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Posts Tagged ‘body’

No Longer Empty-Handed Cinepoem

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on August 28, 2025| 4 Comments »

CONTENT WARNING: If the idea of a woman sensually touching herself is not your jam, this video and poem are not for you. Please do not watch. But if you are at all curious about a new language for women’s pleasure, we made this for you. Totally tasteful, totally suggestive. This is what metaphor is for. And if you like it, please share. “No Longer Empty-Handed” is the twelfth track on RISKING LOVE, a spoken-word album that explores how we might fall more deeply in love with the world as it is, even when that seems impossible. 

RISKING LOVE was made in collaboration with the amazing guitarist Steve Law. Video by the glorious Holiday Mathis. 
To purchase RISKING LOVE, visit here.
Spotify: here ; Deezer: here ; Pandora: here ; Apple Music: here ; YouTube Music: here
And if you are a member of the Recording Academy (or know a voting member for the Grammy Awards), please consider this album for the Spoken Word Poetry Category. 

Video and Audio Releases from RISKING LOVE to Date
Safety Net ;  The Precious Matter of Love ; I Want an Interlude with Mr. Clean ; Into the Questions ; For the One Who Is Gone ; In Case You Don’t Know Already ; The Long Marriage ; The Broken Heart Goes Dancing ; Still Here ; Self-Portrait as Tuning Fork ; Because My Heart Is Where You Now Dwell ; No Longer Empty-Handed

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Involuntary

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on August 18, 2025| 6 Comments »


 
 
I love the small sounds of pleasure
people make when taking the first
sip of coffee, or when sitting at last
after standing for hours. That small
hum of delight that escapes the lips
when someone presses a thumb
into the arch of our foot and makes
small circles on the sole. That sigh
that flies out when we step into shade
on a relentlessly sunny day. Bless these
moments when the mind can’t outbrain
the small animal living inside us, when
our feral self slips through the cage
of decorum and groans or purrs
or moans or gasps and reminds us
beneath all our fancy syntax and
pretty words, we’re creatures,
and the body is so much more
than a carrier for the intellect.
Every roar and crow, hiss and howl,
murmur and whimper and trill
is a primitive prayer, an involuntary
thank you for being granted
a body that can slip into warm and
soapy water, that can press its lips
to another’s soft lips, that can inhale
the perfume of rain after months of drought,
that can curl into the warmth of another
and through scent and touch know
it is safe, it is loved, it is home.
 

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Letter to Myself at Twenty-One

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on June 5, 2025| 18 Comments »


What is it that shines through all this withering?
—Kim Rosen, “Grand Finale”
 
 
You would be embarrassed of my body.
You would never believe contentment
is possible with a belly this soft
and legs this thick, but sweetheart,
I promise you I love being alive
in this time-ripened body that still
carries me into the garden to plant
snap peas, this body that cradles
my grown girls, that explores
the familiar terrain of my husband,
that walks through spruce forests and thrills
at the scent of evergreen and rain.
It is so much easier now to be gentle
with myself, even easy to be gentle with you.
Easy to forgive you for thinking you needed
to starve these bones. The irony is
you never felt beautiful, did you, and now,
when I am so far from your ideal,
I’ve never felt more lovely—
which is to say there is something
inside, a radiance, that beacons through
the crumbling walls of the body,
and the real beauty is being in service
to that shine, becoming less and less
a vessel and more and more that light.

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Going Quantum

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on June 1, 2025| 13 Comments »



 
I almost expect the rain
to fall through me. That is how
porous it all feels sometimes.
 
If sorrow and joy
and fear pass through,
why not rain?
 
When drops gather today
on my arm, I stare at them,
amazed how they round on bare skin.
 
I want to let it all pass through.
At the same time I want to be solid
in the world so I might open my mouth to rain
 
and become part rain. Might open
my heart to love and become all love.
Want to feel myself held by the holy
 
and know I have never not been holy.
Want to hold the rain in my hand
and marvel how a woman so porous
 
can hold in her palm a miracle.

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Last Days

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on May 20, 2025| 4 Comments »




In the end, my father couldn’t
raise his arm to feed himself.
Couldn’t sit. Could barely open
his eyes. But damn, could he love.
He could still curl his thick
fingers around my hand.
Could still say my name.
And though I had never known
a moment when I was not sure
this man loved me, in those last days
I knew it more. Somehow, barely
able to speak, he drenched me
in his devotion. In those last days,
all was reduced to love. Or was it
all was expanded to love? Either
way. Somehow I hadn’t known
how love can take over a body.
A life. The purity of it. The gift.

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How It Is Now

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on February 21, 2025| Leave a Comment »


 
 
In every moment, doors appear—
not literal, of course, with knobs and locks,
but metaphoric, yes, with thresholds and casings
and simple invitations I feel
in my body, an architecture of possibility.
I didn’t used to notice them.
Was it because they weren’t there,
or because I simply had not yet learned
to see them? Now I marvel
at how omnipresent they are,
and all they ask of me is that I choose
to step through them or not.
I recognize them more in my body
than with my mind. As if the body
has spent decades learning, oh, this is what
it feels like when a door appears.
As if the mind is at last learning to say
yes, body, I believe you. Now I trust
that I can change everything with
just one step across that invisible
threshold. Or not. Now I know
once I take that step, I can’t return
to the place I had been. And there will always be
another door. Another door. Another door.

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Commingling

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on January 22, 2025| 14 Comments »


 
What if our flesh commingled became the mother of light and sound, the vast word, the ocean forgotten at birth?
                  —James Tipton, “What If, When We Held Each Other”
 
 
I love it when I float on the pond in summer
like a human water lily,
the top of me sun-drunk and heat-buzzed,
seduced by shine, blossoming into blaze,
the rest of me held by the cool and swoony dark.
 
It’s like having two lovers at once—
one playful, one taciturn—
both of them tracing the shape of me
in the way only they know how,
both of them enticing me to fall in love
 
with having a form that shivers and stipples
and craves and longs to be found.
I desire them both,
the one that invites me deeper in,
the one that bids me rise.
 
The one that caresses with liquid tongues,
the one that strokes me hot and bright.
How I love to have a body then,
nakedly alive, enticed by sky,
embraced by the deep,
 
blissed and beguiled by the kiss of it all,
the one original kiss that links me back
to the miracle of being become flesh.
How good it is then to be limb and skin.
How good to be a nexus of firing nerves.
 
How shameless I am as I beg the world,
touch me, please, touch me,
please, make me yours.

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In a Dangerous Time

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on January 19, 2025| 12 Comments »


                 
 
I think of the bones
of the unsung rib cage,
the way they protect
the heart. How bone,
too, is living, how it constantly
renews and remakes itself.
I think of how ribs engage
with other ribs
to expand, to contract,
and because they do
their solid work,
they allow the heart to float.
This is what I want to do:
to be a rib in this body
of our country,
to make a safe space for love.
There is so much now
that needs protection.
I want to be that flexible,
that committed to what’s vital,
that unwilling to yield.
 

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One Impatience

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 21, 2024| 8 Comments »

like asking the peach
to ripen before it has even flowered—
this longing to be healed

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New Eyes

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on October 27, 2024| 4 Comments »


 
If the body is a temple,
then I want to remind myself
the grotto, too, is a temple,
a holy chamber carved
by nature and time,
a sanctuary
where song echoes and rises
in a place that’s been scoured,
ravaged, worn.
The meadow, too, is a temple,
with a giant blue dome of sky
made more holy by its expansiveness.
Let my prayer be not to change my body
but to change the way I see it.
Let me look in the mirror and see there
a grotto, a meadow, a temple,
a being who is learning new prayers
as she’s shaped and reshaped
by the world.

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