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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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Creatures, All

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 soft

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 animal living inside us, when

our untamed self slips through the cage

of decorum and groans or purrs

or moans or gasps and reminds us

that beneath all our fancy syntax

and pretty words, we’re creatures.

Every triumphant roar and ecstatic howl

is proof of our common primitive tongue.

Fluent in human, we praise in squeals,

blissful giggles, grateful throaty grunts.

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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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After All These Years

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on September 25, 2024| 15 Comments »

 

 
 
Once they were slender,
this arm, this waist,
and I loved them
when they were slender.
Though that’s a lie.
I did not love them.
Never once did I think
they were slender enough.
But I was happier then
with my body, wasn’t I?
When it was lean and smooth
and strong? No. It’s a lie.
I was cruel to that body,
and pushed it and starved it
and glared at it in the mirror
with hateful, critical eyes.
It’s so strange that the body
I’m learning to love is the one
that once disgusted me.
This one with its strange roll
around my waist, this one with its
thick upper arms that stun me
in photos. This one with its
marbled flesh. Is it true
I am learning to love this body?
Perhaps it’s more true
I’m learning to love the one
who is learning to love this body.
How gentle it is, this learning.
How layered. How slowly it arrives.
How quiet, the invitation
to turn toward the one
who could despise this body
and not push her away.
To wrap her instead in these
thick soft arms and choose
to love her.
 

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Nocturnal Hyperhidrosis

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on September 24, 2024| 15 Comments »

I do not love it, the way I fall asleep cold
only to wake in a flush of heat.
Do not love the soaking, the drenching
the damp, then the clammy.
Not once in those small dark hours
have I thought to praise the eccrine glands,
the aprocine glands that secrete the sweat,
so much sweat, the sweat that makes me
shove down the covers and seek
a dry towel to lie on. The cool
night air never quite cool enough.
I don’t love it, the way the warmth
steals me from dreams and returns me
to the demands of body, a body
that’s changing, that’s aging,
a body with an exquisitely sensitive
hypothalamus that worries my body’s too warm.
How quick I am to complain instead of praise.
How hard to remember in these hot and sodden
hours that I admire the wisdom of the body.
Let me now remember I’m a being made of water,
a pond of a woman returning herself to the air.
I am at the mercy of evaporation.
How natural it is, though I do not love it,
this teacher in what comes next.
This is how I practice how
to disappear.

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One Momentary

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on June 19, 2024| 6 Comments »


 
 
running barefoot
past the end of the pier—
before the splash, flight  

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Curvaceous

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on June 10, 2024| 8 Comments »


 
 
Once, I was a twig of a thing,
  a scrawny, scrappy slender being.
    A sapling. A stalk. A vine.
      My body rhymed with the y-axis,
    with flagpole and street lamp and pine.
  Perhaps I thought it would never change,
confusing my self for my form.
  Perhaps I was afraid it would change,
    my ideas of loving myself so small.
      And now, look at me, a tree-ripened pear.
    A cumulous cloud. A peony.
My body rhymes with river bends
  and nautilus, helix, anemone.
    And I am more me than I’ve
      ever been—as lush on the inside
    as I am to the eye, rounded
  and softened and carved.
How sweet these hours when
  I love what is here—
    which is to say when I love
      the change itself,
    these hours when I wade
  into the mystery, not clinging
to the way things used to be,
  these amorous hours
    when I revel in my curves
      with eyes as forward as a new lover’s hands,
    astonished by my own becoming.

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Mother and Son

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on June 5, 2024| 9 Comments »


 
 
Briefly, you were taller than I,
tall enough that when we hugged
my head rested against your chest,
your body lean from growing
so fast. My body remembers
how new it felt when you
gathered me in long, slender arms
the way I had once cradled you.
It is not the same to be held
by your absence, no warmth,
no scent. Still, I let myself
be held by what is here—
no heartbeat but my own,
but oh, the love still growing.

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After the Nightmare

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on March 10, 2024| 2 Comments »

As if the whole world depended on it
I nestled deeper into your warmth,
made myself soft as morning light,
soft as a lullaby, softer than that,
as if wars could be stopped and
peace achieved if only I could 
make of my flesh a place so safe
you could sleep. 
 

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The Crown

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on February 5, 2024| 2 Comments »


Tonight I miss the top of your head—
the way it fit beneath my chin
when you sat on my lap to find Waldo.
I miss the three cowlicks that swirled there,
how they made your hair bounce
with every step—a challenge
for every haircutter we ever met.
I miss the smell of your head,
a place I would again and again
and again sniff. And the way
you tucked your head into my neck
when we’d snuggle in your bed
before sleep. I miss the way
I could no longer see the top of your head
when you grew so much taller than I.
And the silken dark gold of your hair,
how it slipped through my fingers
like something I was still learning to value.
How simple it is, how primal, this love.
And today, this—the ghost
of the top of your head
as I don’t see it bobbing slightly above
the sea of other heads.

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Hurkle-durkle

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on August 3, 2023| 10 Comments »

(v.) to lie in bed for a long time, to lounge around


When the eyes decide
to stay closed.
Though it’s light.
Though dark tea
and blue skies await.
Though there’s music to hear
and books to read,
and sugar peas fresh on the vine,
still the eyes decide
to be closed is divine.
And then there’s the warmth
of the bed, the perfect
weight of soft sheets,
the way the blood
has transformed into honey
and the limbs now curl
so perfectly into the perfectly
sleep-drunk, ease-heavy body.
When there’s work and a host
of sparkling to-dos,
but all the eyes want
is to stay closed,
to sail on the sweet ship
of near-sleep just a few,
just a few more,
just a few …

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Doing the Heart Work

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on April 30, 2023| 10 Comments »

The heart circulates blood through the body
a thousand times a day and not once
do I give it a thought. Not once do I think
of those four chambers, flooding and releasing,
the valves opening and closing to keep blood flowing.
It does this while I eat, while I crumple, while I teach.
It does this while I hold my daughter as she weeps,
while I stumble, while I fall apart, while I sleep.
 
Oh body, though I speak of being broken hearted
and the gifts that come in the breaking, meanwhile,
you go on with your ceaseless heart work, the work
of flow, the work of current, the work of push through,
of never saying no, the work of life, the necessary work
that allows all the beautiful breaking open to happen.

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One Impossible Hug

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on February 25, 2023| 4 Comments »




my arms still recall
the slender stem of your body—
oh, sweet empty circumference

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