A Few Poems | katie robinson

A Few poems

GOOD; HERE

“I feel humble in the face of all that time”

- adrienne maree brown, from Pleasure Activism

when we meet, and before we begin,

I ask you for a prayer,

and you ask the universe to keep this land safe.

how else could asking for forgiveness look?

It’s the time of year when you can’t imagine it was ever cold

and neither can the gnats, flies and cicadas,

dancing little reminders

that the air has opinions about where you walk.

a few weeks ago, I am here in this park alone,

and as the sun is bows her head to

a cloudless new moon night,

I follow her lead into the forest.

as dark as I have ever been, glittering,

I saw a sapling shiver off several

drops of liver red dirt blood

doing its best to

bless itself in the memory

of dismemberment, of being severed,

and of watching the same happen to

others, here near this water,

Cedar Lake, (its settler name).

my home, I remember, has genocide in its skin, and

all that grows from it.

all the wet memory

that comes up through this spring that feeds

this and all other lakes,

is this the ocean that caught my ancestors,

or the part when I ask for forgiveness too?

when we meet, we realize that

the ritual we find ourselves in is not the moment

you bring up Resmaa

and of the harm white people

must have done to their own

to tear the whole brown-green world from

itself, in several scattered pieces

it is not the moment

we speak through each other

the language of harm and its expression,

the push-pull confusion

that safety never meant to signify

it is not the moment

we recognize in each other,

the same

piece of the universe

that reached out to us

through the thick brambles of

oak (settler name?), birch (settler name?), and maple (settler name?)

the ritual is the moment we realize that

of all the things that aren’t a poem,

forgiveness is the one that takes the most

water to believe in,

the ritual we are is the moment we ask, in unison,

here?

PRAXIS

reflection and action need, desire, and crave one another. reflection and action need, desire, and crave one another. it can be seen in terms of a build up and release of energy. despair is at the other end of a lot of reflection and no action.

I am longing

to print years

of photos

of my life

since my mom died 7 years ago

I want her to know

what has happened

it presses me

I want to show her

what shape I am

after everything that doesn’t seem to end

the burning and the being born

the transformation of breath we all must swallow

our home carving itself deeper inside without knowing what it will find

the shape of a heart that is one muscle coiled in on itself, twisting and untwisting

as it gives and receives

it is nothing like a pump

it has no pit

nothing about a heart will break your tooth

if you bite down on it

potential giving itself itself

pressing down into pressing

an impression of an empty pocket

the way a clay pot is shaped by plans of intimacy with what typically falls through

this is a language dissection does not speak

there is nothing solid about it

there are no photos of me

following the natural cleavage down and around

rubbing away with my thumbs the tendons and laced layers of fascia

unwringing the tight twisted bulb in three turns

still

what I have I want to offer to her

somehow

I show the not-photos (the negatives?) to other people

and it doesn’t quite do the job

my jerky smiles swap parables with prints

that develop themselves right next to me

hot burning even

still not solid

If I swim the distance between spinning and twisting

will I learn to go back and forth 7 years through shape?

and will it be enough to have learned?

I dream of delivering green algae water

wet knotted milfoil prints

and myself

to the portal at north end of Wita Topa Bde* Lake of The Isles

I dream of greeting the coiled serpent dragon

up close and unstable

who guards the passage

(we greet by winking)

I notice its one huge eye spinning slowly theturningearth to keep the lake afloat

the other eye

still

tell me

what is it I need to bring

what proof

what stone

what must I swallow or knit into a single band

to know she knows everything that’s happened here?

*Marlena Myles and Dawí https://marlenamyl.es/project/dakota-land-map/

Forgiving My Mom, Who Taught Me Everything She Knew About Love By Loving Me

“it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay”

- Sung by Garnet, in “Here Comes a Thought”, from Steven Universe

when I admit that I needed something you couldn’t give me,

I relinquish us both, and what’s

left is a very beautiful hole,

a very purple door,

an edge much older than the days you held

onto as you crossed back.

I dream that forgiving you (for being white)

gives birth to a self that

makes triumph of my hands,

and opens my wings to reveal that

I’ve trained my blood to careen outside my body

all in preparation for this conversation

which I hope will begin, what has the world done to love?

why did the world have to do that to the love you grew in me?

what did we create when I left your body?

what did you create when you left your body,

so that when I push the purple door open,

we see together that I have arrived moving oxygen, water, and nutrients,

and with many other mothers,

directly from the stars?

you begin to tell me that you’re “here

even when it doesn’t feel like you are,

that we are trying even, (especially), when we fail,

and that when I’m not okay, it’s okay,

because the cosmos has no emergencies – “

the moment I choose to forgive you

(no birth, no wings, no blood, hands hot.)

there is an alchemic force

which forms visible solids

from the collision of light and breath.

when tilt my head toward this collision,

I hear that my bones hardened as they grew,

quietly bending me into a shape

exactly older than I can fathom.

forgiving you, I hear that

at the start, there were endings

and doors

and blood

and light.