katie robinson
writer - facilitator - artist
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.
