Ordinary days deliver joy easily again & I can’t take it. If I could tell you how her eyes laughed or describe the rage of her suffering, I must admit that lately my memories are sometimes like a color warping in my blue mind.
Metal abandoned in rain. My mother will not move. Which is to say that sometimes the true color of her casket jumps from my head like something burnt down in the genesis of a struck flame.
Which is to say that I miss the mind I had when I had my mother. I own what is yet.
Which means I am already holding my own absence in faith. I still carry a faded slip of paper where she once wrote a word with a pencil & crossed it out.
From tree to tree, around her grave I have walked, & turned back if only to remind myself that there are some kinds of peace which will not be moved. How awful to have such wonder. The final way wonder itself opened beneath my mother’s face at the last moment. As if she was
a small girl kneeling in a puddle & looking at her face for the first time, her fingers gripping the loud, wet rim of the universe.
“I am often able to look more clearly at these wild and gorgeous trees growing old in the cemetery than when I try to see and accept my mother's young headstone. The work of this poem might be, today, to look at both with joy.”
"As Cathy’s publisher it is my job to make her book known; as her friend it is my privilege to know her intimately; at the intersection of publisher and friend is the real, the conditions we choose not to ignore. I hope she will approve this formulation. Fence labors to gather visibility so that it can conserve and amplify weirdos like Cathy."
Resources for Supporting and Uplifting the Black Community
Prison Book Program: "Prison Book Program is a grassroots organization that exists for one purpose—to send free books to prisoners. We’ve been doing it since 1972.”
No New Jails NYC: "The Mayor is planning on expanding Rikers while building new jails for over $10 billion. Instead of building new jails, this money should be used to create safe, strong neighborhoods by addressing our needs."
Equal Justice Initiative: "The Equal Justice Initiative is committed to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States, to challenging racial and economic injustice, and to protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society."
Poetry Daily stands with the Black community. We oppose racism, oppression, and police brutality. We will continue to amplify diverse voices in the poetry world. Black Lives Matter.
"For days I could go nowhere. The temperature dwelled stubbornly below freezing. The roads were too slick to walk on. My car was encased in ice, a solid blue cube, and, quite comically, a red bicycle, leaning against a nearby shed, seemed to be waiting for me. I sat at the window, wearing two sweaters, looking at it."
