LOVER

Checklist/Am I The Art

1. Of course you leave salt trails
2. Transforming ruckus
3. Where there is space for deepening
4. I am resting my eyes
5. It's time to come out as a spiritual leader
6. How do we begin to practice being different?
7. Vulnerability and honesty
8. Octavia Butler
9. but we already knew/these days of ashes
10. Individually and collectively
11. Listening to solutions
12. Commitment to self-transformation
13. What I mean when I say is
14. Don't practice to feel good
15. Practice to feel more
16. Assessment of fractal
17. In stories of how my ancestors survived
18. Know there is chaos
19. For why and how we
20. Internalize the world
21. We are about to enter a core  
22. Women saying these words
23. Death and the big cycles
24. The study of the soma
25. Listen from the bottom up
26. Alice Coltrane
27. The fragile human
28. Meteorite
29. Sparking hard like flint
30. Can you build a fire?
31. Fire runs through all of this
32. For me
33. Degrees

passed

I thought that I was doing fine but I still got you on my mind

 

In Remembrance of Hurricane Katrina

Come Home

A Junebug Productions/Visible Productions Film | Directed by Kiyoko McCrae and Jason Foster | Edited by Jason Foster | Written and performed by Frederick "Hollywood" Delahoussaye | Director of Photography: Paavo Hanninen | Assistant Camera: John Carlo-Monti | Production Assistant: Remy Williams | Starring Asana Olusola | Music by free feral |

Checklist/13 Years

1. My heart won't quit its gallop
2. A huge bird
3. in her long black dress
4. My body hung below me like a stranger (trauma
5. I am the water brought inside by flowers (recovery
6. This is how we slept since the beginning
7. Burn me, fearless 
8. laugh out loud, feel the fire
9. I promise something carnival
10. arms and legs of blood/running toward death
11. Don't move, don't you dare take a step
12. What is your name really
13. I keep the bears in hiding
14. I have been still and listened
15. turned out to be an owl
16. You don't own me or anything
17. Rose from the kid to the hero
18. Of course I believe
19. everything experienced by little girls
20. of the earth/clouds in sky (you don't get to know me
21. Ain't that right, sister?
22. It's a thousand years forward and back
23. and I have no words for you
24. Certain magics know to be silent
25. Butter-full moon
26. Cut wide open singing
27. I'm just a dream
28. Ancestral vision/their sights on me
29. All is impermanence
30. Write what happened to my body
31. What closed, write open
32. In this, omniscient 
33. Degrees

what I remember (13 years)

The crushing spin of trauma and people in the world failing. A thick hot elixir of fear ballooning the body, bravery the bones holding it all up. Raw courage and loneliness, gut-wrenching, compassion-building loneliness. I remember all kinds of kindnesses and cruelties, the whole mess of humanity careening around non-stop. The oddest surprises! The family bible that had been underwater for weeks, the only inheritance from my mother, filled with the only photographs I have of my parents, surfacing in the great rumble and muck of my destroyed home untouched. Complete strangers posting $25 checks sent to my FEMA hotel. And family and old friends abandoning me, family and old friends rejecting me outright, utterly cruel. I learned the true way that the lived embodiment of trauma is literally too much for most people. Oh, for the privilege of it being too much -

 

 

 

ROUND N ROUND

just give me one good kiss

NOBODY

And Coming Down

In this life, you will hit

banks of fog and walls

made of rocks bound together with

mud and straw -

identities. I grit my teeth -

listening -

 

Get with our bodies we used as ashtrays, get with

the fever to escape out of one's self every

day, the restless

scanning with the precious, delicious

aches to be

be more

other, over. It's no wonder spirals

are everything. Expect that being

 

isn't what we ever expected

it would, could or should be -

it won't, infinity. Acceptance

 

never was anything I could just

do, oppressions

I created were almost worse than the ways 

of the world, gifts

cracking heads wide open, skin

drifts off. Accepting

 

reality doesn't mean I eat it, a thick druggy

milkshake or poisoned scallop or even

his tongue - when I let go

 

I'm let go - I get to learn. There's something

special to waking up to dread, in

getting bored with giving

the same thing and getting

the same thing back, something brave

to confession. There's a skill

 

intrinsic/I have - after

tantrums, settled grief, bound

bones, salved wounds - I can always

change. The meaning isn't

in the things

but the being

 

Into The Woods   photo ©EUnderwood

 

 

by invitation only

a glimpse into the great honor I'm given when I'm invited to glimpse into this culture

Black Indians, Mardi Gras Indians, Guardians of The Flame, Crystal Feather Ceremony, Mardi Gras Indian Hall of Fame - 

I've never been surrounded by so much New Orleans royalty, so many Big Chiefs, so many Big Queens, culture bearers, true guardians of all that holds this city together, all that pulls it from suffering to dream - 

sacred streets, sacred beings, they carry the medicine that heals me - it's the charm of my New Orleans life

my heart is wide open with gratitude -

how I wind up in the center like this? I don't even know though I know - 

 

 

 

you are the one you have been waiting for

adrienne marie brown