app says we were friends

in a past life.

(I don’t know if I believe in past lives

but if I did I’m sure we were just that.)

in this life,

we haven’t touched yet.

my lips don’t know yours.

I’m unsure of how you kiss-

Is it with a lot of lip or a lot of tongue or

my body, a stranger to your body.

we are nothing but possibility thus far.

When we sat in the sand,

You called me friend and I said,

“I. am not. your friend,”

so worried, I was, to be relegated to anything

but I’m sure I felt what you felt

a safety, a knowingness, a reconnecting

what I meant that day was and

what I mean now is

I doubt

the moon and her sky

are friends.

I think instead

they are something I don’t yet know

what sound to make to describe.

but they hold each other up, don’t they?

make each other possible, don’t they?

beautiful separate but together

a landscape so remarkable

we are often just left staring.

I’m sure they have an understanding

akin to friendship

but something else entirely

I don’t yet know

the language of the sky,

his moon,

or us

but I know, like them,

we already are

and always will be

becoming.

[ampersandthenwhat]

for me, I choose to live differently.

I wade in my emotions like bath water

like the holy water I was never baptized in

(like something far holier than that.)

I coat myself in everything I feel

and doing so helps me move forward,

helps me move

at all.

[ampersandthenwhat]

You like the idea of a stone you can throw

that never boomerangs.

When your emotions curl up

in the lap of your being-

you spit venom.

you do not want to feel

so much

everything

at once.

[ampersandthenwhat]

[ampersandthenwhat]

After reading poems outloud for almost five years without serious critique, a couple of men told they didn’t like my poems

and subsequently i buried my voice out in my own backyard after I had just unearthed it

Wouldn’t want to bother anyone

instead I robbed myself

of the ability to build worlds

because I didn’t revolve around theirs

because someone finally said

what I’ve always known:

that my poems are pointless

redundancy

my wild and loud and soft and sharp

needn’t be collected and spoken

I used this as a long awaited excuse to stop dissecting my trauma

to turn that interest exclusively academic

sometimes still I move like I’m about to be in a peer reviewed journal:

Study Examine Analyze

Delineate Dissociate Dissolve

In a way

it is a lot easier

to let the trauma erode what’s possible

convince me that the way I think is not something that needs to be recorded

takes less energy to shut the poems down

to tamper them with weed and intellectualization

to think you are doing yourself

and everyone else a favor

by finally shutting up

But they don’t stay

gone

the critics

or even the poems

so why silence myself?

for the illusion of safety

If I don’t let the poem string itself sensical

I don’t have to introduce myself to myself ever

If i don’t make that mental leap at therapy

I don’t have to feel my way through it

if i don’t write the anthology,

I don’t have to cower in the shadow of a maybe brilliant thing I have just built and live up to it

or in the shadow of a book no one reads

Instead I can just be the shadow

pretend it is mysterious allure

not cowardice that paints me quiet

likewise,

if I never let anyone too close

they can’t tell the difference

I can keep this up indefinitely

but I hope I won’t.

and every time I fall in love I know I won’t.

know I have to speak for myself

but the longer I live the longer

this narrative grows harder to do aloud.

I think myself so far into myself that i think

in spiral

into the same spot five or seven(teen) times

into a shell

into a relic

Into the question,

am I a scholar of my own trauma

or an architect of my own fixation around it?

and then I say, does it really matter?

I grab a shovel

and get back to work.