This is Only Our Survival

"My nice voice is reserved for meetings with a view, my palm
outstretched saying here. Are our problems. Legacies rolling out like multicolored marbles. Don't focus so much on the 'doom and gloom' they keep saying. We don't want to depress. Everyone. This is only our survival." – Kathy Jetnil-Klijner, from "Nice Voice"









Forget to Smile

Some days spent in the Arizonan red rocks will do this to you. Those red cakes, from a distance, luxurious, 'decorated up well,' a tour guide tells us. As though planted, sculpted, and of course they were both. It doesn't take much to wish for those hands. Fight it back, not supposed to be religious, just spiritual, is that correct? These would have been invisible, my hands. Straight up from a sodden sand I suspect, fingertips pulled accurately along the edges of the eruption, soft enough to contour to the liking. Of it. Of what. Clipped finally at the top, flat and nearly predictable, something that they eyes of ours latch onto, all eyes, from the scorpion on up to the native, all wisdom, you can't kill wisdom. Those days spent walking hungrily along the provided lobes flat enough to survive your step. Little gradual steps, similar to how we might come to love, but forget. Red heart, yes, pulsing we climb, as we lose our own, a world arrives again. People in the city sleep behind everything.

Then descend back into the city, it's own arid hush. Snow had done something nice for us. Animated the grisled yards tortured by freeze and dehydration. First white powder down must have been religious for all the rest of them. Call it castles if you must. Crystals I shovel. Ear buds in. New to touch. I sculpt lines along the sidewalk, clear the driveway to an open mouth, place little piles of snow down like a potter with shovel. Might melt in an hour. I use it as a tool. The sun itself. A tool. Cars that pass are quieter. Most everyone inside buildings along the corridors of business disappear into the sky, alive, eyes burning up white, climb, friends.


for tomorrow
you will forget
to smile