A Man may make a Remark -
In itself - a quiet thing
That may furnish the Fuse unto a Spark
In dormant nature - lain -

Let us divide - with skill -
Let us discourse - with care -
Powder exists in Charcoal -
Before it exists in Fire -

In the still of morn, Dreams and solitude echo Prayers for a new day.

When I was a kid, books and writing gave me sanity. The Baby Sitters and their Club distracted me from the neverending fights between my parents and my sadness every other week when my “best friends” would dump me on the playground, defriending long before Facebook was around.  Books gave me a glimpse into what it was like to be a “normal” American kid with parents who talked to your friends’ parents and let you do things like sleep over at their houses and have pets that aren’t fish. I loved poems and memorized Robert Louis Stevenson’s “My Shadow” for fun. When my strict dad would not let me go out to play with my friends, I hung out with myself and made up songs as I swung on the rusty metal swingset in the backyard of our house. 

In the fifth grade, I got my whole class in on the production of “The Gottmann Gazette” a class newspaper. I wrote the Editor’s letter, some of the poetry section, and a an advice column answering questions that I conjured up and imaged other 10 year olds would have. When we would get an anonymous note of feedback in our mailbox, it was like Christmas!

When I hit middle school, my poems shifted from being about clouds, frogs, and stars to the pain of unrequited crushes and how much I hated my body. Basically, I was a normal 13 year old with a penchant for rhymed couplets and suicidal endings to short stories. I worshipped my eigth grade teacher, Ms. Dziezek, with her spunky, sarcastic attitude and short cropped hair. For the longest time, I didn’t remember much about that class except for the fact that I got a B on one of my poems and was crushed. A few months ago, I looked back at some of my papers and saw that she wrote, “You have quite a flair for the dramatic!” I also recall getting the letter that I was going to be placed in the regular English track in high school, not Honors Advanced English with most of my friends. I think it was judged based on my essay interpreting a poem about some vase. Poetry! But, I thought I loved poetry! I thought that I wrote poetry! Grades and academic achievement (racking up honors classes) were my only concrete measure of self-worth, the only time that I knew my parents were proud of me. Every other time I was fucking up. And now, I fucked up again. Even though I eventually went back to Honors English in my junior year and later took AP English, it was over. With no one to encourage me to keep believing in myself, I abandoned writing and poems and everything English. Math and science became my steadfast friends. At least I always knew when I was right and when I was wrong.

Then something happened more than ten years later. I went to a spoken word show at the Loft Literary Center’s Equilibrium Spoken Word Series. I watched Asian Americans tell and yell their stories about their relationship with their immigrant parents, their complex American identities, and this racist FUCKING world. My stories. They told these stories with their hands and their bodies. Their message was direct, raw in emotion and unapologetic for its sadness, its anger, its candor. My own body and heart responded as I cried and cried and cried. I cried and cheered and laughed with the other brown people in the audience and for the first time in Minnesota, I felt like I belonged to a community. For the first time since middle school, I loved poetry again. 

Now, I’m working on writing this piece for the Runoff ABOUT POETRY and I’m fighting years and years of self-doubt and self-criticism. ARGH, you are a terrible writer! You can only write science, and barely at that! What do you know about poetry! The pressure of wanting to redeem myself to 8 year old Stephie, that sad little girl who wrote songs about the Pope while playing by herself and begged her parents to take her to the library while other kids begged for money for the ice cream man. I want to tell her, “Don’t give up! You will write again some day. You will love poetry again some day.”

But the years that have passed since have told me that I’m not smart enough for English, that I’m too plain languaged for poetry. That stupid fucking vase or Grecian urn or whatever told me that I was not good enough for this. I heard recently that “Forgiveness is giving up all hope for a better past.” So maybe I will stop wishing that I didn’t lose faith in myself and get back to writing and editing this piece, hoping that I’ve written enough here to be unstuck for the time being.

sex, love, rock and roll.

choose your drug, the high’s the same:

‘get me out of here.’

Out in this desert we are testing bombs,

that’s why we came here.

Sometimes I feel an underground river
forcing its way between deformed cliffs
moving itself like a locus of the sun
into this condemned scenery….
….Coming out to this desert
we meant to change the face of
driving among dull green succulents
walking at noon in the ghost town
surrounded by silence

that sounds like the silence of the place

except that it came with us
and is familiar
and everything we were saying until now
was an effort to blot it out—
coming out here we are up against it
Out here I feel more helpless
with you than without you
You mention the danger

and list the equipment
we talk of caring for each other
in emergencies—lacerations, thirst—
but you look at me like an emergency

Your dry heat feels like power
your eyes are stars of a different magnitude
they reflect lights that spell out: EXIT
when you get up and pace the floor
talking of the danger
as if it were not ourselves

there are so many tictoc 
clocks everywhere telling people
what toctic time it is for 
tictic instance five toc minutes toc
past six tic

Spring is not regulated and does 
not get out of order nor do 
its hands a little jerking move 
over numbers slowly

we do not wind it up it has no weights 
springs wheels inside of
its slender self no indeed dear
nothing of the kind. 

(So, when kiss Spring comes
we’ll kiss each kiss other on kiss the kiss
lips because tic clocks toc don’t make
a toctic difference 
to kisskiss you and to 
kiss me) 

defragmentation

memory is rearranged

make room for new ones