trying to figure out

:Feminist:  How do I define a feminist? A woman who realizes her own authorship and sees herself as equal to all human beings (her experiences, feelings, thoughts as valid, worthwhile.) A woman who believes her voice and experience carries the same weight as a man’s because we are all human beings, a woman who will knock on doors till they open, who will fight to enter the gentleman’s club only to announce she is building her own treefort. It is a woman who learns (or is learning) that she possesses her own life, who is engaged in the struggle of birthing… who is awake. A woman who believes there is no second  sex and will live her way into the birthright men and other women have trampled down. A feminist is someone who is gaining self-determination (of what it means to a woman, of what it means to be herself), or struggling for it, or even dreaming it may be possible. A feminist is  a woman who listens to herself and hears the Uncreated One whisper, yes. It is not: a man-hater, a reversve-the-dominance, it is a woman who will resist cages, or enter them to sing her own song (subervision of the way things have been handed down, or acceptance by their own merit, defying patriarchy.)

while I was packing I thought you said

Always this, slowly this

a sigh, ten minutes pass,

I am trying to tell you something...

    ...I know

but you don't, you don't and I don't

know how to tell you

beginning

      another beginning surrounded by

good intentions, intentions

piled so high, crumbled all around me

with the sincerity of origami folds

this will be, this is, this was

pounding relentlessly in my head till I

...oh nevermind

no, what, what were you saying?

always this

surrounded by another beginning

and hedged, hemmed in by

papers, the past, the fragments

always, writing fragments 

I...

beginning

straight-faced we stare into

the illusion of historicity

and embrace translations,

illegible and illiterate

with religious fervor

the static whisper of the conscience

beneath the hum, hiss-rush of

soundwave masses is too faint to grasp...

but I search, stethoscope to heartbeat

do you know what I mean? but, oh, how could you?

this conversation is so old,

so old it might disintegrate were we to press it

we await our animal tongues

to stir, to seek the prey of

undsicovered, to devour the unknown

and speak and ask 

            words

what is the depth of the sound of the sky

I hear only an echo

though she swallows our cries

while

fingertips encrusted with the dust of nature

hold flecks of memory that freckle our skin

the way will descend into my

soul as the dew, inescapable,

I adore the distance as a

worshiper of wandering

of the thousand lives indwelling one 

and this storm shuffles down the valley,

a steady unhurried approach, 

where time is only a servant to emergence

an arrival that can never be late

all i have left is this

is this and only this

(and this is more than enough)

do you understand?

but oh, how could you?