“The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized.”1
I said “I love you”, and handed you the mug, the vase, the bowl, and brick after brick after brick. ‘Hand over hand’. I said ‘I love you’ through my finger tracing your studio walls, stumbling on the wood panel, stumbling and meeting June Jordan upon tracing paper, speaking through your handwriting.
“I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED
GENOCIDE TO STOP
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED AFFIRMATIVE
ACTION AND REACTION
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED MUSIC
OUT THE WINDOWS”2
I said ‘I love you’ in fire season. These trees give sight to histories (dare I say hope) in rings and roots and when caught ablaze – There is an oceanic oil spill pooling in my belly, and I am clicking lighters to show you how afraid I am.
There is this opening that has turned cavernous this year. “A wound is an opening”, and it is there that we meet. In that fire where histories and hopes are held, within those thin linings of our stomachs.
This past May, Jules and I facilitated our first “femmes&thems”, an afab/queer centered wood soda firing at Cider Creek Collective. A 50cubic foot Catenary arch kiln was loaded and fired in a week, and it was a time of gathering, eating, caring, and tending to - each other, the kiln, the space, the clay. I felt for the first time in a while there was some sunlight finding its way through all that darkness. And with this reckoning of feeling, I notice and feel and follow, in the space of feeling where “there are no new ideas still waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves - along with the renewed courage to try them out.”3
I want more days around a flame that we feed, as we feed each other through the nourishment of reading aloud together a book about trees, of taking the time to drive down to the beach, to find the sun, to play the same three notes on the guitar and make a song that is stuttered with laughter, to ask if you want pancakes this morning? orange juice? How about some berries? I want more hours with the people I love to remind us all how it feels to be human together. “For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt - of examining what those ideas feel like being lived on Sunday morning at 7 am, after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth, mourning our dead - while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while we taste new possibilities and strengths.”4
“I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED
NOBODY THIRST AND NOBODY
NOBODY COLD
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED I WANTED
JUSTICE UNDER MY NOSE
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED
BOUNDARIES TO DISAPPEAR”5
I wanted translations of trees, to hold all the nuanced languages of oak and pine the excess free hard wood from furniture companies and felled trees in your backyard. The histories they speak in the acts of being set ablaze. I am vacuuming the stories into my heart. I am tasting flame, my lips setting fire with each statement. “I love you” and I want you to fire this kiln with me. Let me show you what care means to me. Let me show you devotion in a time so desolate and devoid of the divine quality hands have to hold each other.
I said ‘I love you’, and I held those smoke laden words upon my flaming tongue, and asked “is this your first wood firing?”, I hold devotion in handing you the lighter, in watching you give the kiln its first breath with your own. I hold onto you and this hope for a better day - “for the betterment of the everyday”6 - In the handing you the mug, in the handing of the brick after brick after brick, in the bricking of the door, in the mixing of the mud, in the listening of what you need, how have you slept, have you eaten, can I make you a coffee?
We want something that reminds us what hope can taste like. Something radical that is the reminder that radical is in the acts of care that greed and corruption have forced us to forget. “Sometimes the most radical thing I am immediately able to do, is to serve my friend a beverage in a ridiculous mug”.7
I have been looking for guides and then I saw with breathless wonder something of the divine in the opening of a kiln peep, in the swirl of orange and white flame, slow and curling, plumes of sparkles ignited through soda-ash. There is a god within those flames // as those flames, and there is prayer in feeding it together. I want devotion in the form of hands touching clay, and clay touching flame, and hands feeding and feeling those fires. I need something to believe in. Something old and forgotten. Arcane and lonely. But remembered in feeling, in flame, in fluidity, in trust in historicity - trust in the hand of my companion holding the white hot brick, counting my movements, “hand over hand”
“AND I STAND
DESPITE THE TRILLION TREACHERIES OF SAND
YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME AND I HOLD THE LONGING
OF THE WINTER IN MY HAND
YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME AND I COMMIT
TO FRICTION AND THE UNDERTAKING
OF THE PEARL”8
more soon, always, more soon
~*dan*~
[they them]
Lorde, Audre. “Poetry is not a Luxury” Sister Outsider, The Crossing Press Feminist Series, 1984, pp. 36-39
Jordan, June. “Intifada Incantation: Poem #8 for b.b.L.” Directed by Desire: The Complete Poems of June Jordan, Copper Canyon Press, 2005
Lorde, Audre. “Poetry is not a Luxury” Sister Outsider, The Crossing Press Feminist Series, 1984, pp. 36-39
Lorde, Audre. “Poetry is not a Luxury” Sister Outsider, The Crossing Press Feminist Series, 1984, pp. 36-39
Jordan, June. “Intifada Incantation: Poem #8 for b.b.L.” Directed by Desire: The Complete Poems of June Jordan, Copper Canyon Press, 2005
my dear friend Christian
my dear friend Henry
Jordan, June. “Intifada Incantation: Poem #8 for b.b.L.” Directed by Desire: The Complete Poems of June Jordan, Copper Canyon Press, 2005
Love this soooo so much.