#lorettakc
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Full Circle
We begin in medias res Fell in love with a complicated man weaving a tale, a promise, a wedding ring
The loneliness of always being right
A cloak that shades from red to white
Temperance A reminder each time you bring him home stumbling over his boots
A sudden burst of rain then sun
Rainbows and riddles I'd like to buy a vowel
He is leaving on the road leaving you on read
A painful game of would you rather bedroom eyes and truthful lies
What it would mean to return a decade later or two
The city changes, unrecognizable or perfectly recognizable as anywhere else
Voice memos that ask for something resembling forgiveness offering something adjacent to change
Find the rightness in being alone
The glass half full the journey
The same messages in a different tone
The middle of the end
(LKC, 2/7/23)
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A ritual for the full moon in Cancer
It's raining hard and unexpectedly the streets are full of water clogged drains and frothing creeks
All the city's trash is getting redistributed Trees uprooted
Feelings are also flowing pooling, gathering
Dreaming of my mother, my aunts my sister and cousins swimming in the ocean
Remembering that time we drove all night to Mexico in the back of my uncle's truck watching a lunar eclipse going way down into the desert of Baja, the Sea of Cortez an escape from all we knew
Facing the unfamiliar Now it all dissolves in a crack like a lightning strike a sudden aneurysm Sometimes what seems like a choice is just an illusion
A turn of the wheel A lamp in the dark Pulled along by the moon
Listen to the rain on the roof a sudden downpour not fate but something similar
And plant deep the tree of your heart
(LKC, 1-7-23)
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Circular
(Notes from the Hella Feminist exhibit.)
"One cannot feel feel free alone." — Angela Davis, 2019
We begin in a circle a wreath without end but grief a full bowl what might be placed in a side cabinet
Leave a calling card for community allow for togetherness
find intersectionality, find freedom
I pause to text a friend in Minnesota tell her I'm thinking of her I send a picture of Angela Davis
How can a person be a person alone?
This is not a rhetorical question
But how can we find freedom in community without the constriction of conformity?
(it is time to be the weird sister of your best dreams)
You do not need to be other than you are and find acceptance as such
We are like individual trees but we grow together
Our branches knitting the sky
Each turn of the wheel eyes closed and opened a box set on a high shelf the gravity of sunset We exorcise the demons
Find magic in healing
the careful growth of a crystalline structure or the silent harmony of planetary orbits
A circle without beginning but love
(LKC, 11-12-22)
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Darkness
In the mountains you notice —when all the lights go out the stars shine even brighter & the sounds of the night get louder crickets rustling leaves an owl
I propose the problem is not darkness but loneliness How you can be totally alone in a city of millions
Laying out the cards for guidance Eight of Swords Nine of Swords The Star Reversed
What is the dark but when you should be asleep? (I am afraid to go to sleep)
Call it insomnia or jet lag lying alone in a sterile hotel room on the other side of the world
The clouds are orange & violet above the midnight city sirens helicopters a garbage truck
And if the mountains feel far away you know the stars are even farther
(LKC, 7/24/22)
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“Had we but World enough, and Time”
— Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress” (1681)
The clock ticking in a minor key
Midnight on the bridge and the street lamps’ light fractures in the water
We take the plunge
Still life memories: red apples and yellow roses; her lover’s pearl necklace
Pigeons take flight in the piazza, shadows fall
(LKC, 11/22/22)
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Ebb tide
The anxious flutter worn like a mantle feeling first and then assigning reasons
A sort of tacked on explanation for— all of this
How we grasp at logic but it's all just Signals from a faulty machine
(LKC, 5-25-22)
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I am trying to explain this in a way that I can understand
I am feeling now what I was feeling then. Late summer burning into fall and I am driving every weekend to visit a rehab center in the middle of wine country. A feeling that sticks in the throat. My teeth are falling out. Or, I am thinking about my teeth falling out. Yellow grass and vultures circling the sky. I am hurting myself by holding on too tightly; I will spend the next month not editing the Colony project and watching Felicity and trying to heal my wrists. Everything will be broken all at once. I will be unable to bite into anything; we will eat a lot of couscous. All of this can be explained by astrology. I will tell my mother that I am like a nervous little dog, chewing on itself, and she will tell me I am taking the Cadillac of antidepressants. I am feeling now what I was feeling then. Late spring drying into summer and I will take a bus into the Marina every week to talk about my problems, which seem insignificant by comparison. Is this what it means to get enough sleep? The old women get off in Chinatown and I get off at a Starbucks and the bus heads west into the fog.
(LKC, 4-7-22)
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Open heart surgery
She is surprisingly blase about that time she died
It was only for a moment or two the stopped clock in the operating theater
Falling in love hurts more and happens every day
(LKC, 3-2-22)
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Definitions
acidic envy; driven
A quality of catching the light
we are confronting each/the same
a challenge of finding —to evoke
She says the solution is to live (in the moment)
flash of wings
it catches In the throat
(LKC, 4-25-2022)
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The witching hour
Is this seasonal depression, or has the veil between worlds gotten thin? How he rejects my suggestion out of hand, and I leave him on the couch watching YouTube videos. Work requires lipsticks named for fruits, raisin, a soft raspberry, the lower lip trembling. This is what it means to be seen: How we are perceived to be perceiving ourselves among a gallery of other faces all perceiving the same thing. To be a wizard would be preferable, or a witch in a hut made of bones. Wine with ice, a memory of his mother. Once again hearing the bells in the clock tower ring out of tune and feeling that we have returned to somewhen. It is not necessary to go searching for ghosts in the hollow where two creeks merge. I would not think I had the answer; no, that is a lie, I’m always more certain than I ought to be.
(LKC, 10-8-21)
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Stardust
(LKC, 2-2-22)
The thing about being a person you have this rich interior life probably & so does everyone else
And then you take a swim like the prime minister of Australia & then you’re gone
Probably
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Image text: Sometimes I wish I had a mother like other mothers, who would mail tea just because she worried. Instead she hides empty bottles and sounds brittle, too bright, too tired when I call. • This is why I never call. • My sister is texting me about what we should do, and I just want to sit on the deck and listen to the owls in the distant dusk.
(Post date: 8-15-2014)
Poetry postcard project
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Pocket Full of Posies, part 2, Loretta Clodfelter
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Pocket Full of Posies, part 1, Loretta Clodfelter
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Image text: Nostalgia is a eucalyptus tree in morning fog. No, you know, what even. I felt all the things and cried in the work bathroom. <here is a mascara-smeared selfie> I also cried in my car. Do you remember how people used to say "take a chill pill" (maybe you don't remember; I am old)? Anyway now I have a prescription I can take when I'm freaking out, and I'm only just now realizing how much easier life would have been if I'd had pills if I'd had pills to take the edge off back then. Gray skies, gray trees, gray concrete, and for a moment I feel it from the inside out. Later I will stare in the mirror and obsess about imperfections in my mouth and text you <3<3<3.
(Post date: 4-16-2014)
Poetry postcard project
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