tender

to care, to be sensitive, to tend, to exchange

The Tenderness Project is a collaborative act of pointing, and imagining, and sharing, and gathering.  A collaborative gathering in and gathering up.  A listening.  An inquiry.  An experiment.  An archive.  A seam. 

brett kirkpatrick

confession

I cry easily, often

During sermons at church,

Listening to NPR,

Watching children at the farmer’s market,

So it should come as no surprise

That mosquitoes feasted

On my ankles and elbows

While I stood teary-eyed

In our backyard garden,

Overcome with joy and listening

To God push up through the August soil,

I was watching the world work against decay:

Bright green sedum,

Patient purple yarrow,

Squash hidden under their canopies

Of sticky green vine-leaves, all the promise

Of the pregnant moment,

The pinnacle of late summer, 

Zinnias drawing swallowtails

And tomatoes leaning in

For the last bit of blazing humidity,

befuddled humanity, myself included, 

lost in a garden older than any of us,

bolder than the world beyond its edges. 

h.e. fisher

today you are safe

sleep, worry not the hard or wary disadvantage

calm thorns thwart unwanted glances rise

be in whatever human form you can manage 

fret not other scorn or greener grass’s vantage  

pledge allegiance but do not flag do you fly

sleep, worry not the hard or wary disadvantage

shake it up shake it off water it under the bridge

have a good day have pie have it all have at it 

be in whatever human form you can manage 

be born be borne make love make money make it rich

this is the only time only breath only meditation song

sleep, worry not the hard or wary disadvantage

fugue vogue pirouette dance your body language

unlock your shied pen go forth go public go with love 

be in whatever human form you can manage 

wrath gone munitions none know no more damage

dream it be it conceive it and be conceived

sleep, worry not the hard or wary disadvantage

be in whatever human form you can manage 

essence london

discourse on tenderness

               --december 7, 2018

I made these five maps of or to tenderness.

“Of�? and “to�? are very small words that are very different. If I claim they’re maps of tenderness, you will likely expect to see the shape of tenderness represented, complete with labels of its major cities and the specific routes that connect them. If I claim these are maps to tenderness, you’ll likely expect to see a single start point—say apathy or bitterness or depression—and the end point, tenderness, some distance away, as if a person can’t be in those darker states at the exact same time they pass the Welcome to Tenderness sign on the highway.

Whether they are maps of or to tenderness, the assumption here is that the cartographer knows the terrain, yeah? That the cartographer has studied it, and preferably has lived there for a spell. How else do we trust a map in a long history of misinformed maps and maps that have been purposefully skewed in the name of political agenda?

When I told my baby daddy the other day that I was going to do a lyrical lecture on tenderness, he laughed, said, “Essence London is not tender.�? This is true, do not trust me. My maps to—of—let’s just call them tenderness maps instead…. My tenderness maps are impressions. They’re as close as I’ve ever been.

˚

Here Tenderness is. A big, soft woman holding her hand flat and the orb we live on spinning above her palm. She didn’t create us but every once in a while, she’ll lean her face in so we can see a glimpse of her to reorient ourselves. She’s the reason our planet is still alive now.

I was raised Christian, at a southern Baptist church big enough to afford annual mission trips. At sixteen, I went to Haiti. I expected the children to be sadder and poorer than me and at my feet, eager to hear God via my mouth. That didn’t happen. The children were wholly unbothered by my mission team. They came to eat, they came to play soccer, they came to laugh at us. There was one kid with a serious face who watched me as I struggled to explain word search puzzles to him in English, everything in English. A white guy around my age from Missouri was the camp translator. He played his guitar for me and taught me songs in Creole and told me about his parents’ orphanage. We watched Sanford and Son and I told him about Facebook, he fed me mango. And one night, while I lay half-asleep/half-awake in my bunk bed, this white guy from Missouri astral projected through my mosquito net and made love to me. I’m almost sure of it. The last day I was there, the kid with the serious face gave me his finished word search puzzle. That’s when tenderness first knocked the wind out of me. As an intruder, accepted by another intruder and by a kid who worked around the language barrier to connect with me.

˚

In this map, tenderness is the orb in the center. The dimensions surrounding it are all the experiences you must pass through to reach it. And they vary depending on the person. I’m somewhere in the peach area. I’ve gotten into an argument with my mama so bad she said “Just say it, I’m a bad mother,�? I’ve climbed a cliff even though I was terrified, I kept talking to the man who accidentally called my number until he showed up at my job; I had a kid young, got evicted, made friends with the mistresses, really heard the word “tenderness�? from the lips of a woman who doesn’t answer my texts anymore, etc. etc. These aren’t badges earned toward some prize, neither are your experiences. They’re reminders of how fragile we are. Reminders that if we’re not completely cautious of how we’re moving through this world, we could really fuck someone up.

˚

If tenderness were a physical place—a city, a state, a country—where would it be? When answering the question myself, where did you first experience tenderness, I drew a blank on family and friends. We’ve always operated on something else. Love, yes, but a harder, more obligatory manifestation of love. Not tender love. Never tender love, because if anyone ever witnessed that, we’d become a target. Tenderness is that unpaved road out in the country, deep country, lined with corn fields on the left and on the right a graveyard with your last name carved into 75% of the headstones. Oh I’ve been down that road. Maybe tenderness is at home, in the land.

˚

This map depicts colonialism on one end: Xs over the water outsiders named, Xs over the ground they drilled into, Xs over the mountains they blew the tops off of. In the land that remains, the soil is thick, and under the soil there’s tenderness, under that, our ancestors offer their bodies back and their wisdom, under them, tenderness, under tenderness, semi-molten tenderness at around 2400˚F, under that hot-ass tenderness, tenderness, under that tenderness, a tender core. The diagrams you’ve seen about inner Earth are all wrong.

˚

I’ve lived in Bloomington two years, four months, three days, nine hours, and about thirty minutes. Before then, I lived in Lubbock, Texas for two years, before then I was home for two years, before then I lived in St. Paul, Minnesota for four months, before then I lived in Memphis, Tennessee for a year and a half, and before then, I spent seventeen years living in North Little Rock, Arkansas. I’m homesick if you can’t tell—which is strange because in those seventeen years I was in Arkansas, all I heard was “We gotta get out of Arkansas, ain’t nothing here, it’s boring, it’s dangerous, it’s nothing to do in Arkansas.�? I believed it. I left. Only reason I moved back was because I got pregnant. And when I moved back, my mama moved to Dallas, and she happened to not move back until after I was gone.

I miss Arkansas because it made me. The river, Emerald Park, the Wetherington Boys and Girls Club, the horribly average schools I went to, and yes my hard family and friends. Last summer I was here and homesick just like now so I got online and started researching. I found a documentary called Dream Land: Little Rock’s West Ninth Street. Here’s the description:

Little Rock, Arkansas's, West 9th Street was once a vibrant, African-American business and entertainment district. Taborian Hall is the only remaining historic structure on West 9th Street and stands as a living witness of the street's former glory days. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Taborian Hall housed varied and important black businesses, including professional offices, a USO, the Gem Pharmacy and the Dreamland Ballroom. By the 1930s, Dreamland was firmly established as a stop on the "Chitlin Circuit," which showcased regional and national African-American bands and stage shows. It was also host to local musicians, dances, socials, concerts and sporting events.

This documentary seeks to recognize, memorialize and share this history. The spirit and hard work of the people and the implications of federal programs such as Urban Renewal, school desegregation, the Housing Act of 1949 and the Eisenhower Interstate Program are explored. West 9th Street and the Dreamland Ballroom have patiently waited for their story to unfold so new audiences can connect to their historical past and unknown future.

Here's the first sentence again: “Little Rock, Arkansas's, West 9th Street was once a vibrant, African-American business and entertainment district.�? I had no idea. I wonder if the reason my people haven’t been able to connect to the land, if the reason we’re so eager to flee, if the reason we have this tenderness deficit, is because we do not know what our ancestors did there.

This map is of West 9th Street in 2030. I’m writing a novel about a community that rebuilds the area with history and new ideals in mind. Here’s Chicken King—omg a real local restaurant with the best chicken in the city. Here’s Tandy 10, the dollar movie that closed back in 2014. Here’s the barbershop, the pharmacy. And here is Blissville, the co-housing community who takes care of the area when the capitalists close up shop for the day. In the novel, I’m thinking about how this group deals with real life after the high of a successful rebuild wears off a bit. What’s left? Just these new sparkly possessions or a real community capable of supporting all of its members, a community capable of tenderness?

kayte young

roach

When was it? Was it summertime? Couldn’t have been--my mom’s birthday is in April. It was spring, it was after school. The doorbell rang. I answered the door. Rochelle was standing there, with a clipboard and a pen. With her pale skin, thick eyebrows and wiry hair. She must have been wearing some collared, maroon-colored shirt and no-name jeans. She looked surprised to see me standing there. As surprised as I was when I opened the door. We weren’t friends, but we went to the same school, we were in the same grade and she rode my bus. 

Her name was Rochelle, but everyone called her Roach. It was a horrible nickname, mean-spirited, not endearing. She was a target in seventh grade. It’s not like there was something obviously terribly wrong with Roach. In a lot of ways, she was perfectly normal. She just didn’t fit in somehow. Her pants were too short, or everything she wore was out of style. She was slightly awkward, and hadn’t managed to make friends. Her hair was cut pretty short, and the style didn’t flatter her, but she wasn’t ugly. She was okay. She just happened to be the one who got singled out. 

She was mocked and ridiculed by loud, rude boys, for no good reason. The rest of us laughed along, or were silent. I was in the silent category. My mom taught me not to bully or make fun of other kids. But I didn’t stand up for her either. In my mind I’m thinking “there but for the grace of god go I�? and I couldn’t risk guilt-by-association. I probably told myself I didn’t like her, though I had nothing to base it on. We had never talked. 

I had to hand it to her, though, she was a fighter. On the first day of eighth grade, in every class that I had with her, when roll was called, and the teacher would say “Rochelle�? she would shout out “just call me Shelly!�? She was trying to reinvent herself. I admired her strategy, and secretly hoped she could pull it off. Everyone mocked her behind her back. I joined in, “Just call me Shelly! Right. Like that’s gonna work.�?

At one point I heard rumors that she had sex with her dad--something along those lines. I can’t remember how it was worded and I only heard it once. At that moment, I knew Rochelle. We were connected by an invisible thread. I felt indebted to her. Like she had somehow taken the fall for me. No one (that I knew of) talked about how my stepdad was making me have sex with him. I always worried it would happen, but it didn’t. She had suffered my worst nightmare.

She handed me a glossy folded sheet with pictures of gold plated jewelry with descriptions and prices. She was selling jewelry door-to-door. It wasn’t for a charity. It was to earn money. My first thought was NO. I always said no to door-to-door salesmen. I never had money, I was just a kid. The answer was always no.

But then I remembered my mom’s birthday was coming up. I would need to buy her a gift. What if I bought something for my mom from Rochelle? I asked how long it would take to be delivered. She said two weeks. I did the math, it was plenty of time. So I scanned the pages for something my mom would like. She already had a really nice gold chain that my stepdad had given her. Thin and shimmery, they were popular in the early eighties. I decided on a small B pendant. B for Betty. It was fourteen karat gold, and it cost twenty-one dollars. It would be a stretch, but I knew I could scrape that together from allowance money, and I didn’t have to pay until she delivered it. So I said yes. 

I filled out the form, feeling grown up for making a purchase like this, planning ahead, paying with my own money. Rochelle was very pleased. She smiled and her voice quickened as she rattled off the details. I smiled and thanked her. “See you in two weeks!�? She said, before turning to walk down the driveway, and on to the next house.

moyo

Moyo is currently on death row in Texas and has been using art to give meaning to his life and to connect with others for many years. As an ongoing project, he has been making origami cranes to send to others, who in turn have been submitting photos of them to https://www.instagram.com/1000ambassadorsofhope/. A few months ago, a woman named Carrie wrote to Moyo from Washington state, saying that she had seen his cranes online and that they reminded of her son, Daniel, who also used to fold cranes. He used to leave tiny ones all over the place for people to find. Over the course of a few letters, she opened up to him and revealed that Daniel committed suicide on Thanksgiving 2017. Later, she asked if Moyo wanted Daniel's origami paper. From this, he has been making tiny cranes of his own to keep Daniel's love of folding origami cranes alive.

aida raphael

unkind husband

               --april 22, 2018

Dear Mister President:

Next door, there is a woman who loves animals. She lives with a man who has been her husband for over forty years. He has not been kind so far.

She gives all she's got to the animals in the neighborhood. For example, she's taken to throwing nuts over the balcony we share, onto the roof of the building across the way. There, a squirrel awaits. The first few times she fed it, I was alarmed and told her so. I explained―because I pretend to know about these things―that as soon as the squirrel learned to expect that there would be nuts in this place, at this time, each day, it would not be very long until it invited its kin to share in the bounty. 

The squirrel shows up, she's there with her nuts, they arc over to him, he collects them, runs away, comes back and takes what remains. Day after day. When he arrives and she is not there to meet him, he squeaks until she comes running, throwing whatever bits she's clutching in her fist. If she does not come running, he leaves his post, comes down, crosses the courtyard, and ascends the stairs to our balcony. He knows where she lives.

It's been a year, sir. He hasn't told a single other squirrel that he's drilled into a bottomless well.

Sincerely, 

A

abdel shakur

footing it

I think of tenderness when I think of my father, Gilgamesh, pedaling a rusty green ten-speed up 35th Avenue on a school night, me perched on the curve of the handlebars, leaning against his chest, his heart thrumming in my ear. I concentrated on his breath and my balance, keeping my feet stacked carefully on the fender that protected me from the rattling wheel. The thought of getting my shoe caught in its jaws made me wince. My dad’s eyes were on the sidewalk in front of us: the older lady pushing a shopping cart full of bagged white laundry, the blue pickup truck with Tejano music blasting out the passenger door, the hill with the blind curve and projects near by. His breath went in and out. And that’s how he got me home when it was my day to be with him. In summer, we cruised, in winter, he sprinted on the pedals through rain. I was eight.

Tenderness is the taking of care. The practice of care. The holding of a heart within your own. A heart that has been injured or jarred, senses frayed. Tenderness is an applied balm. Tenderness has a responsive touch that does not overwhelm. Tenderness heals by reminding a soul that all contact need not be pain. That contact can bring wholeness. Tenderness requires presence.

I was in 4th grade when my dad left my mom. We had moved from Minnesota to Chicago to Los Angeles to Berkeley to Richmond and back to Berkeley, and then my parents split and my dad moved to a one-bedroom bachelor pad in East Oakland. His parents named him Clarence, but before I was born, my father renamed himself Gilgamesh, after the half-man, half-god Akkadian hero. To me, it was fitting because he seemed to be on some kind of epic journey, which I didn’t fully understand. I was sad sad that he left, but he seemed to be striking out to find something important about himself. He was married to a white woman and was raising a black son, and luckily for me, I had a father who had the tenderness to know that although his journey involved my own, they were not the same. That although I needed to learn from him, my struggles were innocent of his.

The little, red Civic hatchback that my grandparents had given us got us from Los Angeles all the way to West Berkeley, but went kaput soon after. My dad was hustling to get money for a new car, but the expense of chipping in with my mom and getting his own place left him strapped, so he rode the train to San Francisco State University, where he worked and went to school. On days I was with him, I stayed with his friend Rose after school. She had three kids around my age and lived down the street from my mom. Rose threw newspapers with my dad and was friends with my mom. When he got off work, my dad rode the train from San Francisco all the way to Berkeley to pick me up. Then we’d hustle up to North Berkeley BART station to take the Fremont train all the way out to Fruitvale station. Then it was a mile and a half up to my dad’s place.

My dad was often tired when he arrived at Rose’s door. He always had a baby blue shoulder bag, loaded with at least one huge Chemistry book, and whatever books about history or sociology or black studies he was reading on his own. Cress Welsing, Diop, Foucault, Van Sertima.

The walks were long, but now it strikes me that we were always together. We spent a lot of time together on those days. We talked or just sat and read until we got to Fruitvale station. It seemed like it was always dark when we got there. Clouds of moths smacking against the florescent lights overhead.

The bike was on the racks near the entrance. In those days they had huge metal chains on the rack that you could attach to your lock. For some reason, my dad didn’t want to buy a lock. I’m not sure why, but I know I have the same impulse.

The bike was nothing special. It was dark green. It had a big fender that rattled. The seat was thick like a leather couch cushion, but I usually rode on the handlebars. My dad let me sit on his jacket while we rode.

He pedaled fast most nights. He must have had a thousand things on his mind as we traveled 35th, crossing Fruitvale, crossing Foothill, then hanging a right at the Queen of Sheba market, a corner store owned by North Africans. (I had a feeling that they were a little nicer to me because of my name.) Then we would pull up to our house, which was in the back of another house, the landlord. I remember there was a long-wheeled gate, which was the width of the driveway.

When we got home, I might sit and work on my homework or watch TV if I was finished, while my dad made dinner. Usually, he made lentils and broccoli and maybe a piece of chicken or a pork chop. Then we would sit and eat while we watched the 10 o’clock news with Dennis Richmond and Elaine Corral. He wielded the mute button on the TV remote to provide commentary or spark an argument or just tell a joke that would have us doubled over with laughter. That was tenderness.

Tenderness is hard for a black man. We are taught that our tenderness is a weakness. That we need to be strong, hard. The fist bump is our compromise. Tenderness requires presence, loving presence. A type of stillness we don’t always get to access. My father was on a journey to cultivate his own tenderness. He wanted me to know what was going on in the world, but was not insistent that I conform to his vision of who he thought I should be. But he did help give me shape. He did tend me, along with my mother, in a way that let me know he could see who I was, who I would become. Tenderness requires this.

And one day, we got to the station and our bike was gone. It was hard to imagine that anyone would want it, but imagination has a way of making its own way.  The long, rusty chain laid there like the sloughed skin of a snake. My dad wasn’t really the type to curse, so he slung that blue bag back over his shoulder and sighed.  

“C’mon, Brother,�? he said. “Looks like we footing it.�? And kept on, walking all the way home. And even if it made him angry, I wasn’t afraid because I knew he wouldn’t take it out on me.  

At that moment, my father was younger than I am now. And he had this growing son. And so many things he wanted to do with his life. So many things he wanted me to have. But his tenderness was all I really needed. Tenderness is my father singing Johnny Hartman in the morning while minding a pot of oatmeal, melting butter and sprinkles of brown sugar. Tenderness is a father that teaches a son how to make a home for himself. Tenderness is the making whole again. It’s creating a loving canopy so the soul can peek out. Tenderness gives more than it requires.

shan overton

the family walk

One year ago, in the middle of a cold, grey, snowy Pittsburgh winter, my significant other and I adopted a three-year-old husky/border collie mix named Freya. She had bounced around from house to house while in rescue, always finding people who cared, a bowl of kibble, a soft place to sleep, but never finding home. We drove to Bethlehem, PA, in between snowstorms to meet her. I like to tell people we found our baby in a manger.

Upon introduction, she was enthusiastic but anxious, and so were we. Freya had just ridden from Boston to Bethlehem in a Volvo station wagon with two foster parents and two canine siblings, and she was apprehensive despite her underlying friendliness and cheerfulness. The trip home that night included a stop by a state trooper when Charles’s driving became erratic--Freya had begun to sling herself around the back of our small Jetta, barking wildly for reasons we could not parse. When we arrived home with her, we took her on a chilly walk around the block; then she came in our office and took a massive shit on the carpet. It was a case of the nerves. Hers and ours.

Since then, we’ve made every effort to create a stable home life for Freya. One feature of this steadiness is predictable, daily walks. Charles gets up at 4:30 a.m. and takes her out for a 20-minute spin and, while she’s not a morning person, Freya hauls herself out from underneath our bed, her favorite place to sleep, and patiently sits while he pulls her harness over her head and attaches the leash. Charles describes these walks, which are undertaken while I shower and make coffee, as contemplative in nature. The two of them embrace the last of the twinkling nighttime stars and the silence of the lonely block. They have several stopping places, including a spot we call Poop Corner, a small hill with a lovely maple tree overlooking the neighborhood, which was Freya’s go-to spot last winter during the deep snows.

I take Freya out again before I go to work, usually around 8:00 a.m. This time, she is awake and all in, leaping into her harness and prancing out the door. These half-hour walks follow a particular route down our street and past familiar faces like Grandma Joyce, Gardner Ed, and Rita the Crossing Guard. We pass the elementary school that was out all summer but is now back in and thronged with kids. And past the scared old dog and her scared elderly owner, past a deceptively aggressive cat named Myrtle, past the piles of garbage on Monday mornings before the collectors arrive, and all the way to the patch of green grass running like a wide ribbon in front of the community garden. It is here that Freya does her business while I listen to the birds and unfold the thin, blue poop bags that I carry in my pockets.

These walks are contemplative in nature, too, but they are punctuated with friendly greetings. Freya likes to stick her nose in the back-of-the-knee creases of every woman, man, and child whom she passes, getting to know them in a way that seeing will not do. She bounces crazily at the sight of squirrels and remembers the particular trees they call home. She hops around with glee when we pass another dog, aiming only to make friends but sometimes pissing off her dour canine compatriots and their equally dour people. We love our morning walks, Freya and I. If I have woken up on the wrong side of the bed and groused around the apartment during my morning routine, I will be delighted by the time we return, wipe off Freya’s paws, slip her out of her harness, praise her, and give her the treats she relishes as a reward for letting me touch her feet.

***

There are other walks, too –  quick ones at lunchtime and late at night before bed. But the crowning glory of each day is the walk we take, all three of us, together, when Charles and I get home from work. Freya anticipates these peregrinations, excitedly pouncing on the bed while we change into our stinky clothes. She knows, she knows, I say to Charles. And, indeed, she does. Our habits are unmistakable.

By the time we have double-tied our tennis shoes and picked up her harness and some extra poop bags, she is hopping around the back door, pricking her ears up, and barking in that howly way that’s all husky. Freya bursts out of our apartment door and sucks in fresh air with gusto. She takes the sidewalk at a gallop, and I find it tough to keep up with her and Charles, who hangs on to her leash. Sometimes, he and I talk about our work days or the vacations we never seem to take. But we often fall to silence, bounced along our route up the hill and around the reservoir, encountering the friendly and unfriendly people, squirrels, dogs who must be greeted, sniffed, or chased according to their kind. We look at the evening light in the trees, the changing colors of the sky. We point out to each other the red-tailed hawk that lives and hunts on the back side of the reservoir and the big, fat Canada geese in chevron flight coming up from the river below to settle in for the night. No matter how the day went, these are perfect moments with Freya straining on her harness as she happily leads the way.

All of this is remarkable to me in its constancy, which in other times of my life I might have labeled boring or monotonous. Charles and I met each other in the middle age decades when each of us had been single for many years and had decided to live that way for the long haul, having put to bed notions of lasting love and family. Neither of us had children. He had been married once. I had been engaged once. We met, saw something in the other, and moved to Pittsburgh for my job not too many months later. Adopting Freya was a big decision. Creating a space of safety and predictability for a rescue dog has been a major shift, especially for me because I loved my freewheeling ways from the time I was liberated from my family until now, in my 50s. The steadiness, the relative quiet, the evenness of this way of life is probably not something I could have done before, so taken was I with my wandering ways. It is both surprise and gift.

One early evening as we gathered our shoes and tied them tight, Charles looked up at our excitedly howl-barking husky and said, Come on, now, Freya, it’s time for the family walk. And it was. And is.

dani clark

what’s in a song?  

Maybe, when the moment is right, your entire life.

Gladys Knight & the Pips’ “Midnight Train to Georgia�? is one of my favorites, stable at the top of the 25 most played songs on my iPhone. I don’t quite know why except for the soul inside it, the idea and melodious feeling of a decision and escape made for solely for love, the ache for home and how things used to be, “a simpler place in time.�? I can identify with that—I suspect many do—even though I’m not about to sell our Jetta for a train ticket anywhere.

I played that song at the nursing home.

Most of the elderly we visit there are African Americans who came north to Washington, DC in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s as part of the Great Migration. Mainly from North Carolina and Virginia, from farms and backcountry roads, and from difficult social and economic situations to say the least. I’ve heard their stories. In Washington they found work as maids and nannies, bus drivers and janitors, teachers and typists, all in service of the federal government’s sprawling economy. Now penniless at the end of their hardworking lives, they spend their days under the fluorescent lights of a for-profit “rehabilitation center�? which receives thousands of government dollars each month to care for them, money the likes of which they will never see.

And yet, my fear of seeming (and of being) the white-lady-come-to-expiate-herself has always existed in direct proportion to the love and acceptance poured into my heart by the people I have befriended there over the years. By Connie and Mildred and Louise and Maurice. By Mae and Bernadette and Joseph and Thomas. By Caroline and Eugenia and Daisy and Rosie. By Barbara and William and Naomi and Doris and Dorothy. Some of them long gone, none of them forgotten.

One day fellow volunteers Athena, Joe, Gusti and I took the regular break from our Third-Sunday-of-the-Month bingo game to rush around the room and serve coffee, chips, and cookies. Feeling giddy, I thought, “Well now, why don’t we play some music?�? It’s something we don’t usually do, but not for any specific reason. So I took my iPhone, set it next to the bingo microphone and pressed play on what I thought was a wise choice: my “Best of Billie Holiday�? album.

No offense to you dear Billie, but nothing happened, "Autumn in New York" notwithstanding.

Then, in a flash, I knew just what song to play.

“L.A. proved too much for the man (Too much for the man).�?

Electricity filled the room. Mildred, who sits in a wheelchair and is mute for tracheotomy in her throat, closed her eyes and swayed. Bernadette, also confined to a wheelchair, sang along, her index finger punctuating the melody in the air. And I was taken, gone without a thought to how I looked. I danced around the bingo tables as if I were in a cabaret. I sang as if I could actually sing.

"Ohhh, he's leaving
(Leaving!)
On that midnight train to Georgia
(Leaving on a midnight train)
Said he's going back to find
(Going back to find)
A simpler place and time."

At a certain point, Mildred reached her hands up and out and took mine. Her feet shuffled to the beat on the floor as we both swayed, my hips, and her shoulders in the wheelchair, two seemingly disparate women unified by the beat, two lives entwined in a song.

It felt like time stood still for those four minutes. Or went backward. I can’t say for sure.

We carry our lives inside these bodies and on our faces. Anyone who says you can’t see that is fooling him or herself. It’s all there: our history, all the joy and love and pain inhered right in our movements, gestures and expressions, the space we fill for the entire time we have on earth, rendering us to ourselves one day at a time as eons and rain will weave a rushing river. And when the music plays, we don’t have to think about this to know that it’s true.

We just feel it.

christine hierlmaier nelson

green desert blooming

My daughter spent the summer on search and rescue

Behind our home for monarch caterpillars.

We are supposed to mow the whole lawn

With covenants written years ago,

but we let one third go to seed.

The long grass shelters milkweed and soon

Pin-sized eggs appear on the furry underside

Of their broad leaves.

Like an expectant mother my daughter

Waits for movement behind a magnifying glass 

To catch each egg hatch.

Soon enough two, then four

And six clear mason jars perch on her dresser

With tiny striped larvae inside.

Each has a name.

She teaches me about keeping them safe,

Adding fresh milkweed leaves 

And cleaning frass (poo).

Holding hostages seems wrong 

But their predators have evolved like ants, toads, spiders, wasps

Plus sun and wind.

Once they are fat, Lance

Then Bradley, Pidge, Keith, Groceries, and Sixteen ascend

To hang and transform into chrysalis.

We hold vigil through July and August

Toting jars to a lake in Cold Spring, a St. Cloud park

And family in Hutchinson. One butterfly hatches during lunch.

In a Panera.

Carefully, we parade to a quiet, suitable spot of green

With each grasping butterfly choosing a flower

or branch to dry its wings and fly.

Grateful for this life.

jane jerardi

nocturne   

a performance-video installation*
sullivan galleries
chicago, il
2012

In Nocturne, audiences encounter a low platform the scale of a bed, where a single performer slowly shifts from side to side as if amidst restless sleep. A video projection adjacent to the bed displays a ‘live feed’ of the performer, but a second body appears with her. This virtual body slowly shifts and rolls in response to the live performer’s movements in a durational piece over two hours. A meditation on absence and loss, the piece aims to capture a somatic understanding of the memory of another. 

On a formal level, the piece re-thinks the meaning of vertical and horizontal, two-dimensional and three-dimensional, subjectivity and representation. As the viewer’s eyes shift from the horizontal plane where live ‘real’ bodies shift and breathe, they glance up to a two-dimensional picture plane on the wall, where the bodies suddenly float and swim, tumbling down the frame, changing a sense of gravity. 

Through a casual intimacy that cycles through rolling and stillness, the piece tracks the traces of the body, imagining the marks it leaves, and the memory of someone else’s movements. Subjectivity and the body “are clearly not monads or self-mirroring singularities, but packs, open collectives, continuous processes of unfolding, multiplicities�? impacting one another, even in unconscious ways (André Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement).

*performers: Heeran Lee, Hannah Verrill
video performers: Heeran Lee, Jane Jerardi
choreographed in collaboration with Heeran Lee, Abigail Blueher, Hannah Verrill
camera assistance: Joshua Sampson
production support: Alex Gartelmann, Michaela Murphy, Lesley Dixon

fara tucker

two poems written about and from within the liminal space

1. when you find yourself in the In Between-- 

you may feel the pull to withdraw 

how can you face others when you  

no longer recognize yourself

how can you arrange words into 

tidy or truthful 

(or even remotely intelligible) 

answers to "how are you?"

when even your name sounds like

a vaguely familiar tune

to a song you swear you once knew by heart

2. sometimes you discover

that this beautiful home you worked so hard to build

is not a home at all

but rather a bridge

to a new home you've yet to imagine

and couldn't have seen from 

where you used to reside 

so you gather your tools

with a sigh

and you start walking

tony liu

ode to tri

I cry when I think of my friend, Tri Vo. In fact,

I love him. He is my brother, my sibling, and my sister too. They have made my life so much better.

Growing up is lonely! And so was Minneapolis until I met Tri.

When we first met, I thought he was, dare I say it, annoying! Telling me he needed to take a hot sec to scream outside. Why? I don’t know. “I just met you, man.�?

But I knew she wanted to feel and to breathe and to be the “Punk Asian�? of her dreams—the community-loving, empire-fighting, life-affirming Tri Vo-ness, that’s “Vah�? btw, that she always was and is.

I love Tri for many reasons. 

He always shares his pre-packaged meals, the one he gets from his grandma which are actually sent to his deceased grandfather—and now consumed by us in a feeding and flourishing of diasporic Asian life.

We drove above the Walker Art Museum, and I found her Magic Kids’ CD. Magic Kids! The band of my youthful heart, the shepherd of our sheepish souls and the soundtrack of our drive-to-First-Avenue-prepare-to-be-surrounded-by-people-who-don’t-look-like-us adventures.

That he says things like and calls some people, even though I disagree, “Boba Asian.�? (Let it be known that the drink is delicious).

That the first album we each fell in love with was American Idiot—in Eagan, Minnesota and Lindon, Utah, circa 2005, respectively (not ’04, because we were god damn children and needed TIME to listen to the radio before we could feel that we *must* have this album and let’s not forget, to muster the strength to ask our parents to buy something EXPLICIT).

How our late night conversations consist of dialogue on
the condition of Asian American life
& its relation to Black life
& what (r)elation means
in this life

that once felt lonely, but is not, because

in Tri, I am taught how beautiful it is to be Asian American. 

We go to church together now. And I’m learning what faith does and means in this “iron cage�? of post-modern life. It is and we are “liberative love.�?

This is Tri and their partner, Michelé.

I am honored to be their witness.

stephanie j. williams

the lingering survival of the unfit

Single Channel Video w/preamble: 8:40min, 2018-present*

The first four minutes of audio only (black video) in the single channel version of this animation, reflect upon the history of the Bataan Death March and the Greater United States (the US mainland and its unacknowledged history of colonization). This ongoing animation project focuses the the Philippines' absence from American history textbooks, presenting the perception of nationhood formed from unlearned and fragmented contexts.

The protagonist is a balut (a Filipino fertilized and fermented duck egg). Americans eat duck, Americans eat duck eggs, but the thing as in-between makes it distasteful. 

*The puppets as performed here, will continue to add footage to this project, performing a walk sequence until the puppets stop functioning.

amy baskin

thaipusam, 1983

On King’s Road in The Church of St. Ignatius, I kneel on tiles each Sunday to show my earnest devotion. My knees bleed afterwards, but this is nothing compared to the trials our Lord undertook, and surely I can handle this. Some other members of our church have chosen faith over their own families, abandoning the comfort of acceptance for redemption.

This afternoon, my father holds our hands and leads me and my little sister to the Sri Srinivasa Perumal Temple on Serangoon Road. We bear witness to Hindu Tamils who walk encased in 30-kilo kavadi frames. Spears pierce skin, stakes plunge through cheek and tongue. This cross is not like mine. More difficult to bear. They walk uproad in trances to the beat of urumi melam drums, peaceful, silent, with no trace of blood. Women and children carry pots of milk to thank Lord Murugan for vanquishing their demons. Please Lord, I pray, by any name, please grant them many boons. Place garlands of marigolds, herbs of the sun, around their necks. Wash their sorrows away with rose water and sandalwood soap. I repeat my prayer later that night, kneeling by the rattan bedpost. I spend the evening hiding in the pantry, trying to poke a hole in my tongue with the tine of a fork, but I cannot. Please Lord, show me how to suffer like them. This prayer has been answered tenfold.

chloé leisure

tender hazard

The glowing yellow background of tenderness makes me think of those plastic traps for yellowjackets and wasps, hazard signs, and radioactivity. At first I think, why this color, and then a little toggle switch goes off, and I think I get it. I go back; it’s more deep than bright.

I’m small and trying to sleep in a large honeycomb cell. I’m trudging through a mango, swimming through New Gamboge. The old gamboge is in a faraway country deep inside a tree.

I do talk to the bees, but I don’t bring them the news. Sometimes they let me pet them if they’re really digging a flower. Other times I’ll put a dab of their own honey on the end of my pinky and let their tongue and little feet tickle my skin. They don’t sting. And even if they do, the joints in my hands are grateful. I don’t remember when I learned that they die after their one and only sting. I once tried to put a stinger back in. What a gooey mess we both were, my tears helping not a whit.

My dad is walking tenderness: just weeks ago, 47 staples railroaded up and down his spine. Thanks to two metal rods, he’s taller than me again. He wears a neon yellow vest so trucks and tractors will see him as he walks a little further each day up the county road. He lives in the house he grew up in, built by his dad of cinderblocks and wood paneling with owls in the grain, who at 17 was a gunrunner’s mate on D-Day. He used to plant rows and rows of sunflowers. He could feed a wild fox from his hand and summon a cloud of cardinals with the shake of a coffee can full of seeds. My dad is up to a mile and a half now, his hazard-yellow vest working hard to keep him safe in the morning fog, flashing bright as lightning bugs so hungry for love.

ja’net danielo

letting the ghosts in

               --after gabrielle calvocoressi

brigitte lewis

achilles

I rupture my Achilles tendon on a downy spring day that promises rain. There is a pop, though I am not sure if I hear it or simply feel it. What is it to feel a sound—aching and staccato—in the body? Still, I recognize this feeling, this sudden sinking into the earth. I have heard this before.

Many body parts are named after men. Have you noticed this? When he comes to visit me post-surgery, I ask my friend if he has read The Iliad, if he knows the story of “the best of the Greeks�? and the hero of the Trojan War. It is said that his heel was Achilles’ one vulnerability–-as an infant his goddess mother dipped him in the River Styx headfirst. Only his heels did not make the plunge. My friend hasn’t read The Iliad and so I tell him what I know. And that sources other than Homer’s epic assert that Paris shot Achilles in the heel toward the end of the Trojan War, thereby slowing him down enough to be killed.

The Achilles tendon attaches the calf muscles to the heel. When it ruptures, the body loses the ability to walk normally. The tension gone, the tendon pieces pull away from one another, recoiling. Promises are revealed for what they truly are: fragments once joined.

After the surgery to repair my severed tendon, I lie mostly in bed, icing and elevating my foot near constantly for days. The weather has been uncharacteristic this spring–-clouded, overcast, a near constant promise of rain. Outside my window, the maple is in full leaf and a family of birds that I can hear but not see build a nest for their young. They talk nonstop about this and that and I am thankful to be privy to their conversation.

When I say I recognize this feeling, I mean to say that this is the second time I’ve injured myself in this way. First the left. Now the right. When I rupture my Achilles tendon, the firm plane of ground turns liquid and I fall toward its molten center. Gravity momentarily alters its equation and I trip tender under its weight.

The words tender and tendon are almost the same. Though only two letters deviate, they do not come from the same root. Tender from the Old French, from the Latin meaning ‘delicate.’ Tendon from the Greek: ‘sinew’ or ‘to stretch.’ A tender thing is a gentle thing. A tendon joins muscle to bone. And yet tender is also a verb: to offer, to give. It is a word in motion, adjoining, connecting and so I can’t help but think of this ruptured tendon as a breach of offering. As something un-tendered. As something rendered delicate.

It has almost been a week since the surgery. I am no longer taking pain pills. I am feeling myself once again. The clouds have beat themselves into a soft layer covering the sky. There is a 40% chance of rain. I have built myself a nest of memory foam and Belgian flax, forgetting and the opposite of heroism. The tenderness of life goes on.

dynas johnson

diary entry: space girl remembers tenderness

noname - “window�? (ft. phoelix)

morning already eclipsed by exhaustion

i pull my body outside of my half-remembered

dreams push my books inside the bag push

the waters back inside my body push my tears

back into my eyes so that when i walk down

the street no one will know         know what?

know that i am a burning ocean frying its fish

no lemon no breading just screaming and a lot

of thrashing                    i swim more than walk

down the street no one looks at me no one looks

at me and why would they           they don’t know

me              who knows me in this place how do i

stop burning i look out the window and see ways

to leave looked for a gate to narnia  beneath the waves

and found only an untouched Bible and mildew stains

only found a girl who can’t even claim her brown

without wondering why everybody thinks she’s dirty

only found a girl trying to play super hero plastering

her friend’s walls with the leaky roof but never

disclosing the flood in her basement heart a flooded

basement a flooded cave a flooded sky that doesn’t stop

raining         wings what are wings           wings rubbed

raw and the window too small for a soul to fly through

what was tenderness when all i knew how to do

was rub rub rub my eyes until the tears rescinded

jamila woods - “lonely�? ft. lorine chia

the first time i really understood tenderness

i was walking along a stream gurgling summer

music for a weekly expedition to a farm

it started raining      i didn’t have an umbrella

instead of running beneath some trees or

complaining about my hair            i pulled my hood

off my head               the water seeped so quickly

that i felt like a succulent drinking her fill after three

weeks of drought                the rain cooled and soothed

whatever itchiness my scalp felt      i remembered

baptism                     the faith i had to not be dropped into

the water and the firm hands that held my nose

and gripped my shoulders       dipping me into the pool

and when i came up from the sparkling water blind

and trembling      more hands gently holding my arms

to guide my steps           momma waiting dressed in white

with a towel in her arms enveloping me always always

enveloping me         the first time i felt tenderness and

really really felt it was when momma was detangling

my hair still relaxed and frizzy before i decided to go

natural          momma ran into a knot but instead of

using the comb to drag it out               momma ran

her fingers through the knot and gently            gently

soothed the strands apart         momma’s hands are

another kind of rain        are the first baptism i’ve ever

had         when i get overwhelmed i imagine momma

combing my hair             fingertips humming with prayer

ella mai - “naked�?

momma told me that i can tell her everything

momma gives me kisses stayed up for 5 hours after coming home from work by train and bus

to comb out my hair and braid dark brown gold into my scalp

momma knows how to be tender

but her mother her grandmother her aunties and cousins

made her out to be a nobody

so momma never learned how to be vulnerable

momma told me that i can’t tell anybody everything

but she doesn’t know that the second person i learned tenderness from

was a girl who ran her fingers through my hair when i cried in her lap

about how the future is a boarded up window and how i

was going to stay falling all my life

momma didn’t teach me that a friend’s arms can be a home too

so i stayed ready to run

but i tired myself out and became a burning ocean of fish fried alive

by their own salt a home turned house on fire

momma told me things out of her hurt not wanting me to be hurt but

when i see the distance behind her smile when momma don’t share her tears when we talk about my depression

my fears my sadness the hopelessness that i’m trying to overcome

i wonder why she won’t tell me what happened

sometimes saying i love you every morning every night over and over again only does so much

i do the best thing that i can do:

when momma is falling asleep

i rub my fingers through momma’s short relaxed hair

and soothe softness into her scalp

anne marie & julia rooney

index

We are sisters who have not lived in the same city for the past sixteen years. Both artists, we use the mail as a space of collaboration—not only between the two of us, but with every hand that touches what we send. It is one of our favorite practices of tenderness. 

When Anne Marie moved to Baltimore in 2016, her mailing became a daily practice. As Julia collected each mailed item, she wrote Anne Marie an email as a form of digital receipt. After two years of sending objects and emailing responses, the artist turned the collaboration into a folio of risographs, each page made from scans and prints of their correspondence. 

traci brimhall

love advent:

Or What I Learned Writing Over 100 Love Letters to Friends and Strangers

Three-and-a-half years ago my marriage was ending, but I didn’t know it yet. Everyone kept telling me to take care of myself, but all parts of my life—financial, personal, medical, parenting—were stretched and fracturing. I made sure to swim, to cry privately, to make sure everyone got fed and bathed and to bed. Self-care was the everyone’s mantra, but I couldn’t afford a massage and no bath bomb was going to fix what was wrong. My therapist at the time told me I didn’t just survive trauma, I thrived in it, but I didn’t want to anymore. I’d spent so many years of childhood and young adulthood staying calm in a crisis, rescuing others. I thought of the Li-Young Lee quote: “what kept you alive/all those years keeps you from living.�? And I wanted to live.

I don’t remember how the idea arrived, but I decided I would write love letters for advent. I posted on social media that I wanted to write letters to people and asked who wanted one, and because I didn’t know how to say no, I wrote almost 60 love letters for the 24 days of advent. It emptied me in a way I needed emptying. I read articles on love, books on love, watched movies about love. I thought about what it meant and shared that with friends and strangers. So much that seemed tucked away or unspoken came out. It felt good to love others and to have that love appreciated.

The advent after my marriage ended, I was better at keeping the boundary where I needed it—at one letter a day—though not by much. I still wrote 40. I found myself revisiting some ideas from the previous year, seeing if they felt different. I watched more movies, read more books. I thought and felt, and I wrote to friends and strangers and some wrote back. Someone asked if I poured that much into other people so I wouldn’t notice no one loved me like that. I didn’t know.

This past year, I asked people to nominate others to receive a love advent instead, and I stuck to my boundary of 24 people (okay, I admit it, I did 25). And although it was my smallest list since I began, it was the hardest to write. Someone asked if it was because the letters were to strangers. In some ways intimacy with strangers was easier. I could say things and no one would remind me of it later or ask a follow up question. I thought that perhaps since I’d healed, I didn’t need to give love so desperately. I’d found ways and people to love that didn’t make me feel insufficient at love. I wanted to offer a gift of love but wanted something left of myself too.

Someone suggested that I write myself a love letter at the end, but by that time, I was empty again. However, after the new year began, I started making little love notes to myself. This year, by the time advent arrives, I hope to have written 24 small love notes and to open them as I write to others. To look back on a year in which I loved full-hearted, but not desperately. To give to myself the kindness I want to give to others. To open those little doors for love’s arrival and find the generosities of the year again, to invite them in, to celebrate that I can survive, but now I get to live.

chelsea balzer

bro

what do you do with your longing?

do you even know it?

do you even look at the tomatoes and cry?

remember me like this:

squatting
to piss,
all
paper-bag colored
from our
grabs at early

summer,
wearing your
old work shirt
next to the
misconstrued creek
I used to pick
mulberries behind
when I
thought that just
stomping on things
made them
wine,
beside the
govern
ment-
sponsored fields
of endless
corn and soy,
still self-made
and mysterious
to me,
staring at the

birds we only now
notice, black with
bright

orange
shoulder pads,
warning each

other of the in-

coming storm that we
risk letting

soak us,

downhill from the
bench you discovered

years before
sharing,
the one that you

like because it’s
easy to miss,
which holds

still at the center of

loose gravel roads,
bike paths,

concrete high-

ways like tangents all

huddling near the

small bits of

wild that

survive through the

not-really-looking
of cars going by
as I’m

crouching,
bare-assed &
surviving this

way too,

close to the

earth so that
just you

can
see
me.

samantha maren

pause, the slow drop 

In the spaces between daily responsibilities

in transit to my life’s works

when I do not have reception

when everyone else seems to be asleep except for me

you come back

smiling

pass brand new times

when you held my hand and I scratched your back

enchanted by even your tiny, gapped teeth

between which toffee-sweet words fed me

Then soon I am scrambling out of your sleeping arms hungover again

I want coffee.

I want to get back to the other side

before you pressed your body against me and covered my mouth with your hand

your ragged breaths like daggers

It comes back to me in the quiet undisturbed spaces:

That crawling under my skin. A shivering of the tenderest of timbers.

justin rigamonti

a quote attributed to ross by kaveh akbar on twitter

has become the star I guide my workshops by:

"If the critique does not emerge from love, then I'm probably not interested."

I'm in love with what tenderness can do in a beginning poetry workshop, the way it makes poets out of everyone, the way it allows new writers to feel seen, the way it fights the fucking patriarchy.

valeria

pedraza

what a homesick mexican mom feeds you

Inspired by Brandy N�?lani McDougall's "What a Young, Single Makuahine Feeds You�?

caldo de pollo, to bring the color back to your mejillas.

tamales, hechos por todo la familia (every christmas).

huevos con chorizo. o salchicha. o machaca.

enfrijoladas. papas y rajas. agua

de jamaica

de horchata.

de piña y sandia y tamarindo. 

ensalada de nopales. albondigas. flautas. tortas ahogadas,

como en guadalajara, with the cousins. little salsa rivers running

down your hands, a beautiful mess. frijoles

smothered on bolillo, sprinkled with queso fresco. fideo

de little stars o alfabeto. chicharron en salsa verde;

fatty, crunchy, tender. tinga, tostadas

                                        de tinga.

de hamon.

                                                de cueritos, all vinegar & chewy goodness.

quesadillas. calabazas. carne asada, with radishes & charred spring onions.

guacamole, all chunky (not blended como las tiendas de aqui).

enchiladas de mole, rich & tangy with red onion ringlets.

lentejas. caldo tlalpeño. sopa de tortilla con chile pasilla pa’ smokiness.

chilaquiles. tortas de atún. sopes

de frijoles.

                                                de picadillo.

                                                de perfectly melted queso.

menudo pa’ desayuno. & the best part is crumbling el oregano

between your palms, letting it perfume the air & cascade into the tripe elixir.

ceviche, all summer. limón con todo. y salsas de molcajete,

never amiss & fragrant. elotes. pozole. y pa’ el postre, polvorones.

flan. fruta y lechera. arroz con leche. cafecito.

it’s sunday in bellingham. & mami doesn’t cook here.

she’s 70 something miles away, which isn’t lejos. until

you contemplate the jitomates in the boiling pot;

how the crimson of their skin will soon peel back

& you don’t wanna do this wrong. so maybe

you’ll call her. & before anything else,

she’ll ask, “ya comiste?�?

chelsea biondolillo

kaidan kathryn mcnamee

a testimony

last december i flew to san francisco for top surgery and my mother didn’t fly with me. here is the account. i was born a kathryn and will die an unknown artefact. i am an ongoing question. i am a persistent possible. i was born on december 8 and went under the knife on december 29 some 23 years later. i am a double sagittarius. me and i were both born in the cold. in a sleeting snow. for a year about my top surgery i have curated a careful winding silence. there was no lack of words, rather, a maelstrom of words in competition to be the first to fly from between my teeth. it was a silence of impounding. a silence of t erminal velocity. jaw closed, words chippin g at the enamel. click. click. click. shards of teeth sprinkled in my morning coffee. a hundred people ask me to write about my top surgery and a thousand times i say no. i have fortified my body, zipped myself up at the stitches and attached a padlock, throw n the latchkey across the crenellations. i spent 23 years scrutinizing this body. i have seen it beneath the microscope of a fabricated self -hatred and i have wronged my skin and bone. i visited my body once a night and brushed my fingers along the vines twisting around its skeletons and hummed to myself and mov ed on. it was a shell i could not vacate. i crawl ed my slimy naked self into other shells and every edge punctured me. so here is an unstringing, careful as a scalpel. there is a little extra tissue obfuscating the sutures. here is a many jointed leg i couldn’t tuck in before the tides swayed back to meet me. here is a cautious spillage, fearful as a prayer. look at what you will. 

to other bodies like mine. this is a love poem i want to sing into your bones. when the tide comes in, slip back into your own deep recesses. map every twist and ridge of your scalpeled shell. kiss a scar until you feel the tingle in a nerveless tissue. when your flesh swells and grows, a press against your container’s sides, apply pressure until you hear the surface crack. when the ocean retreats. when the ocean retreats. go seek another Elsewhere. go find a world Otherwise.

joanna gordon

today

I found my joy in a piece of bread
It was a spongey-good bread

I found my joy stuck to butter-paper
spreading its legs easy over breakfast toast

once, as a kid, I ate a stick of butter 
and my mother said I had no self-control

which is true since I found my joy tangled 
around a ghostly boy the other night and then

I found my joy in an empty bed the next day
maybe he melted into the covers or maybe 

he just went home but still I found my joy inside a soup pot
I brewed it for days and watched the broth deepen into bone

I found my joy in a bowl of cereal
which is also a type of soup

I found my joy washed in sun 
I let my legs out down the street, hairy n bare

and rubbing up against each other like cats 
I found my joy in the little red rash that spread 

angry along my thighs afterwards, so grateful 
for the friction my thighs create when I walk

I found my joy in my own fires burning low,
of being mostly ash and a struggling ember

I found my joy threaded through a needle, because yes
I am now the single woman who does needlepoint—

I found my joy today, forgotten I think—
just an old tube orange lipstick in my purse

and still, I peel it’s streaking face from the cap
use it to draw a bonfire over my lips, or something pretty

I think I found my joy today, but it was mostly fake
crappy plastic glitter stuck to my face

charles boardman

Googling the workers at a local tender age facility

I recently spent an hour looking at the Facebook pages

of the people who work at the Morrison Child and

Family Services Center, where, in Portland, immigrant

children separated from their families are held.  I wondered,

who does this work?  Who does this work every day?  One

supervisor, named Alejandro, is in charge of the displaced

child program, and he really likes pet fish and craft beer and

Game of Thrones and last year re-posted a helpful decision map

for DACA recipients who might be confused and scared in

this new era.  And last August, he really hoped to win a free

Glock, which you’d win by sharing the free Glock contest

image (I’m guessing from the lack of comments and

likes that he never did end up winning that Glock).   And,

here we are, I thought.  Here we all are.  This full

human man, whom I hoped to hate, whom I hoped to

judge, whom I planned to screencap and dox, is as abundant

and aimless as a hotel bed.  Pet fish!  He likes pet fish!  Fish

who were born in captivity and die in captivity, wildly-

tinted silver and chartreuse and white fish, with those long

festive tails that hang for a half-moment, after the fish itself

has started out on one of its hopeful circuits around

the water it never finds the edges of, and then, like the

afterthought to a thought that never ended because

it couldn’t begin, catch up in an elegant little snap.

Did he ever decide to enliven the kids' environs with

a fish tank of their own, so that inside their box they

might watch other brilliant beings in a smaller box?  I imagine

large, soft Alejandro, in a broad, checked neck-tie like the one he

wears in his staff photo, enjoining the stunned, unrooted children to

gaze and wonder at the angel and clown and devil fish, saying this is how

you feed them, saying this is how you change the filter so they can breathe,

saying look at their little castle, saying please don’t tap the glass because

not only does it startle them, it reminds them that it’s there.

ama codjoe

the princess and the pea

I've been told, and I believe, the gardens are grateful for the cold. And, it's true, the rain, though icy, is somehow watering the forsythia, whose canary blossoms will herald spring. Still, even with this knowledge, something about a New York City winter makes for a hard go of it. 

I could enumerate the "something" here, but that would pull me away from the subject at hand, which, as you may have guessed, isn't cities or flowers but tenderness. Tenderness lurks in harsh conditions when one feels the vulnerability of being a human animal walking upright against the wind. 

For instance, there's tenderness in the way I misremember the woman from the county clerk's office calling me "sweetheart." In actuality, she might have said "dear," or perhaps there was no term of endearment at all. But in our brief exchange a few weeks ago, in this call to be crossed off my "to do" list, her voice was a rope, a tether. It wasn't the help she offered, though she was helpful, it was the tone of her voice, her kindness--so different from cheer. 

If we, this stranger and I, were walking alongside each other down a New York City street, shoulder to shoulder, in our rain boots or snow boots, me and this woman I've never seen, perhaps someone, another stranger, walking in the opposite direction, might glance at us, might say we "favor" each other, might confuse us for family, because in this woman's voice was a kind of kinship. 

And I think this is what tenderness is: a reclamation of kinship, a reminder of how little it takes to demonstrate care, and in return, how little it takes to feel saved from forgetting, for a second or a season, that we're bound by a durable fragility, an enduring fragility that as long as it lasts, as long as we're breathing, is, in fact, indestructible. Tenderness reminds us of what can't be broken and of what is always in danger of breaking. 

Pouring tea into two cups from a ceramic pot the color of grass. The few extra breaths in a long embrace. A friend singing on a voicemail. The woman at the county clerk's office--in the middle of winter, in the middle of the week--I'm saying her voice tended to me. These small gestures are like the Hans Christian Anderson tale about the princess and the pea—the one where the princess is up all night because beneath twenty mattresses and twenty feather-beds is a single pea she can feel: this makes her a real princess. We are all princesses, but instead of sleeplessness we're allowed to rest in each other. Such a small pea tenderness is.

11 February 2018

jenessa abrams

we are the ones

We are the ones he’s put his hands on. We do not know each other. We may share a subway car and brush our coats too hard. We may even have looked too long in the elevator. At ourselves. At each other. We’ve stared at mirrors and forgotten where our bodies began, forgotten we were in public. He has said we are not the normal. Has he said that to everyone? He has asked us to hike up our skirts and he hasn’t meant it as a question, he has asked us if we were okay and he has not cared about the answer. Some of us may be dead, but our bodies have still been held and tugged on and pressed against the parchment and made to feel like meat. Some of us have given up eating animals. We weren’t certain why, but the flesh began to taste like flesh. It was familiar. Some of us lick our wrists or bite down too hard because we’ve learned to confuse our bodies, we’ve had to learn how to distract pain so we can pretend it has dissolved. It does not dissolve. It will not dissolve. But sometimes, we’ve found it feels good to fool ourselves.

 kjirsten severson

thick in the throat honey

her voice

i don’t know how to be tender

i haven’t seen it up close

i haven’t seen it in me

i want to be tender

im brutal

im cutting

im a force

i am really good at punishing myself

but i don’t know how to be tender

how to be gentle

when i am wounded

when i am wounding

when i've stricken myself

before, during or after

i haven’t healed myself

healing through tenderness

always has been physical

the way someone touches me

the way someone talks to me

receiver of tenderness

an awkward giver

and an empty bank of tenderness for myself

i don’t know how to start

i don’t know what it really is

i know when i see it

but i don’t see it in myself

is it, worthiness

is it enoughness

is it comfort in being and unfolding to myself

and removing the judgement on whether i deserve it or not

i think it's stillness

i think it's writing

i think it's grace

grace first

acceptance first 

open first

deserving

belief

enoughness

am i worthy of tenderness?

perhaps it’s a question i need to stop asking

perhaps tenderness is given without criteria

without limit

without judgement

without preference

it's given

like air

and breathe

and the flow of water

it is

and being here

means it’s for you

tenderness is quiet

peace

stillness

love

calm

forgiving

available

thank you for modeling tenderness

so i can get a glimpse of what it looks like

but change my view of what it could be

it's not intimate moments, thoughtful touches, well timed moments of care

it's stillness, peace, grace, forgiveness

it's being open and available

it's being a little kinder, a little easier on you

it's a slowing down and clearing out

it's available

it's yours

you are worthy of tenderness

colette labouff

part-time at the library (i)

How to copy, for two women my age, a two-sided document; they had with them a small boy who’d found a quarter and wanted it returned to its owner. The one searching for books about Lupus and did those exist in Spanish? The request for a phone number for the headquarters of Walgreen's in order to make a complaint. More Tinker Bell books, please, a Bible for a preacher, direction toward a shelf with green card information, and Julia Child's boeuf bourguignon recipe - to write down and carry on a plane across three states - to make for family. Amtrak tickets for three. The one whose grievance covers his face; his phone’s broken and he’s here to get with the provider and get things working but will need my help to read. Of the computers, most say it won’t work or that’s what I told it to do. A few begin with I don’t know how. The IRS doesn’t make it easy for the one working to print old tax returns. I say: here, click here. And there, let’s go back. As I stand at her side, she’s warm as if she’s leaned on a noon-wall. I read panic as much as summer sun in her temperature. It won’t. I can’t. They want. By end of day. Tomorrow at the latest. The boarding pass, says the one bouncing an infant, is for my mother in Mexico. And the quiet girl with the car-racing game; every time I press play, she complains with her palms up, nothing happens. I used to think of libraries as a place to get out of the sun or cold and hide out, and about desire as much as the need to know. But how heavy -- thick heartbeats -- this read-to-yourself in the presence of others about history and bills and illness and the long complaint. What hard worlds I’ve felt we’re in as I try to avoid the specifics of theirs: job application, overdue, audit, citizenship, indigence, deadline. And the boy with the quarter stretches both arms toward anyone.

shayla lawson

+

gabe tomlin

when she gets weary

When the comb comes up missing, look to the tender-headed child for answers. My mother learned this quicker than my scalp would have preferred. She would tug and pull at the roughage of my hair, and every strand would cling to one another like they had been drafted for war. Tears would well up in my eyes, and I would always be two tears away before I had to call it crying. Later, when my mom prepared dinner, I would listen to loud gangster rap to redeem myself—from what, I am not exactly sure. I am 21 now. My scalp is still tender, but tenderness is not the same to me. In these 21 years, I have learned that some days you will have to be, both, the hand that pulls and the scalp that screams. Somedays, I still decide to hide the comb. Though, I think repression is tricking yourself into believing that you could ever really hide from you—like a gangster rapper screaming they are afraid of no one and whispering they are afraid to be alone. I now find myself seeking these tender moments and the truths that they have to offer because, sometimes, pain, truth and love are teeth on the same comb.

"granny" bobbie hayden

trey hayden

Ice & Spread

Though you put the cubes in still,

it was always something funny to you

that I liked ice in my orange juice.

And funny to me you had anything

to do with benedictine, as it oozed

deceptively in salt though the color

of mint. To make it you’d juice

a cucumber and mix in whichever white

spread to give it body and balance. It’s not

enough to love salt or spices on your

toast, which I think a lot learn too late,

already satisfied in some grave though still,

munching. Cucumber gives the dip

surprise. It’s enough to eat a sandwich

with the stuff spread thin or thick and say

you’ve eaten well, no matter who’s picky

and disdains it. I always took my bread

plain, which was pretending it tasted

good without wanting anything to do with what

could’ve come next, the push

it promised, and it’s just benedictine,

you’ve made it a hundred times I’m sure.

A hundred people could make a hundred

things and still not glimpse into them such an

other with so little as cucumber

and sandwich bread.

Sometimes I came so close

to tasting it that my pinky

dangled above the rim of the bowl

and shook in a circle until your feet

hit the floor of the hall and I returned

to my glass of juice, took it back, let

ice hit my mouth to cool it, and in that way

let my lip become a brim into which poured

what—earlier and with hands which for all

my life have seemed deliberately and tirelessly

to shape—you, Bobbie, granny

though you’d never let me say a thing so gaudy,

had poured.

john rhodes hayden

taylor alyson lewis

three years

1.

Through the bars of my rented balcony,

Atlanta seems painted small and ephemeral.

Masticated gum and cotton-candy-blush children stride

skirting smoldering rubber on asphalt-

black and bleeding with rainwater.

I fear that any notion of home has no place in a

city of manipulated steel and dying heroes.

The spaces I called my sanctuaries,

places I have been deferred or devoutly deviant-

suddenly stood emptied by my own rejection of them.

Perhaps I was not built for meaning.

Perhaps I was not built at all, but sprang up from red clay soil,

Strung like a bow, the arrow of my desire.

I could one day plunge to the bottom of this world

and find soft-skinned purchase in wet gravel.

Peel my frozen face from the concrete and see red.

Press my cheek against the dirt,

hear the footsteps of dreamers,

maybe dream myself.

2.

You ever been so damn soft you melted

Through the cracks of the sidewalk like butter?

Remembered the brownness of her hand

on the small of your neck? You ever loved

so damn deeply that the moon was jealous and

stalked your sleeping black bodies, searching

for fire? In love, I have felt everything;

I would thank her that gifted me empathy.

I have never been so naked—I have

never felt the wind and the sun, as now.

Her name behind my teeth, a prayer for grace.

Her body absorbed by the ocean’s floor.

Yet my young soul stands alone, bidding

for hers to join in my awakening.

3.

an experiment of living

the vacuum dragged across the chipped floor

my first time cooking for someone

other than my open mouth

(besides my mama)

a softness of breath

a kept promise

the spring equinox

manifested in smoke

the small ridiculous creature

we call our child

her brown eyes tracking the movements

of our connected bodies—

the salt and steam of commitment

your naked selflessness

enrobed in cotton

the cinnamon/chocolate brown of our nipples

taut against the cold

the high blue windows

the balcony

the morning paranoia of forgetfulness

the screaming and

the water and

our eyes

the brown beef broth of routine

a chaste kiss at a traffic light

i love you over the phone

i love you in the car

i love you through the blooming green arch

and beyond it

phillip sauerbeck

dao strom

I wanted to make something vulnerable for TENDERNESS. Or I wanted to make myself vulnerable, expose some gentle space or enter it, to encounter softness, to admit it, dare to inhabit it, a pliable aspect in the self in response to hardness, to force, to all the deadening weight, the dehumanizations, of history, the past, hungers, hauntings. I wanted to hold something soft that might soften me, for a moment, or at least an attempt at a moment. In a remote northern place (another country than America) I cut up photocopies of photographs of a past era - a past war - and laid them out next to the bodies of birds. As I held them I felt tenderness for the birds, and tenderness woke in me, toward the past, toward all our little forgotten bodies.

tyler wilkinson

rachel taube

until the elevator comes

—Do you remember her name?

—Who?

—Seth’s new wife? Es? The new wife?

—Do you mean his old girlfriend, Esther?

—No, his new wife.

—He doesn’t have a new wife.

—You know, I’m not mad, but they didn’t invite me to the wedding. And they won’t get me out of here. I hate it here.

—I’m not married. There was no wedding.

—I know you’re not married. His wedding. Do you know her name?

—No, I don’t know.

—You never call me anymore. You used to call all the time, on your way home from work.

—I know.

—I’m not mad, but you didn’t ask my permission before moving so far away.

I imagine my grandmother on the other end of the line, sitting in her wheelchair. It’s a recent concession to her age, though she can still walk when she needs to. Her legs are swollen now, my mother tells me, because she won’t put them up like the doctor has told her to, and she has a gold fang hanging from her gum where she won’t replace her dentures. Her hair is still thick, though, and maybe that bodes well for my old age.

She’s right—I haven’t called her in weeks. I did recently move, to North Carolina for school, and I am busy, and I no longer have those walks home from work. But these are excuses that I tell myself and her. Really, I was afraid that, when she picked up, she might no longer know who I was.

—You know Rachel, you’re my favorite niece.

—You’re my favorite grandma.

—It’s so strange, no one knows her name. I don’t think Seth will be at Thanksgiving.

—He’ll be there.

—Oh okay. I’ll just pull Seth aside at Thanksgiving to ask him.

Shortly after my grandmother turned 94, she forgot who my mother was. She still knows me and my brother. She still knows my father, Seth, and that he is her son-in-law, and certainly that he is married to a woman who visits frequently. But my mother, both that woman and not, has dropped out of her world.

To be a daughter is in no instance an easy thing, but this is particularly true when your mother ceases to exist. We are promises and roadblocks and most of all we are mirrors. The world, which was formerly like a lake reflecting our images, my grandmother and my mother and me, now roils like the ocean sloshing off a flat earth.

A few weeks ago, my grandmother tried to escape from her caregiver. She dressed and walked down the hall and stood by the elevator in the middle of the night, waiting for it to come, refusing to return to her room. She waited and waited for the elevator until the sun rose and then set again. Until the earth circled its star and towers crumbled and reemerged from the dust and we blew ourselves up and the sun exploded and the universe exploded and the world restarted. Until the Ice Age and the Bronze Age and World War I had all passed and my grandmother was young again.

Until she was 19 and married, until she had her first miscarriage, then another. Until my mother was born, dark-haired like her father, and my uncle five years later, unexpectedly, after more un-baby disappointments. Until sibling jealousies morphed under uneven pressure into sorrow and hardened into anger and my mother and her mother sharpened their words. Until my grandfather died of cancer just weeks after my mother’s wedding, and I was born and my brother was born and still my mother and my grandmother sharpened their words. Until the anger became silence, and my grandmother stopped speaking to my mother for seven years, and in between was only the wind and me. Until my grandmother moved into a home and they started speaking again and my grandmother woke up in the middle of the night to stand in front of the elevator.

Until the caregiver had to call my mother in the early morning to yell and scream at my grandmother to please please go to bed, they will take you to the mental wing, they will kick you out, please go to bed.

—Do you like Seth’s new wife?

It is almost time to hang up—I need to go to class—and there is no answer for her but the truth.

—Yes. I like her. And she cares about you very much.

—Oh well, that’s nice. That’s something.

hafizah geter

on kindness 

BY ARACELIS GIRMAY

At the Detroit Metro Airport
with the turtle-hours to spare
between now & my flight, there is
such a thing as the kindness
of the conveyor belt who lends me
its slow, strange mollusk foot
as I stand quiet, exhausted, having been
alone in my bed for days now, sleeping
in hotels, having spent months, now,
without seeing the faces of my family, somehow
its slow & quiet carrying of the load
reminds me of the kindness of donkeys,
& this kindness returns me to myself.
It reminds me of the kindness of other things I love
like the kindness of sisters who send mail,
wherever you are, &, speaking of mail, there is
the special kindness of the mail lady
who says, “Hi, baby�? to everyone, at first
I thought it was just to me, but now I know
she says “Hi, baby�? to everyone. That is kindness.
Too, there is the kindness of windows, & of dogs.
& then there was that extraordinary Sunday
back at the house, I heard a woman screaming
about how she was lonely & so lonely
she didn’t know what she’d do, maybe kill
herself, she said, over & over like a parrot
in a cage, a parrot whose human parent
only taught it that one sentence. I looked out
the window & saw her from behind, the way she flung
her arms like she was desperate & being killed
or eaten by an invisible predator, like a tiger or a lion, in the chest. & her voice seemed fogged out with methadone, I don’t know, something, & I walked away from the window
& sat, angry with her for screaming, & sad,
& not long after, I heard her saying,
What’d you say? What’d you say to me?
& a man’s voice, low, I could not tell if it was kind.
& she said, I’ll kill myself, I’m so lonely.
& did I tell you, yet, that it was Mother’s Day?
Flowers & mothers, flowers & mothers all day long.
& the woman saying, I’m so lonely. I could kill myself.

& then quiet. & the man’s voice saying, it’s okay. It’s okay. I love you, it’s okay.

& this made me get up, put my face, again, to the window
to see my landlord’s nephew outside, just hugging her so, as if it were his mother, I mean, as if he belonged to her,
& then, again, quiet, I left the window but sat
in the silence of the house, hidden by shutters, & was amazed. When the front door of the brownstone opened up
& let the tall nephew in with his sad & cougar eyes,
handsome & tall in his Carolina-Brooklyn swagger, I heard
him start to climb the stairs above me, & my own hand
opened up my own front door,
& though it was none of my business
I asked him, Do you know that woman out there?
& do you know what happened next?
He said, No. The nephew said no, he didn’t know
the woman out there. & he told me Happy Mother’s Day
as he climbed the rest of the stairs. & I can’t stop seeing them hugging on the street, under trees, it was spring, but cold,
& sometimes in the memory his head is touching hers
& sometimes in the memory his eyes are closed,
& sometimes she is holding him
& singing to him I love you. It’s okay.
I mean to tell you that everywhere I go
I hear us singing to each other. This way. I mean to tell you that I have witnessed such great kindnesses as this,
in this, my true life, you must believe me.
I mean, on a Sunday, when nobody was supposed to be watching. Nobody at all. I saw this happen, the two
of them hugging, when nobody was supposed to be
watching, but not a secret either, public
as the street, not for glory & not for a joke,
the landlord’s nephew ready to stand there for the woman
like a brother or a sister or a husband or son,
or none of those at all, but a stranger,
a stranger who, like her, is an earthling.
Perhaps this thing I am calling kindness
is more simple than kindness, rather, recognition
of the neighbor & the blue, shared earth
& the common circumstance of being here:
what remains living of the last
two million, impossible years… 

abigail bereola

snapshot—january 2018

You always dwell on the moment after the moment. Maybe that's because it's sweet with possibilities that only you can see. Even when it's raining, you can only think of the ground swelling with delicious water

—AstroPoets

emily jensen

they told me he had no tongue.

he sat on his cement slab of porch

on a folding chair

that looked like it was straight out of

a church basement.

every morning when i

peeked my head out

into the thick louisiana air

there he was.

i’d smile and say

“mornin�?

and he’d just nod

keeping his mouth shut tight

as he watched me walk down st. claude

in a white dress

stained with miller high life and

cigarette ash.

we didn’t have much in common,

an old southern man

and a young northern girl

but we had our morning greeting

like a tiny bridge between far-apart worlds.

i never once heard him make a sound

until the day i left.

as i heaved my bags into the car

i heard a sort of yelp-howl

and when i turned around

there he was in his chair

with his arms crossed over his heart

in a gesture that looked like love

and his mouth open wide in a grin

that showed he really did have no tongue

but when he pointed at me

and clasped his arms across his chest again

i knew we’d understood each other anyway.

tenderness in the 9th ward.

coleman stevenson

1. I would call my childhood idyllic in that it was out of the influence of most humans

2. But the current drifted down the driveway & my leaf boat sailed away

3. A single escape into multiple traps in the world of folly and whims

4. A reckoning (My otherness)

5. A reckoning (My sameness)

6. A maze of rivers & renditions, A maze of systems & searches

7. Too few results, a too-tall Tower, too much rain to plant seeds

chet'la sebree

Tender-ness

The cube steak of my childhood,

which I’m told was tough. My

memory of it is a soft massaged

muscle, the wet in the corner of my

mouth.

The pressed fresh of skin freed

from a nail cut too deep.

The ache of devotion. Knees bone

sore from double genuflection at

faithless men’s doors.

Forgiving you for forgiving me for all

that I can(not) be.

taylor cass talbott

...real postcard sent to me in 1988, which my mom recently recovered from an old box of keepsakes. I was Brodie's best "fried gril" until last year, when I became his wife. Even in dark moments, this postcard helps keep me tender.

brian mcqueen

remove choice from a person and you strip them from what makes them a human being / the blueprint of a life // there is in fact no act of love that includes violence // emotional / physical / psychological // no act of love that uses fear as a motor // the two cannot abide in the same space simultaneously // tenderness / his hand on the small of my back / his shoulder / an open ear / empathy even without understanding // letting him come first and him also // tenderness is a fermata / tenderness is love's wings giving flight to that which is the only real thing i know / a trans-ing / a light

amna ahmed

jeremy paden

try pounding

& when pounding fails

cut against the grain 

some will tell you

the secret is the marinade

not just any 

but their acid bath 

perfected 

by trial & error 

to eat away the connective 

tissue before 

the softening work of fire

some will tell you

slaughter the young

while still suckling 

that meat is like grass

tender & sweet

when just a bud

but here we are, old

& the fires of the world 

have cooked us hard

we are tired & our 

hearts have grown 

large & tough

climb the steps 

take the flint 

crack the chest

pound the heart

pound & mince

& grind it down

there will be no tenderness

until bruised & battered

the heart like a seed

like a cedar shoot

is taken to the mountain

high & planted 

we have too long

been in a land of traffick 

in a city of merchants

for too long our hearts

have been bought & sold

to the lowest bidder

I am old & spent

& heart in hand, bleeding

I give it to you

I ask nothing

nothing of you in return

I've worked it over

it will still be tough

in parts, beat my heart 

till soft & once 

your mallet 

has done what it could 

once you’ve slow 

braised it

set your knife against 

its grain & slice

Let us lift up tenderness. Of the fierce kind and the vulnerable kind. Of the kind that picks up wounded animals and wraps them in the feathers that brooding hens have plucked from their chest to warm their clutch.

ainsley wagoner

make me your country. be tender to me.

ross gay

3 tender-nesses

56. The Hand-written Letter

I am one of those lucky souls who regularly receives handwritten letters.  Lucky sort of implies unbidden or unreciprocated handwritten letters, which is not the case.  I write a lot of letters.  Not a lot in the old-timey way.  A lot for today.  Which I guess isn’t saying much.  But every time I receive a handwritten letter I feel like someone who ought to call himself one of those lucky souls, because I am. 

The handwritten letter next to the bed where I’m writing this is written in a lovely, almost old-timey cursive with a bonnet and a cast iron woodstove to it.  There is also a beautiful drawing of two people embracing which, she told me, was a sketch for a graphic novel she’s working on.  This epistolary sketch reminds me the dire inadequacy of the emoji, though I am glad for the brown thumbs up.  Believe me.  It also reminds me, for some reason, the sorrow I feel at the genuine corruption, or perversion, of the exclamation point by very famous and erratic twitterers.  I wrote it like that to let you know that no, I don’t do it.  Which is not a judgment, just a fact.

Once I was extolling the virtues of the handwritten letter to a group of students at Rutgers, telling them that, first of all, it’s a mode of writing, of practice, of communicating ideas to someone with whom, presumably, you want to communicate.  Which hopefully is the very same thing we are doing when we write our poems or essays or whatever.  (This doesn’t, to me, negate or trouble the fact that poems and essays are also, as I see them, written very much to oneself—they are letters to ourselves, which imagines a kind of mutuality or sameness between the writer and receiver.)  But, too, I said to the student, whose handwriting was terrible, he told us, the magic of the handwritten letter is that it communicates our bodies across this space.  The actual oils of our bodies.  Our breath glazing the pages.  If we sneezed and such.  (I might have lost them on that one.)  His terrible handwriting his beautiful and disappearing and only body stuffed into an envelope to be shared with, to say hello to, his friend. 

A computer cannot.  Email, etc.  Even typewriters, which I sometimes write letters on and love for the ways different technologies make our bodies think differently, and for my substitution of the phrase “expl. pt.�? for the exclamation point, which mine does not have.  Lovely, but it’s not a handwritten note, the scrawl of which, when I receive one, and if I am not in a hurry, I will sometimes find myself almost caressing with the tips of my fingers.

February 16, 2017

62. Hand to Mouth

There are few things as wonderful for its profound tenderness as watching a person’s mouth move as they write by hand.  I noticed it today as the hotel clerk scribbled the internet password on the back of a card, her mouth moving just so.

Sometimes you might discern a slow-motion mouthing of the words the scribe scribes.  Sometimes it is a simple twitching, the lips pursing just so, teeny kisses floating into the air.  Or the tongue probing the corner of the mouth, or dragging along the teeth.  Sometimes the jaw gets involved, the muscle pulsing flashing a shadow near the ear.  Or a neck tendon flickers taut like a kite string catching a gust. 

The tenderness I feel toward the little mouthings of writers is cousin to the tenderness I feel when I see people mouth the words they are reading, neither of which I can quite explain, except to say the tenderness is deep, and I am inclined in equal measure to look and look away.  To boot, I noticed today that when in the presence of such literary oralists I also start kissing the air. 

March 4, 2017

96. Raucous Greetings

Among the delights—among the things that delight me for its being an expression, one of the bodily expressions of delight—is the raucous greeting, which comes in many forms.  Today I saw it on 14th street when two young men hugged each other so enthusiastically, so convincingly, that one of their hats flew off his head, neither of the huggers making the least gesture toward retrieving it, so enthralled with, so entrenched in, the hugging, the greeting they were.  So concerned with eliminating the distance between their bodies, and hearts, were they.

May 7, 2017

john akira harrold