“who would dream to drain a lake?”

A peaceful morning in this place. Having been given the choice, the girls always choose drawing over writing words. Today, I let that be ok. My back still hurts all the way from Saturday — I was yoga-ing while the girls watched their third episode of Scooby Doo. I’d set up my altar; amethyst, smoky quartz, rose quartz, lit candle, laptop. Twisted too quick and that brings us to today. Where the pain jumps from the screen onto you to remind you about folks’ ugly faces, heavy bodies on black bodies for no good reason, no reason at all. I was just opening my Twitter to lift up a friend, I was just pulling the fan from the top shelf of my closet in the dark. I got hit in the face. It didn’t hurt me that badly. It wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been. And that brings us to tonight. Where so many of us sit in comfort.

The necessary weight of it, though.

I offer…(thank you, Pema).

“Instead of reacting aggressively when we’re provoked, endlessly perpetuating the cycle of pain, we trust that we can engage with others from a place of curiosity and caring and in that way contact their innate decency and wisdom.”

I copy and paste…(thank you, Asiya).

attention as a form of ethics [excerpt]

Asiya Wadud

We are mired in matter until we are not
— Ralph Lemon

I thought we were an archipelago
each felt under our own finessed and gilded wing
let’s make an assumption
let’s make an assumption that the lake has a bottom
let’s make an assumption that everyone will mourn
let’s sack a hundred greenbacks
for the sake of acknowledging they mean something
what does it mean to have worth?
who would dream to drain a lake?
I spent my days staring into the eye of the Baltic
it’s because I am also a body of water
it’s not that onerous
I’ve built a muscle memory
it’s not that heavy
let’s talk about erasure I mean
that’s easy
start with a word that you don’t like
start with a people you didn’t know
start with a neighborhood, rank
start with any miasma dispersed
let’s talk about burden
let’s talk about burden for the weight
it lends us
let’s talk about supplication
about my palms — uplift, patience

let’s celebrate our substance
subsistence in
amber rivulets of stilllife
constellations how you molded me
country how we became it
the longitude is a contested border
my longest muscle I named familiar

Copyright © 2020 by Asiya Wadud. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 26, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.