Dear reader,

I have submitted this story to so many magazines and since they won’t accept work that has been posted on a personal blog, I haven’t posted it here. But I finally decided that since I haven’t had any luck, I would post it here.

While the last collections of work have been poetry, I started out with fiction. My book The Gift of an Imaginary Girl published by A Word with You Press in 2015 is a collection of magical realist short fiction as well as a novella, Coco, which is to date, my favorite work I’ve ever written.

During the pandemic, I took a remote class on flash fiction and each story was set in the pandemic with a surrealist twist. You can read three of these stories in my most recent publication, Shapeshifters: A Love Letter to the Resistance published by Beyond the Veil Press. The story I’m sharing below is one in a what I hoped and still hope, will someday become a full collection. For now, I’m sharing it here. It reminds me too, how magical realism was my focus during my MFA program and how my entire thesis and essay revolved around the history of it. Maybe sharing this remind me to not limit myself to poetry. I am a Gemini after all. “…I contain multitudes,” Walt Whitman, Song of Myself 51, (who I just happen to share a birthday with!).

I hope you enjoy it:

Sundays at Seven

Monster disappeared from Stella’s apartment the night she began to glow in the dark. He escaped out the window and down the fire escape. For the first couple of weeks, she let the wet food remain in his bowl, eventually molding and sprouting awful white spores, reminders of his absence, until finally the stillness of everything robbed her of any hope and she cleaned out his bowls and stored them atop her fridge.

In the early days of the pandemic and the lockdown, Stella relished having nothing to do. She felt as if she’d won the lottery. No more answering phones eight hours a day at the real estate office. No more dodging co-workers and their incessant invitations to god-awful hole-in-the-wall bars. No more getting up at 5 AM to put on a full face of make-up, strap on an underwire bra, rushing out the door to catch the 6:30 bus for the two-hour commute to a barely above minimum wage paying job. She could sleep in, at least long enough for Monster to paw her face, dig his claws into her robe to knead biscuits. She watched the news channel, watched the infection and death toll grow by the hour. She ate ice cream for breakfast and let Monster lick the spoon clean. She took long afternoon naps, and ordered delivery, waited to hear the masked delivery driver drop her food off outside her apartment door. Sometimes she would look out her second story window at the mostly empty streets below.

In the Before Times, Stella’s life was far from social, and she felt superior in this ability to be alone for long stretches of time. She was, after all, an only child raised by a single mother, a tax accountant. She had learned how to tolerate boredom and loneliness, to disassociate so effectively that she’d forgotten how it felt to yearn, to long for something, anything, out of reach. She had built an inner world, so detailed and historic, that it took precedence over anything surrounding her.

She received a once-a-week call from her mother every Sunday at 7:00PM on the dot. Her mother loved to talk about her retirement, and she’d often given Stella unwanted advice about pensions, 401ks and the dangers of credit cards, expensive coffee drinks and did she know about high yield savings accounts? She worried her mother could hear her roll her eyes.

“Two years, three months, and fourteen days till retirement,” her mother announced the latest countdown every single week. Stella could remember her marking off the years and months even as far back as when she was in the first grade in Mrs. Miller’s class, the year she ended up in the principal’s office for throwing a punch at a boy who’d knocked a nest out of the tree and stomped hatchlings who would never fly. She still felt her bones shift and earthquake every time the memory resurfaced.

During the fourth week of the lockdown, Stella noticed her exceptionally punctual mother had not called. This had only ever happened once before during an especially chaotic tax season when her mother had a very difficult client. The client insisted her mother check and re-check her work and was totally convinced her numbers were erroneous. But apart from that, her mother never missed their weekly phone call. She called her mother and got her voicemail. She called again and again and again. No answer.

Up until that moment, the pandemic and lockdown had been a welcomed reprieve, an “introvert’s paradise,” she’d told her mother just a couple of weeks earlier. She felt her time had finally come to finally know comfort. But now, something was different. An uncertainty arose that she had not counted on, the idea that this terrifying thing could touch her directly.

It was Wednesday night when a nurse finally called her.

“I’m so sorry,” the nurse said, “We would have called you earlier. There have just been so many…”

“Can I see her? When can she come home?”

The nurse was silent.

“I really am, so sorry,” she repeated, “I’m calling because your mother isn’t going home. I wanted to make sure you got to say goodbye.”

The nurse put the speaker to Stella’s mother’s ear, and Stella spoke softly, “Hello? Mom? Hello? Mom, it’s me. It’s Stella. I’m here, mom. I’m here.” But all she heard was labored breathing followed minutes later by its absence.

After it was over, Stella drew a bath so hot it turned her skin red. She felt nothing.. Monster followed her inside and curled up on the bath rug, purring. Stella was sweating and the bathroom mirror was fogged over. She reached for Monster, who rose to meet her wet hand with his head. She remembered when she found Monster by the apartment complex dumpster. He was maybe three months old, appeared feral, and swiped at her when she first made a grab for him. It took another week and several cans of tuna to finally win him over. He was covered in fleas and ringworm and for days she had to treat him with sulfur. Patches of his fur fell out, and he had an upper respiratory infection that gave him a hoarse sounding and menacing mewl. She sent videos to her mother who said, “Jesus, what a little monster you’ve got, Stella!”

A funeral was out of the question. These were perilous times. Even in death, even when the worst of it happened, there were no exceptions to the rules. A memorial over Zoom felt anticlimactic, almost embarrassing. She had few people to contact. Her uncle Robert in Portland, Oregon, a great aunt who had helped them out a few times when money was short, and her mother’s oldest friend Diane in Tacoma. Her mother would be cremated, her ashes delivered in a few weeks, they told her.

It started shortly after her mother’s death, with hot spots on her arms. Even Monster seemed to notice, and he would rub the top of his head against her skin. At night it sweltered. She scratched her forearms only to watch them seethe. The heat spread from her arms to her shoulders, her neck, and eventually her face. She scoured the internet for clues. She found nothing.

She expected the typical symptoms: fever, sore throat, joint aches, blurred vision, a ground shaking cough, and then… But she had no other symptoms and was puzzled as to how she’d been exposed. She wondered if she had caught something from a delivery driver. So, for two days she stopped ordering any food and instead ate a stale box of saltines and plain, brown rice. She finally caved when she finished a box of croutons.

Just as Stella had tired of the ambiguity of her condition, the warming sensation and the itching stopped. She celebrated with pizza and wine, and a can of sardines for Monster. She fell asleep on her couch to the blue light of her television, the fresh breeze from her cracked window, and Monster, curled between her knees.

It happened right as the sky turned pitch black and starless. At first, Stella thought she was dreaming. But when Monster hissed and growled, when he swiped at her like he had done all those years before, Stella shot up from the couch and saw her glowing, neon reflection. She shrieked, rubbed at her skin as if it was something external, something superficial. But the glow was emanating from a deeper place inside of her. She thought she could feel it in her organs–not painful, but uncomfortable.

“Monster!” she called to him, but he sprinted away from her, through the slight crack in her window, an opening so narrow his escape was unfathomable. But fear changes all living things. She called for him, manic and desperate. Her heartbeat, visible through the green center of her glowing chest. She wanted to run after him, but she was blinded by the brightness of her light. She called for him until her voice went hoarse and her skin stung with heat and tears.

Stella wondered if she was hallucinating, but if so, why did Monster react how he did? She went to the bathroom and stood naked in front of the mirror and nearly blinded herself trying to get a good look. She thought of fireflies. Glow worms. The glow in the dark stars on her ceiling she had as a child. Was it a sign of toxic radioactivity? Was it related to the virus itself, or the trial antidote she was so quick to order from the Department of Health? Or something otherworldly?

Stella watched the news and searched message boards trying to find out if anything like what she was experiencing had been reported. Instead, she watched hours of the rising death count, scientists versus men of faith arguing over the state of the world. Even when she took a break from the news, she could hear the neighbors on both sides of her watching as if they were in her living room. One day, the apartment to the right of her went silent. She no longer heard the man or woman shuffling to turn on their coffee maker, no longer heard them slamming cabinet doors, or clearing their throat. A knock came a few days later and Stella did not answer. Later, Stella noticed that a card had slipped under her door. She opened the white envelope addressed to “Apt 311” and found a notecard with a picture of a lone sunflower in a field, a barn in the distance. The inside read, “Dear Banner Apartment tenants, please join us over Zoom to remember our dear neighbor, Phyllis Reynolds. Beloved grandmother, retired music teacher, and friend. Also known as Phyllis from apartment 312…”

Stella didn’t know her neighbors. She made sure of it. If one of her neighbors was in the hallway, she would wait until they were gone before opening her door. Her first Christmas in the apartment building, she found a Christmas card and a poinsettia outside her door and her stomach curled. To be seen, perceived, in all her averageness was her nightmare. Why can’t we all just keep to ourselves, she would think. Getting her mail, throwing out her garbage, were tasks that filled her with anxiety. She kept her eyes glued to the floor or the walls and her heart raced when she would run into a neighbor on her way out to the dumpster, or when she unlocked her mailbox and heard footsteps behind her. Her mother had always blamed herself for Stella’s antisocial tendencies, saying it was due to her being an only child, and their being as isolated as they were. But Stella always denied this, telling her mother, “I just came into the world like this.”

But with Monster gone, and another month deep into the lockdown, Stella grew curious of her surroundings, a diligent observer from the safety of her second story apartment. She was the type to daydream even as others spoke to her, and then panic when asked a question about minutes of conversation she had zoned out.

She kept no body length mirrors in her apartment and when she bathed, she’d let the small, cracked rectangle of a mirror fog over and she refused to clean it until she was fully dressed. Her body was something of a burden, a load of laundry she kept forgetting in the dryer, kept re-washing, adding exorbitant amounts of soap to, but avoiding just the same. Now, she noticed things. Like, how the fibers of her mid-century couch looked almost like human hair, orange and brown, tightly braided. She noticed how the spot where Monster used to lay on her armchair was still brighter in color than the rest of the upholstery, but now, that deep green shade too, was fading little by little, without him to preserve its saturation. She noticed a pattern of sounds on the street below her window, and when it was more silent than ever, she was tortured by the sounds of her own body and its terrible churning, its hunger and its drought. But the most unsettling observation she’d made had to do with her own growing desire for something she’d never wanted for pre-pandemic: intimacy and connection.

After another couple of weeks, of the glowing keeping her from sleep and no cat to keep her feet warm, Stella cursed her reclusion. As the days grew shorter, her glow brighter than ever, Stella spent more and more time in the window of her two-story apartment, looking down at the scarcely populated streets, counting the few cars that came and went. She took notice of the few masked delivery drivers who dropped off groceries. She noticed the sober march of masked insomniacs, six feet apart.

Occasionally, a drunken stranger noticed her luminescence, gaze a green glowing woman standing naked in the window. The stranger would point, pull the mask down from his face, and stumble back. Stella would retreat, draw the curtains shut, and try to suffocate the glow with her weighted blanket. But usually, this was not the case. Unusual phenomena had become par for the course during the pandemic: babies born with full sets of teeth, UFO sightings, and morphing symptoms and hospitalizations. So, what did a glowing woman matter in such an unpredictable, dangerous time?

A knock at the door one Monday morning, the first one since the neighbor left her the invite to the Zoom memorial for her neighbor, startled Stella awake. She saw the back of the delivery driver turn the corner of the corridor and was surprised how sorry she was to have missed the hand-off. When she looked down, she saw what was left at her door. Her mother’s ashes. Stella picked up the plain black box, her mother’s name printed on a label. Just as Stella was about to bring the box inside, her neighbor in 313 opened the door to pick up a newspaper. She had seen him a few times, pre-pandemic, pre-lockdown. He was fifty-ish, handsome in a way that would make her mother blush. She liked the fact that he seemed as uninterested in getting to know her as she did him. She was grateful back then for his silent understanding.

“It’s really something, isn’t it?” He was still wearing pajamas, a mask hanging from one ear which he quickly strapped onto the other side after speaking to her.

“I’m sorry?”

He pointed with his eyes to the box in her hand.

“All our cares and worries, everything we hold dear and everything that terrifies us and we end up…” he didn’t finish, but Stella understood.

“This is my mother,” Stella told him, her voice cracking, her eyes avoiding him.

He shook his head. “No, my dear, that is not your mother.”

She held the box a little further away from herself at that moment, her vision blurred by tears.

“I lost my partner. He was a nurse. He stayed away for months. Didn’t want to risk getting me sick.”

“Oh,” she said. She was surprised. She couldn’t remember ever hearing a second voice in the apartment or seeing visitors. But then again, she made it her mission not to see or hear anything at all. “And you, have a box like this?”

313 smiled. “No,” he said. “He has a new home.” But he did not elaborate.

Stella stood there holding the ashes of her mother, talking to her neighbor of two years for the first time in a sort of suspended animation, as if she was watching herself, frozen.

“By the way,” he said, “it was my partner who left you the poinsettia on your doorstep that Christmas. I hope you don’t have a cat. I told him they are toxic to cats.”

“What?”

“I said, I hope you don’t have a cat. Poinsettias. They’re no good for cats–”

But Stella had already sucked herself back into her cocoon, the black box pressed against her chest. She remembered how she had thrown the poinsettia away immediately, knowing already.

“I’m so–I’m sorry,” she managed to say through the door, but she knew he did not hear her.

That night, Stella sat at the kitchen table, staring at the black box that wasn’t her mother but also, very much her mother. She thought about a more appropriate receptacle and dug around her kitchen cabinets until she found a pretty, vintage tin she’d bought to stash her tea. She emptied the tin and just as she was about to transfer the ashes, she heard chaos below. This time, she wrapped her bathrobe around her glowing body before approaching the window and looked down to see a small crowd of masked strangers hovering over something in the street next to a delivery vehicle with its hazard lights blinking, driver door open.

She cracked her window open, and the icy January air sent chills even through the warmth of her glow. That’s when she heard a muffled voice among the gaggle of onlookers crying out, “Is it alive? Is it breathing?” followed by a familiar but warped sound, a weak but persistent yowl, and then a cheer. Someone said, “It’s okay. It’s alive!”

Stella turned her head slowly towards the cat tower covered in piles of laundry waiting to be folded, and two bowls stacked on top of her fridge, covered in dust, a box of half canned cat food, open, unused. And Stella ran, barefoot out her apartment door, down each flight of stairs with its flickering lights, its ash trays, until she made it down to the street where everyone turned towards her radiance.

Stella pushed through the crowd of strangers until she reached the center and found her long lost Monster, his gray fur sticky with his blood but his eyes alert as ever. And once he was in Stella’s arms, her sobs dying in his long mane, she felt the iridescent glow leave her body, felt the weight of everything ripple off her skin and finally, she felt the familiar sandpaper tongue licking the tears from her face. Strangers pulling off their masks and cheering. And though she was no longer glowing, warmth ran down Stella’s spine as the rejoicing grew louder. Stella looked up from the street and one by one, watched as glowing silhouettes filled the windows of her building, each window cracked just enough so she could hear the whole chorus of them applauding.

The Magician card fell out of the deck immediately.

***

That morning, I went for a walk with my dog Twix. I heard a caw and looked up and watched a crow fly down to a lower branch as if to get my attention. Two others joined him. I said, “Hello crows! Hello friends,” and Twix wagged his little stub of a tail.

I walked around the corner, another block from my home, and again I saw a group of three crows. This time, the talking crow joined two others on the sidewalk. I said hello again, and this time I added, “I see you.”

If you Google the spiritual meaning of seeing crows in a group of three, you’ll get all sorts of answers and interpretations; good omen, bad omen, death, watch out, be cautious. But this one is my favorite:

“Three Crows: The spiritual meaning of 3 crows often relates to creativity and new beginnings. It may signal a fresh start in your life, such as a new project, idea, or phase. Seeing three crows is usually a very positive omen, encouraging growth and transformation.”

Later that evening, I thought about the date, too: 624.

“Angel Number 624 asks you to believe in yourself and your skills, talents and abilities. Have faith and trust in your angels and ask for their guidance and assistance whenever you need it. To believe that you are on the right path. And you have all you need for your journey.”

I wrote this haiku to let Spirit know that I received the message, and that I am grateful for the signs and the clarity.

“The Morrigan does not call lightly, nor does she call without purpose. If she takes note of you, you're going to have work to do.”

“Given her association with corvids, notably crows, unusual or meaningful interactions with these creatures can signal her presence.” (The Morrigan Academy).

Two of my greatest supporters of my writing who believed in me, challenged me, and encouraged me are men. One was my college English teacher Wes, the other is Thorn, editor of A Word with You Press.

That being said, the rudest, most condescending, dismissive rejection letters I have received have ALL been from male editors. I mean every single one.

I’ve been writing for decades and submitting for just as long. 99% of my work is rejected. Most rejection letters are generic but polite. Others offer constructive feedback. Often times, I look at it and think yeah, that poem needed more time to marinate. I’m a messy, manic, and passionate writer. I can be too hasty. An astrologer gave me a reading back in March and repeatedly indicated based on my natal chart that I need to be a writer and teacher, but only in higher ed. A penchant for writing and innovation came up over and over again within multi aspects of my chart. This man knew my first name and my birth details. That’s it. Anyway, he went into further detail saying everything I write or create is fully motivated through strong, intense emotions and imagination. So, it makes sense that more technical writers with much more craft in their pocket might eye-roll my writing. That’s fine.

Anyway, let’s get back to today’s asshole. Again, I’m used to rejection, I even expect due to hundreds of rejections throughout my life. But recently I’ve written some work I feel good about and decided to start sending a few off after a long break. I sent three poems. I am going to share the note along with the poems he’s referring to. But I want to preface it by saying that one, he made zero reference to my third poem, two, he didn’t even have the right title for one of them, and third his comments on the last were asinine and nonsensical.

The first poem’s full title is Moon in Pisces, not just moon. It is a shape/concrete poem which the magazine encouraged. It took forever! But here it is:

I think even without knowing that I live in a literal desert next to Hanford and I feel at home by the sea, at the very least he could read it simply as someone who was born to a place or world they don’t belong in, one that was stolen from them. But for the life of him…

The next one he said he could just as easily be titled Inspiration or Possibility. Now, tell me, how does this obviously bleak poem elicit these sentiments?

The crayon breaking 
mid sketch,
the smell of wax,
an empty room. 

So, he did a lazy reading, missed an entire poem submission completely and was condescending to boot.

I can see where my poems need work. I can see why my work gets rejected. I know there are people in my own career sector that look down upon it. But for the love of Zendaya, how tf are you an editor when you miss so much, like a whole other poem? Reject my writing if you don’t like it or it doesn’t fit, but at least fucking take the time to read it properly.

Once I started submitting work, I took down work from my Substack because most places explicitly state they don’t accept work that’s published on your socials or blogs. Now, I figure, screw it. I might as well just share it on Substack because it’s not likely to get published anyway.

Writing should be for the people, be accessible to all people, not just editors and magazines. Not just English teachers.

All I want is to make connections through writing anyway. Why wait for Kens to “for the life of them” figure it out.

For the entire first year of my MFA program, my male mentor offered zero feedback other than, “I don’t get this.” That’s it. Every. Damn. Time. Well bro, I don’t get why you were a mentor when you offer absolutely nothing to your mentees. Get bent.

So, Substack, here’s to sharing all my rejections with my favorite humans.

Ken can go back to his Mojo Dojo Casa House.

Fin.

I had never heard of a cento before and now I can’t even remember how I discovered this poetry form: “From the Latin word for “patchwork garment,” a cento is a literary work collaged entirely from other authors’ verses or passages.”

Lately, I’ve read poetry by Mary Oliver, Kim Addonizio, Louise Glück, and I started reading, Something in the Woods Loves You, by Jarod K Anderson. I knew I wanted to create a word collage from these writers but first I had to pick a topic. It wasn’t difficult.

Recently I had a conversation with my provider and therapist where we finally came to a conclusion that has already been obvious to me for decades: I am treatment resistant. Meaning, so far, no conventional treatment has been successful.

I’ve had extensive psychiatric evaluations throughout my life, but never an evaluation of the dozens of medications I’ve taken over decades, until a therapist introduced me to GeneSight which is supposed to tell you which psychiatric medications work for your genetics. You’ll get a red column (these not only do not work, they can make your condition worse), the yellow column (essentially neutral) and the green column, medications your body should be able to metabolize.

“Your GeneSight results are….interesting,” she said. “Your body just can’t metabolize these medications. Usually, it only takes more than three to consider a person treatment resistant,” she said, knowing I’ve tried dozens. Over 90% of first line SSRIs and mood stabilizers are in the red column, and so far, even those in the green haven’t had any significant affect.

My provider is incredibly kind. She assured me that this isn’t my fault, that anyone who tells me or has told me that I’m not trying hard enough doesn’t see how much effort I put into getting better. They don’t see how I show up for every appointment, how I take meds as prescribed, how I journal, how I use a CPTSD workbook, and how I continue to ask about unconventional treatments. My next step is IFS and TMS. Fingers crossed.

She added, “This is NOT your fault. You can’t help this. You have science on your side.”

My first thought was, “Oh my god, if I can’t find something that works, this will always be my life, how will I survive my life?”

But my next thought was, “Oh my god, I’m fifty-one and I’m still here. Not a goddamn medication has worked, but I’m still here. I might be living for other people and for my animals, but I’m still alive.” Then, I told my daughter, “I think that means that I am actually strong.”

So, when I went to write a cento, I searched for poetry that echoed that sentiment, to know there’s something you can never truly, escape, but to choose life anyway.

This following cento combines the work of Mary Oliver, Louise Glück, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Aaron Smith, Jarod K. Anderson and Kim Addonizio.

I kind of hope you don’t relate, but if you do, you have me on your side.

A Therapist Tells Me I’m Treatment Resistant

This is me on drugs

prescribed by my doctor
as I try once more.

It’s Sunday all the time
and recess never comes.

I don’t know how to live my life,
but at least today I want to.

I’m not the only way 
the universe knows itself, 
I am a way and one day 
that way will be lost.

We live and then we don't.

I am aware of my heart: 
it opens and closes.

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

I did not expect to survive,
earth suppressing me.
I didn't expect
to waken again.

Hope surely knows,
escape is useless.
Still, hope will try.

Dear reader…

I have started my self-led (imposed?) MFA in Poetry. I am currently studying The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux as well as A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry (it’s not little) by Robert Hass.

My goal is to study and practice formal poetry. Some forms that I want to experiment with are:

Acrostic

Sestina

Cento

Villanele

Sonnet

Haiku

I’m not reading the craft books in a linear fashion, but going straight to the forms that most appeal to me.

The first form I decided to write is the acrostic poem. They will continue to be a work in progress, but I also really like them how they are, too.

Nova and Leon are my grandchildren. When I practice tarot, my card for Nova is The Star and the card for Leon is The Sun. If you saw the card and the children side by side, you would understand.

Nova

Now that you are here
	I can tell you how
Once, I watched a bee
	Dance on a
Violet and for the first time 
	I knew
A tiny surprise is a miracle.



Leon

Little did I know
          Your peach-fuzz 
Ears and fussy toes
          would launch me into
Orbit upon your arrival,
	whispering a solid prayer:
Never a lifetime without you.

One of my greatest regrets in life is having done a low residency MFA program (between 2006-2009) during one of the most chaotic, unstable periods of my life. Where I am today, at fifty-one, would be the perfect stage in my life for an MFA program. Instead of pursuing yet another expensive degree, I have developed my own MFA program to re-educate myself and hopefully, do some of the best writing of my life.

Back then, I chased degrees to avoid life and feel some sort of accomplishment trying to prove my worth. Instead, I ended up with an embarrassing amount of student loan debt and unprocessed trauma.

Here is a breakdown of all the reasons why it wasn’t the best time:

Year one, 2006-2007: Get married to someone I did not know well enough who turned out to be a raging alcoholic. At one point my husband pours cough syrup down my throat because I am having a panic attack.

My first-year mentor sent me an unhinged email because I was supposed to be majoring in poetry and I wanted to work on a prose piece. He also encouraged me to read more “North American writers” when I chose books by Latinx authors.

In his defense when it comes to the poetry focus, this is yet another reason I was not ready for an MFA program. I was all over the place when it came to genre and, had no real plan.

Oh, during this time I am also working at a headstart where more than half the kids were on behavior plans. We got kicked, hit, spit on, and one teacher ended up with a concussion because a four-year-old threw a chair at her head.

Year two, 2007-2008: Husband and I are roommates. My daughter becomes chronically ill. I can barely keep a job because she is sick and home so often.

In year two, they assigned me a new mentor, poet Lola Haskins. Lola is an ethereal, otherworldly, poet and human being. She is the best thing that came out of my MFA.

Halfway through 2007, a psychiatrist diagnoses me with bipolar disorder. My medications change, and change, and change until they discover a cocktail of psych meds that are mildly successful. I cannot work anymore. I work part-time for a while, and then, I end up having to depend on my husband who I already needed to leave and student loans.

Fall of that year, my husband and separate. He is with someone new and at the very end of the year, I meet A.

I move into transitional housing with my kids to Bainbridge Island to slowly get back on my feet.

Year 3, 2008-2009: I develop severe anemia due to heavy bleeding and almost end up having a blood transfusion. I can only work a couple of hours a day at schools and daycares. I end up having a procedure. I end up taking out even MORE student loans.

I graduated in August 2009. None of my family made it to my graduation, but my friend Kyle was there, as well as A.

Which leads me to where I am now…

***

It took ten years to reap the reward of my graduate degree. I got a job as a full-time English instructor at a community college in 2019--a dream job. This degree made my career possible.

I may have not gotten much out of it academically due to my own lack focus, preparedness and instability, but I met the most beautiful human beings. I watched my peers publish poetry books, novels, short story collections. I watched them win awards. The prolific poet and founder of Two Sylvia’s Press graduated from the same MFA program, as well as award winning fiction author April Ayers Lawson. I saw what was possible.

I wasn’t prepared for this program, I didn’t do my best work, but I was introduced to a multitude of writers who inspired me, supported, and encouraged me.

***

I’ve mostly writen free verse, but through my own curriculum, I want to teach myself a variety of forms, challenge myself and become a better poet, because I owe this to my younger self.

My self-led “degree” is 100% focused on poetry, with a mix of poetry books and craft books on poetry. I will share the list below.

My plan is to share a little bit about each poet and their collection, write a reflection, and share personal connections. I hope to create visual art inspired by their writing as well.

These are some of the poets I am planning to study. This is an exhaustive list, and I do not expect to read a book by every single author, but I have given myself a variety to choose from.

(The authors with a book title are ones I have already read):

• Sage Herrin, The Shattered Muse

• Andrea Gibson, You Better Be Lightning

• Louise Gluck, The Wild Iris

• Mary Oliver, Dream Work

• Warsan Shire, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in her Head.

• Morgan Parker, Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night

• Donika Kelly, The Renunciations

• Susan Niemi, Yoni Provenance

• Evie Shockley

• Tracy K. Smith

• Franny Choi

• Mathea Harvey

• Lucille Clifton

• Audre Lorde

• Joy Harjo

• Natalie Diaz

• Nikki Giovanni

• Olivia Gatwood

• Diane Suess

• Doriane Laux

• Marie Howe

• Sharon Olds

• Olena Kalytak

• Marge Piercey

• Anne Carson

• Clare Pollard

• Jenny Zhang

• Megan Falley

• Elizabeth Alexander

• Eileen Myles

• Patricia Lockwood

• Charlotte Boulay

• Alicia Jo Robins

• Daphne Gottieb

Craft books:

• The Poetry Handbook, Mary Oliver

• The Poet’s Companion, Kim Addonizio

• How Dare We! Write, Sherry Quan Lee

• A Little Book on Form, Robert Hass

• The Poetry Home Repair Manual, Ted Kooser

• In the Palm of Your Hand, Steve Kowit

• Poetry as Spellcasting, Tamil Beyer, Destiny Hemphill & Lisbeth White

Anyone who met her found her just as unforgettable as I do. Her sass. Her intelligence. Her unapologetic nature. Her commanding presence. I’m talking of course about my soul-dog Schatzi, a Miniature Dachshund who left this often rotten world for greener pastures five years ago this past March.

Every Dia de Los Muertos, I create an ofrenda not only for Schatzi but for Suzi, Jaime, and most recently, Biscuit. But it started with Schatzi because well, everything started with her.

It was 2013 and my niece’s grandfather had passed leaving behind a local celebrity: Schatzi, the girl who saved and blessed his life for seven years. I’ll never forget the first time I took her to the beach, how someone recognized her and immediately asked, “Is that Larry’s dog?!”

After Larry died his son initially planned to keep her. But he asked me go dog sit for a long weekend while he went out of town. In the first fifteen minutes I knew we belonged together and so did she. I can’t explain it. I would call it mind reading, but I think the closest I can get is soul knowing, or spirit speak. We both just knew she wasn’t going back.

Sure enough, when the son arrived to pick her up, he admitted that he wasn’t in a position to care for her and asked if I wanted to keep her. I’ll never forget that feeling. That year I was recovering from a series of a events that turned my life upside down and not in a good way. I had just moved back to my chosen home, having left behind a job and community I loved. But in that moment I felt a reconnection to myself, to my intuition. Meanwhile, Schatzi looked at me from the passenger seat of the car with an expression that said, “Well, duh, bitch. Of course I’m coming home with you. Where’s my cheese?”

I took Schatzi with me everywhere. To work. Into stores. On trips. People just assumed if I was visiting, so was Schatzi. A friend of mine reminded me of how one time I picked her up and told her she had to sit in the back seat because Schatzi INSISTED on riding shotgun. (God, I’m so embarrassed!)

Schatzi hated kids and other dogs. She loved cats. She loved me most of all. But her love came with bite and I don’t mean literally. Schatzi treated me like a puppy who needed correction and boundaries. She modeled confidence and self-assurance. Two things I have never really had and still struggle with.

While living near Port Towsend (I’ll be writing about “home” later), our favorite thing to do was to go to a local beach together. Schatzi climbed all over the driftwood sniffing and investigating and if I caught her looking out for me as I waded in the freezing Puget Sound water, she looked away, as if, she didn’t want me to know.

One time at the beach I was sitting cross legged with her on my lap when a woman showed up with two unleashed, large pitbulls. They ran straight towards us and I froze…Schatzi however did not. I am a freezer and a fawner, and that day I found out what I should have already known: She was a fighter.

I don’t think I can ever mimic the sound that came out of her tiny 10lb body. It was gutteral and primal. All this to say, the moment the two dogs were within a foot of us, she went ape shit and they went running back to their mom, literally with their tails between their legs and crying. Their mom said, “Oh yeah, watch out for my viscious pitbulls.” And maybe I should have been embarrassed. But I wasn’t. I was in awe. To be so little and so fierceless. It was just one of dozens of examples of her courage, strength, and protective nature.

Schatzi was full of surprises. Like, the time we had a mouse in our trailer and it ran over my daughter’s cat’s paws (now THAT was embarrassing) and Schatzi immediately chased it, shook it, and sent it to its next incarnation. She looked at all of us as if to say, “Want something done you gotta do it yourself.”

I don’t want to write about the day I lost her. All I’ll say is that she lived to be almost fifteen, I held her in arms till her last breath, and I have missed her every single day since.

The last couple of years have been so brutal. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like with her. I think she would have been disappointed in me a lot, as I have disappointed myself in devastating ways. But, I also know she would never stop steering me in the right direction, one towards self-respect and self-love, even if it eluded me every single time.

Schatzi’s been on mind the last couple of days because on Monday, before the end of March, the same month she died, I was finally able to go back to our beach. Before that I had sat up above a grocery shop and written a poem for her, sobbing in front of a room full of strangers. I wrote about what I was going to do at the beach: write our names in the sand, “Schatzi and Kristy were here.”

When I actually went to the beach and started writing a dog came out of nowhere, trampling over my name. The owner follow behind. I told her what I was doing and I instantly got choked up. “We will leave you be,” she said. And I wondered if this was another stick it to you moment from Schatzi since it was my name that got erased.

But later, as I sat on the driftwood on the part of the beach we so often spent time, I read her poem out loud and to the sea, and the sky. A man with a dog walked past and I thought about stopping, but I didn’t. I kept reading the poem out loud with tears streaming down my face.

The man’s dog, a Husky mix with piercing blue eys, started to pull hard towards me. I asked, “Can I say hi?” The dog dad seemed hesitant, “He’s not really good with strangers. He’s very timid. He doesn’t go up to people.” He said this as his dog pulled so hard he finally got to me, wagged his tail and sniffed me.

“He never, ever does that. He doesn’t like strangers,” the man said, “there must be something about you that makes him feel comfortable.

I told the man what I was doing. We both agreed Schatzi sent his dog, Tosh, to let me know she could hear me.

His dog had saved him too, after his friend died of cancer.

“Love is a four legged word,” he said, then, “Take care of yourself, okay?”

I nodded. It was time to go.

I know there are people who will never, ever understand what it is like to love a soul like this, one that just happens to come in stocky, feisty little mini dachshund. There are people who don’t understand the love of a dog, or any other animal, and how it changes you for the better. This is not for those people. This is for you. The reader who knows soulmates come in all shapes, sizes, and species.

Here is my poem to Schatzi and some pictures:

Here Again

I can’t say that you were glued to my ankles,
but I can write that you never left my side.

I can’t say that you didn’t scold me when I
got home late, that you didn’t stand in the doorway
not letting me in until I heard all about it.

But I can write about how you let me wipe 
the tears off my face with the velvet of your
ears, and even though minutes later you’d
let out a heavy sigh, as you plopped down a 
sharp distance from me, you also knew 
when to stay close.

I can write about the beach that was just ours,
it was just ours because you watched from the
driftwood while I waded in the near freezing
waters of the Puget Sound, pretending you weren’t,
until I called your name and you shed your aloofness.

I can’t write about how often you visit me 
in my dreams, because you don’t visit often
enough, and when you do, you’re always in such
a hurry, rushing back, I think to the old man
whose life you blessed for seven years.

But I can write about how I hold onto 
the image of your silhouette as you leave me
once more and when I wake, I hold the dog
beside me closer to my chest. 

I can tell you how I’ve made room on my
lap for a Pekingese, a Pomeranian, a YorkiePoo,
a Doberman and even several cats.

I can’t say that any of them have replaced
you, no matter how much I carry them like
children, no matter how often I kiss them,
curl my body against them, and sob, 
imagining the day I will lose them, too. 

You were never my child, but my mother.

Your soul has never come back to me, 
dressed in a different breed. 

Lately though, I think about the blonde dog 
of my youth, the one my parents cruelly ripped
from my arms.

Maybe she came back to me, through you,
older, wiser, strong enough to nurture me 
back into myself, so I could forgive the little girl 
powerless to save her. 

Maybe she wanted me to know I was
worth returning to.

Maybe. 

Or maybe you were just you:
bossy, intolerant, moaning at the
insult of being called more human than
dog, knowing full well who wins
at that game.

But today I stand on our beach again.
I pick up rocks and driftwood.
I let the tears fall for you, as
they have for years, as they will forever.

I tattoo our names in the wet sand:
Schatzi and Kristy were here.
We still are. 

Recently, my daughter asked me if I had received the literary magazine I’d been waiting for, the one that features my latest essay.

“It should be here by Friday,” I told her, then I added, “I can’t believe I’m still writing.”

I recited some of the worst things people, especially men, have said about my writing.

Her eyes widened. And again I said to her, “I can’t believe I’m still doing this.”

I told her how proud I was of this particular piece about my mother and how excited I’d been to share it with my now ex-partner. I thought he would be proud, too, and that he would appreciate how I wrote about him in a positive light.

He read it and said nothing. I finally asked him what he thought and he all but rolled his eyes.

“How long are you going to process this stuff, huh? When are you going to write about something different? How much validation do you need?”

I was nothing short of devastated. I told him I had actually never written about it in this form, where I also recognize all the beautiful things about my mother. He said I should write more about the good stuff.

Without telling him, I submitted my essay to a magazine I thought would be a good fit. I got the quickest rejection ever. The editor, a man, told me he just couldn’t get past the essay’s second-person point of view.

For a moment, I thought my partner was right. Because it wasn’t so much the editor’s rejection that hurt, I have enough rejections to wall paper my entire apartment and then some. It was that feeling that this essay somehow didn’t deserve a home, that I was delusional for thinking this piece was something to be proud of.

I thought that…for a moment. I looked for more calls for submissions and submitted to a few more places. When I saw the editor’s email in my inbox, I took a deep breath, prepared to read that yet another editor couldn’t make the leap of accepting a piece written from that point of view.

Instead, I opened the email and found that the editor, a woman, had written, “We would like to accept your essay for publication.”

I was gleeful. I shared the good news with my then partner and he appeared almost disappointed. I think he was hoping to prove himself right.

There’s a reason why I’ve made it a point to mention whether the editor was a man or a woman. Much of the harshest criticism, the kind that could have destroyed my confidence and motivation to write, has come from men. But that doesn’t mean all of my experiences were negative.

In fact, it was my first college English teacher, Wes, who took me aside after the final day of class and encouraged me to pursue writing. I was shocked.

I was twenty-five at the time with a two-year old and five-year old. The rest of the class was mostly made up of teens, sixteen to eighteen, who were in the Running Start program. I wasn’t well-read. I grew up in a cult, married young, and I had become a mother by the time I was nineteen. Reading wasn’t at the top of my list of priorities. I felt terribly behind and deeply embarrassed.

Week after week, Wes would come in and slap down a book by some writer I’d never heard of. This straight, white, cisgender man, who resembled Thor, happened to be the first person to introduce me to Sandra Cisneros, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Banana Yoshimoto, and Yasunari Kawabata.

Wes didn’t hold back and he could be unflinching at times. But it came from a place of wanting me to succeed. I could feel that.

Later, I transferred to a four-year college and took my first class focused on poetry only. It was in this class where I experienced the words I continued to hear for years from men:

“This would be interesting if it wasn’t about you.”

“Write more about your redheaded girlfriend. She sounds more interesting.”

“I wish your story focused more on your kids and less about you.”

Or, in all capitals, “I DON’T GET IT.”

The next year, I took a class from a well-known author, Bill Ransom. Like my first teacher, he was honest, but not harsh. He was encouraging, not dismissive. He gave me a list of publishers he thought would be a good fit for my writing. I submitted and got rejected from all of them. But, it didn’t stop me.

After graduating from Evergreen State College, I got the nerve to enter an MFA program. Most of our mentors were semi-famous, successful writers, and authors. We attended workshops, lectures, and readings. The workshops were merciless.

When I first arrived on campus for the ten-day residency, the first thing I noticed was the lack of ethnic and racial diversity. I believe I was one of only three students who brought that kind of diversity to the program.

The second thing that grabbed my attention was a woman asking, “Who wrote Coco?”

I raised my hand, unsure what type of response awaited me. Originally, Coco was a short story about a little girl with a sentient third arm. It eventually became a novella featured in my first book. I was pleasantly surprised when she told me how much she loved it and that it was the most original story she read from students in the program.

Then came the day when “Coco” would be workshopped. If you’ve been in a writer’s workshop you’re probably familiar with the traditional format. The group reads your work and then each participant goes around sharing their thoughts and critiques. Meanwhile, the writer must remain completely silent. The critique doesn’t happen in collaboration or dialogue with you; it happens at you, or to you.

In her book, The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, Felicia Rose Chavez explains this model in the following manner:

The traditional model silences the author during the workshop while participants compete over what’s “right” and “wrong” with the text. (Chavez 11)

So, I sat there while two men tore apart my story and insisted it was about penis envy. They laughed about it, like I wasn’t even there. Meanwhile, I swallowed down the lump in my throat, not able to defend my writing, or challenge their ridiculous interpretation. One of these men would go on to write a series of vampire books, striking a multi-million dollar contract, while the other, my first year mentor, became frustrated because I wanted to focus on Latinx writers and encouraged me to read more, “North American authors.” He would eventually write me a scathing email because I wanted to write fiction as well as poetry. He completely tore me down and behaved as if I’d killed a kitten in front of him. The email was very much, “After ALL I have done for you and your poetry?!” But in reality, 90% of his feedback was, “I don’t get it,” and “What is this even about?”

How I kept writing after all of this still baffles me. Luckily, I had reaffirming experiences that counteracted the negative responses. I discovered A Word With You Press, founded by Thornton Sully. He became my biggest supporter and cheerleader. I won two of his writing contests and he eventually published my first book, The Gift of an Imaginary Girl, which included Coco, a novella about generational trauma and harmful family secrets, not penises.

While publication brought joy, it also brought a whole new category of reactions, some surprising, some humbling, some unintentionally hilarious. For instance, a friend of mine loved The Gift of an Imaginary Girl so much she suggested it for her monthly book club. At the end of the month she planned to have me over to her house for an author’s reception and a Q & A. I was working at the local indie bookstore at the time and watched as members of the book club stopped by and picked up the book.

One day my friend walked in, her head down looking apologetic. Turns out the rest of the women didn’t dislike my book, they hated it. She asked me if I would still come over and talk to them about how to get published. I politely declined.

Other criticism, all these specifically from men included:

“Do you really think your book is good enough to be published?”

“I hate the cover of your book.”

“You should have had more people proofread your book.”

“Isn’t that just a vanity press? You’re not really published, are you?”

Most recently, I was at a wedding reception sitting next to a relative. We were talking about what was going on in our lives. I told her that Beyond the Veil Press, the same press that published my book of poems Heretic, was publishing my second collection, Shapeshifters, early next year. She smiled and asked what it was about.

“It’s a love letter to maligned identities and marginalized communities, mostly focused on transgender, BIPOC, and LGBTQIA.”

Her smile faded instantly.

“I want happy books. Only happy books! The world is way, way too serious. Let’s all just be happy!”

After a few minutes of shoveling wedding cake into my mouth, I moved to a different table. Talk about on the nose!

I will never be a commercial success. I’m not a particularly prolific writer. I don’t have regular writing practice and my writing is definitely not for everyone. I am however audacious in my desire to continue to express myself even when no one is listening or reading what I have to say, or just doesn’t like it. Maybe even hates it.

There are countless stories of now renowned, famous, award winning writers whose writing was rejected repeatedly. Rejection and criticism can be a gift. You learn to discern between dialogue that helps to hone and reveal your voice and criticism that’s meant to silence you. It takes a lot of nerve not only to write, but to be vulnerable enough to share it with the world.

Everyone’s reason for writing and sharing their work is different. What you write about doesn’t have to be deep and heavy. It doesn’t have to save the world, or sell millions.

I write to understand who I am, what I believe, and finally, to connect with others: the weirdos, the outcasts, the unpopular, and the misunderstood. I write because for me writing is an act of freedom.

Lately, I’ve been thinking there are multitudes of loneliness. Each one comes with its own shade and sound and texture, its own flavor even. Each one collects something different from us.

For instance, I remember the inner world of my childhood. Galaxies upon galaxies, my belly full of stars. I wanted to speak, but what planets would I let loose from my mouth and who could possibly understand?

Some loneliness is lyrical, easy to romanticize, to marry with melancholy until we dissolve into its chorus, forgetting how it started.

I think of the loneliness that comes with having no visitors. What it feels like to clean your home, everything in its spot even though you’re not expecting guests. It’s a restless sort of loneliness, that keeps you fluffing pillows and straightening out knicknacks.

Then there’s the loneliness you feel when you’re surrounded by people, but they aren’t your people. This is a damp, cold loneliness. The loneliness of not belonging or feeling understood.

I think about the loneliness of motherhood. One moment your children want to sleep with you after having a nightmare, they write you misspelled mother’s day cards about how you’re the best mother in the world, and they mean it. Later they hate you, and blame you for everything. Eventually, maybe they forgive you, but they still leave you and your house and your silence and your empty table and empty arms. This though, is a loneliness I can learn to live with because it’s devastating but complete.

There’s the loneliness of being in a toxic relationship, not being able to tell anyone how bad things are because you’ve convinced yourself this is love, and if you say the words to your friends, your sister, your therapist, all the spinning plates will fall to the ground and shatter and you’ll want to carve yourself with their sharp edges.

I know the loneliness of creatives who spend days and nights pouring themselves into their poems and songs and paintings and plays hoping to reach someone, to connect through vulnerability and self-expression, only to be met with silence or apathy or judgment. This loneliness reminds me of the time I touched an electric fence and even as it shocked me, I couldn’t let go. I didn’t know my body was a conduit. I didn’t know that I’d be electric all of my life, reaching for a hand to share the voltage.

Someone will try to tell me the difference between aloneness and loneliness as if I don’t already know. As if I don’t love the peace of aloneness, the grace of aloneness, the necessity and nature of a chosen solitude. We can be alone for so long, we think we’ve healed ourselves, by ourselves.

I spent so many years in self-imposed isolation, sure that I was healing. Only to realize what I was really doing was hiding. It’s as if I sprained my ankle and convinced myself it had mended because the pain had disappeared. But really I had just stopped walking altogether.

Tonight, I met with my people, my new community over Zoom. Afterwards, we sent each other photos of our homes to feel a little less alone. We shared our walls and bookshelves, our posters and our choice of lighting. We visited each other’s homes even though we live on opposite coasts. We saw and we felt seen.

This is loneliness recalibrated. This is the transmutation of aloneness. This is connection.

Thirty nine years ago, I followed girls and women, not one of them nearly as young as me, into a locker room and put on a one-piece swimsuit covered in an oversized Hanes white t-shirt. I walked out into a junior high auditorium filled with hundreds of people toward a rented, above ground pool. I don’t remember who stood behind me, but in front of me was a gorgeous, seventeen-year-old girl who towered over me, caramel skin and ringlets of hair framing her face. She was the talk of the day because she wore a black swimsuit and no cover-up. No doubt she got a talking to later that afternoon.

When it was my turn I trembled inside. I swallowed prayer after prayer, that I wouldn’t slip and fall on the wet floor, pass out, or get my first period. Once I was in the water, a man, a stranger, put his hand on my back, and asked me two questions, “Have you repented of your sins, dedicated yourself to Jehovah, and accepted his way of salvation through Jesus Christ?” and “Do you understand that your baptism identifies you as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses in association with Jehovah’s organization?” But he asked them in Spanish, “¿Se ha arrepentido de sus pecados, se ha dedicado a Jehová y ha aceptado su camino de salvación por medio de Jesucristo?” y “¿Entiende que su bautismo lo identifica como testigo de Jehová en asociación con la organización de Jehová?”

I answered twice, “sí, sí.”

I was eleven.

What were my sins?

I felt jealous of my sister and wished I had her golden hair and her strength. (Envy)

I watched MTV at my cousin’s house and thought about boys. And then girls, and then boys. And these weren’t the thoughts I was allowed to think. (Lust)

Sometimes I was allowed to walk to a little store called Tayons and I would buy Ding Dongs with my monthly $5 allowance and scarf them down before I got home because I didn’t want to share. (Gluttony and Greed)

My mother let me get attached to another dog again, then had my father discard it somewhere in the country while I went to school. Later, she laughed as I cried because she couldn’t believe I was so upset over a “stupid” dog. I pressed my face into my pillow and screamed, then I started pummeling it with my fists thinking of my mother, wishing I could tell her to her face, “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!” (Wrath)

Some days I wouldn’t leave my room. Instead, I listened to the same cassette tape over and over again of songs I managed to record off the radio. Play rewind, play rewind, play rewind, while my bed remained unmade and my clothes lay on the floor. (Sloth)

Once I felt embarrassed to wear a dress my mother sewed for me. I wished I had more store-bought clothes like my peers. (Pride)

Turns out I had plenty to be sorry for. Plenty that required forgiveness.

I can’t remember the sensation of being underwater, but I can remember what it felt like to rise above the surface, those awful fluorescent lights in my eyes. I can remember thinking, Now, now I have done it. God can love me now. Maybe my dad, too. Because straight A’s and quiet obedience weren’t enough to garner his attention and definitely not his affection. But maybe God would have a talk with him. And maybe my mother would be happier, too. Maybe she wouldn’t need to pray so many tearful prayers, or talk about how much she wanted to go back to her country, how trapped she felt here with us and because of us.

When I left the cult I was raised in at twenty-five, a divorced mother with children ages two and five, an elder of the church (they say “organization,” which makes it even creepier) said, “Are you sure you want to do this? Are you sure you want to burn bridges? You’re alone with two kids. You’re going to need help.”

I told him, “I would rather live in a cardboard box on the street with both my kids than live a lie for one more minute.”

And he surprised me when he said, “I respect your honesty.”

Because it would have been easier to fake it and he would never have told a soul as long as I did everything I was supposed to do. He would keep my secret, that I no longer believed. It was the Great Unsaid.

He called me the night they announced that I had left the “organization.” An elder would stand on stage, address the entire congregation, and pronounce me spiritually dead to the only community I had ever known. Days later I would see “sisters” and “brothers” in grocery stores and gas stations, even my own aunt, and it was like that awful game kids play where they pretend you are invisible. But this wasn’t a game. They shunned me. They shunned my babies. I ceased to exist because I had broken a holy contract, an eternal promise I had made to God and the organization when I was eleven. A promise I was expected to keep for this life and the one we were promised after it, as long as we passed all of the tests.

A promise I made when I was eleven.

I was eleven.

I was fucking eleven fucking years the fuck old.

Fuck.

It was 1986. What were other eleven-year-olds doing on that Saturday, October 11, 1986? Were they watching cartoons? Were they riding their bikes? What were other eleven-year-olds doing to be loved?

On October 11th, 1986 when I was only eleven years old I made a pact with the Almighty in front of hundreds of people, my friends and family included. A commitment I would be held to for the rest of my life, a cage and a covenant. And when they served me my punishment, they were punishing a child, a terrified little girl, still so fresh and present inside of twenty-five-year old me. Underdeveloped, under-protected and now, unloved. Acceptance retracted. Affection abolished. All with just a few words spoken into a microphone in a room full of congregants wearing polyester suits and staring at their watches.

A fifty-year-old heathen now, a Bruja, a feminist, a humanist, a foul-mouthed Phoenix, I look back and I am so proud of that little girl. (Uh oh, Pride!) I don’t pity her any longer. I don’t wish to save her the way I have for so many years. Because now I think, What a brave soul. She walked among grown women, a prepubescent child, let a man push her underwater and rose up believing with all of her might that this would be the most sacred moment of her entire life. And maybe it was sacred, but not for the reasons she felt in her eleven-year-old heart.

It was misguided courage, but it was still courage. She was willing to promise herself to the unknown, to trust God, or the Universe as it were, and plunge into the depths of faith, a hand at her back or not.

So, today I celebrate that little girl. Because for decades she has offered me apologies for the trap she set, as if she still needs forgiveness. As if she knew we would someday take the fruit from the forbidden tree and finally, come to know ourself.

Today is sacred. I’m wearing red, my favorite color. Tonight I’ll sit with witches and ponder the divinatory meanings of the cards we spread before us. The cards speak, but in the end, we decide what we believe. We decide where to put our faith.

The other day I talked to a longtime friend about a little bird who visits her daily.

My friend said, “See how boring my life is, that I notice a little bird who comes to visit me on my porch?”

But I saw this differently. So I told her, “It isn’t boring. If your life were still the same, you never would have noticed that little bird who visits you every single day.”

My friend has been working since she was about ten years old. I estimate that before all of this happened, a good 80% of her time was spent tending to the sick, the dying, and the forgotten. Her life has never been still, until now. For the past several years she has been a fulltime caregiver for her son who suffered a massive brain injury. This upended everything from her daily routines and rituals, to her short and long-term goals, to her very sense of self and identity.

I told her how animals know. They come by to remind us. That little bird knows she needs the reminder that her life isn’t boring right now, it’s different. It’s forced her to slow down, and that can be incredibly uncomfortable for someone who has worked 10-12 hour days most of her adult life. But I do believe that experiences like the one with the little bird are reminders of what we so often miss when we are caught up in all of the static and the noise of our day to day lives.

I told her about my cat Rusty. Rusty is more than a cat. Though, cats are always more than “a cat.” I truly believe they are transcendent beings, one paw in our world, one paw in another. Rusty belonged to a young woman in an RV where I lived for several years. In 2020, smack in the middle of the pandemic Rusty came to me. Every morning he would sit on the steps of my trailer, and I would sit there with him, in the heat, him offering the underside of his chin, me scratching him. And every day I would carry him back home, only for him to boomerang back to me.

His owner, a young woman about eighteen or nineteen years old, asked if something was “going on” at home. I shrugged. She said, “Rusty goes where he’s needed.”

She told me Rusty was a kitten when she found him, on the verge of dying from a respiratory infection. She nursed him back to health. She told me this as we sat in the grass in front of my RV, masks on our faces, Rusty on his back purring, while she rubbed his belly.

“Bet you never seen a cat let you do that huh?” And she smiled. “Yeah, I raised him right.”

But she knew her time as Rusty’s mama was ending. She had three other pets in her RV and was about to be evicted. So, after multiple attempts of mine to avoid it, I brought Rusty home, and he’s been with me ever since, purring as I write, a robust, 17lb house cat whose best friend is my Doberman Husky mix, Twix.

Rusty goes where he’s needed. I didn’t think I needed Rusty.

Rusty came to me when the world both stood still and cracked open with marches and revolution. If it hadn’t been for that summer of quarantine and isolation, I never would have noticed the cat hiding under the trailer, refusing to go home. Rusty, the most extroverted, friendly and even nurturing (he has a habit of “adopting” stray kittens and raising them as his own), taught me that even in the time, no, especially in the time of pandemic and pandemonium, I could not continue to “hide” and avoid connection as a way of keeping myself safe.

Rusty ushered in friendships with neighbors who are still important people in my life, five years later. He was like a bridge or a portal, one who connected me to others when I was so ready to stay disconnected.

And this has me thinking about how inspiration, connection and healing often favor stillness.

What more has gone unseen, how many little birds and Rustys might we have missed?

Because the thing is, we are told over and over and over again, “No one is coming to save you.”

And yet. And yet the bird. And yet Rusty. And yet the tree I named Clarissa. And yet the Progressive Insurance agent who listened as I cried storms and told me to keep my good heart.

It’s true that when I was in my worst moment of crisis no winged giant appeared, no Messiah, no knight in shining armor. It’s true that I had to steel myself and tell myself dozens of times a day, “It’s okay. You can do this.” And I did.

But I think maybe these small, holy avatars are devotedly seeking to save us every day, maybe every hour, maybe every minute even. But the traffic of our lives makes for little opportunity to see and be seen in the most sacred of ways.

We cannot always be still, and more often than not, it feels impossible. But maybe we can at least be intentional in making room for these moments to happen.

So, say thank you to the little bird, and thank you to the cat who brushes up against you, and thank you to the tree whose dry leaves crackle under your feet. Maybe we don’t need saviors. Maybe what we really need are reminders.

**This piece of mine was originally featured in 5x5 Keeping the Dream Aloft: Five Writers Five Stories Each**

I believe every writer is motivated by something uniquely their own. For me, writing is a way to overcome fear, loneliness and to connect with others. In my case, the fear of being judged, of being hurt, of being abandoned, must be met with absolute vulnerability. When others connect with that vulnerability, I know that the voice inside my head that tells me I’m alone, is a lie.

My motivation has been to find a language for pain that doesn’t leave the reader feeling hopeless. That doesn’t leave me feeling hopeless. How can I express rejection, emotional wounds, and spiritual violation in an authentic, genuine manner, without being unnecessarily brutal to my readers? How do I find that middle place?

In the end, I do not write about what I feel, I feel what I’m writing. A reader can sense the writer’s voice if the writer is trying too hard, if they are only mimicking an emotion. The most powerful works in my opinion, are those that evoke empathy, that follow the natural curves of loss and redemption.

I don’t for a moment believe myself to be a great storyteller. Sometimes plot evades me. Some people will read my writing and ask, What’s the point? That is what I most often expect. But what surprises me is when someone connects with the language and recognizes something deeply personal to them within my writing. It will always surprise me.