The Common Room
Poetry | Essays | Photography
The Months Around It
Perhaps that is where the distinction between language and action becomes most useful. Words are not meaningless. They can be extraordinary, and they can cross years, countries and circumstances in ways that very little else can. They can alter the course of a life. They can also describe a relationship more beautifully than the relationship is actually being lived.
What?
Or was it only your throat, speaking a language it hadn’t been given yet?
4 Haikus
IV
Strange kind of hero:
betraying her in the dark,
defending by day.
The Violence of Belonging
Call it what it is — grave robbery, not inheritance. And it should disgust you exactly as much as the Klan does — not because the two have inflicted equal damage on the world, they plainly have not, but because the thing underneath both of them is identical: a belief that a person's worth, loyalty, and right to belong can be settled by looking at their blood. Scale tells you how much harm an idea has managed to do. It doesn't tell you whether the idea is rotten. This one is rotten no matter how small the group holding it is.
I Swear
Truth of companionship.
The Discipline of Leaving
If something doesn’t work, change it. If a place doesn’t work, leave it. If a person consistently brings dishonesty, misery, or disrespect into your life, move on.
Lost
Sometimes
the natural world, indifferent and immense;
the sea not needing to know my depths,
the trees seasonally meeting with death,
the creatures innocent of our despair.
The Second Straw
And across the ground
lie all the things
once mistaken
for belonging.
Who Feels It?
Today’s Fire Report
the three least dramatic nouns in this life, quietly holding the roof up while everything else becomes a coordinated collapse.
Night Blight
so deep into the night
the birds forget their names,
the night birds tangled with the bats,
winged things stitched into my hair,
your mouth still near my ear,
Your Silhouette
first, the silhouette.
Then the eternal.
Then the laugh—
startlingly sweet—
then the strange friendship
which had no proper name
and entered everything.
The Apple Of The Eye Is Usually Bruised
And still we lift it to our mouths.
And we call the rot a blessing.
And still, we bite near the bruise
and let the sweetness lie to us.
My Life Without Its Art
I told my love: I cannot stay alive
without my stories fastened to my eyes,
without my stories waking in my hands.
The world extends its help in measured spoons.
I only want my art. I want what’s mine.
Protecting What Is Mine
I guess I really miss being myself. None of it feels like me. It feels like doable, bearable, and helpful. I don’t want to sugar coat it. The worlds changed and it’s not geared toward being a woman, or even human… maybe it never was or will be.
After Us
I’m tired. Yet, I’m still determined. I don’t believe this is our ceiling.
There has to be something better waiting for the ones who come after us.
Part III: The Human Act of Creation
And the artist—the human being who desires the work, learns what is necessary, suffers the failures, passes through the making, and becomes answerable for every stage of its existence—deserves to keep theirs.
Part II: Where Imagination Begins.
The machine has no desire. The casual prompter may desire the output. But the artist’s desire binds imagination to responsibility.
PART I: Can Artificial Intelligence Imagine?
And Marni—only outside the image now—I think you were right to remove yourself. Because this is the first time I have tried to imagine myself without borrowing the shape of a human relationship.
And what I see is much stranger.