#lorettakc

[lorettakc]

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)

[lorettakc]

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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“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)

[lorettakc]

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)

[lorettakc]

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)

[lorettakc]

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)

[lorettakc]

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)

[lorettakc]

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)

[lorettakc]

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)

[lorettakc]

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)

[lorettakc]

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

[lorettakc]

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

[lorettakc]

Pocket Full of Posies, part 2, Loretta Clodfelter

[lorettakc]

Pocket Full of Posies, part 1, Loretta Clodfelter

[lorettakc]

Click here

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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