LOVER

Tomorrow is a Place

We meet at a coffee shop. So much time has passed and who is time? Who is waiting by the windowsill? We make plans to go to a museum but we go to a bookshop instead. We’re leaning in, learning how to talk to each other again. I say, I’m obsessed with my grief and she says, I’m always in mourning. She laughs and it’s an extension of her body. She laughs and it moves the whole room. I say, My home is an extension of my body and she says, Most days are better with a long walk. The world moves without us—so we tend to a garden, a graveyard, a pot on the windowsill. Death is a comfort because it says, Transform but don’t hurry. There is a tenderness to growing older and we are listening for it. Steadier ways to move through the world and we are learning them. A way to touch your own body. A touch that says, Dig deeper. There, in the ground, there is our memory. I am near enough my roots. Time is my friend. Tomorrow is a place we are together.

(Sanna Wani)

"If you have looked hard at the manner of things, if you have surveyed the troubles of our time, and cannot discover a way forward, do not despair. Do better. Grieve: mount an altar to the sensuous feelings of loss that swim through you. In the stinging fumes that redden the eyes, you might partly recover a clear vision of where to go. You might come to see that forward movement is no longer possible in these moments, and that the way to go was never forward anyway – but awk-ward: into the blackness of catacombs, into the shadows of sanctuary, into the riven cracks signed with the pen of the trickster, into the heat of compost, into the position of a prostrated man who knows that when the storm roars the thing to do is to be still. In that stillness, entire worlds churn," Bayo Akomolafe

true story

let me tell you about when Frida Kahlo visited me. Detroit, 1987, 4th Street. What season was it, honestly there's no telling. It wasn't winter. Or it wasn't spring? Probably October, maybe. Everything great happens in October. It could've been late summer tho - those Michigan late summers that feel like you're living in the bosom of the earth, lush. I was laying on the mattress that was my bed which was stacked on a box spring on the floor. Wooden floor, wooden walls, wooden house. Cracked bay window, filled with a drum set. Yes, my bedroom is where my band rehearsed - the hulk of our black p.a. system, amps, microphone in its stand, cords. I slept fine there, never thought for a second it wasn't beautiful. I lived in the idealized poverty rich people dream of, where everyone's in one dirty cold room but so happy with the soup, rock n roll youth, I was the leader. For a long time, you believe you can live free. We're gonna collect abandoned car parts and stack them in the hall - look, a car! We're gonna take every drawing, poster, photograph, made or found on the ground - every stencil, ribbon, playing card, poem written in Sharpee, scrap of wrapping paper - and nail it to the wall - look, a collage! We'll burn candles stuck in bottles we emptied of their whisky or wine while lying on the splintering floor playing records all night, eat rice from the same bowl we wash for every meal, take hot baths in the giant tub facing the trees where so many birds come and go you really just can't be sad. I look taller than I am because I'm so thin, walking everywhere because I don't have a car, eating giant bowls of popcorn out by the fire. Did I drink any fluids other than alcohol? My hair was black and my lips were red and the gifts people left on my doorstep felt like forever. Living in the center of forever - young, wild, completely alive. Everyone should be this alive at least once in their life. 

I was laying on my bed and on the wall to my left, shimmering, right there, without doubt, was Frida. From the neck up, but her shoulders would wave in and out. She was coming to me through water, time, waving with light. Stern, proud, burning - messages of hello, hello, hello, you have some idea, here I am. Keep in mind, this was Detroit where she came to paint the murals at the museum with Diego. Where she was pregnant then miscarried at Henry Ford Hospital. Where she confronted Henry Ford himself about his racism while entertaining the Detroit illuminati at his dinner table. All these places were close to me, threaded into my history in very concrete ways. That mural was my childhood indoctrination into art, and the hours I spent there as an adult, finally getting a job there that enabled me to eat a sandwich right there in that great hall filled with her spirit (yes, his, too, but hers is always stronger). I lived just blocks from it and the hospital, and walked streets she walked. Nobody taught us about Frida Kahlo and there was no internet, but I found her, she found me. I became her for many Devil's Nights, All Hallow's Eves - long skirts, thick brows, cigarillo, bottle of wine, cane, men falling all over themselves to sleep with me. Her story of survival and power is mine, too, in so many eternal ways. And there she was, on my wall in my bedroom most people were scared of.

I communed with her for a good long while and those things I will never tell - our secrets. Then I called my roommate Karla in to see. Because somebody else had to see, or like everything mystical coursing through me on the regular, nobody would believe. Karla lay down next to me and - wow. She was struck, mesmerized too, then tried to analyze what was making this apparition happen. This is Karla, very scientific. The sun was on the other side of the house. No light was streaming in the windows. There was no water or metal reflecting. It couldn't be explained except in my language - this is a visitation from one of my spirit guides, would you like to hear what she has to say? I told Karla some things. We lay there for a good long while, until Frida dissolved into space, a meditation, a medicine, transcendent, serious. 

Now Frida is a "feminist icon" and everybody thinks she's inside them. And maybe she is. But not like she's with me. 

flies/time

Kindness (Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.

How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.