Mugwort Exterior Grounds

2022

[First read aloud at Syd Staiti's Book Release for Seldom Approaches.

Syd, Lara Mimosa Montes, and I read that day.

At Paradiso reading series hosted by Noah Ross & Claire Grossman]

Mugwort Exterior Grounds

for the roller skaters that agree with me & the ones that don't

Like a battery you don’t want to charge to 100%

Keeping yourself even

Not self destruct

Not burn down all relationships

But build

Feel genuinely happy

See a cross tattoo on an arm and not feel like running and screaming

Because you know you are protected by curtains of mugwort that look like black flags

Also cats, lizards, hellebores, deer, angels, frogs, nettle, bushtits, toddlers, all with feet with wheels

All the beings you didn’t have names for yet, all with feet with wheels

All skating in the same cracked court 

All wheels welcome

All gravel a tragedy to people who might otherwise be enemies

Cuz you got to float on that ground

Cuz you gotta survive

Even if you are sneering when the Tesla pulls up she comes over to you and says, I’m just coming back, I got a hysterectomy

And you think about boundaries and how you’re glad she’s here using her body

Because speech is often mistaken

Speech is often wrong

The wrong thing said at the wrong time for the wrong reason 

Yet nobody’s fault

Speech as protective armor when body not embodied:

Speech has so many tricks and violences

So many negligences of the type of a relationship taken for granted

You gotta uplift them

You gotta have 4 people holding them from all sides

You gotta move the car 4 people holding from all sides that is blocking all the parking

You gotta understand

Whatever made them float made them float

If you see them here in front of you they are not a monster

If you see them here in front of you they live in your world

Bedazzling their clothes their bras

A blow up image of them on the back of a baseball jersey

Yet feeling turned off by the men vs. women you see

Wanting to graduate from those categories everywhere

Wondering if falling out of learning is resistance, stubborness, indignant

Or if it is a real disability, an invisible one, one that no one will understand

Thinking you are being difficult but you cannot follow directions

Thinking you are holding back information but you literally can’t retrieve the information

Having so much to share, showing up with a bowl of plums and the bowl is lost

But that’s a community

So many misunderstandings

I have so many misgivings about this word community

You look and I look and if we move in the same way we are a community

Sometimes you have to deeply break the pattern you made

Thinking in a certain way you thought was helping

I am looking at them wondering if they want me to live or die, 

Here: they want me to live and thrive

In a car: they may not care if I die

In a cell: they may learn by a monklike existence or they may reject you soothingly

Or take a hard crush, the kind that has a fierceness which is terrifying.

If I was carrying a fetus, they may want me to die.

I could find silence, but I take more comfort in loud blasting snares and bass

Encasing me in the place that I know is me

Because otherwise I have trouble knowing me

Knowing me contextually is all I know

If you were raised in such a way, if you were, you may know

I found dancing again I found skating I found oblivion 

I found merging the healthy kind of merging

I found wholesome stirred with debauchery

I found kids skating with parents I found new muscles I never used

I collapsed in exhaustion

I felt guilty

I tried to make an offering to the earth to the ancestors

To the beautiful people standing in front of me who chose to do something other than work

Who chose to bring some donuts

Move some chairs

Drag DJ equipment

Stay up all night

Trust me to drive them 

Let me trust them to drive

Into the night

Knowing that we are not going to die

Were you surprised to hear so much fear mixed with so much joy, approaching a gate, a doorway

This one has a chain

Why the things so difficult when before it had been so easy

Why could they not remember how to explain how to do it

Why did they wake up in bed a different person

I bet the epsom salt in the bath would suck it out

Why was the boot so tight, what was wrong with my body this time

Nothing nothing as long as you can leave the overthink

As long as you can not let someone else’s thoughts knock you down

I found love, and it was outside

I found love and I didn’t have to choose between street or rink

I dreamed I was practicing on the carpet, doing long and regular doing crossovers

It felt so right when the right movement was on 

They went on moving in the right way.

There was so much appreciation for the plums.