Y is for: Yoctosecond

Say what now? Yes, Yoctosecond. A yoctosecond is one septillionth of a second. That’s right, a unit of time equaling 10^-24 seconds. Apparently, “yocto” is a prefix that attaches to a bunch of things, things like “newton,” “volt,” and “watt.”

I chose it because not only does it sounds silly and I am a fan of silly-sounding things, but also because yesterday I met a family member for the first time, and a yoctosecond was about as long as it took for me to know how much I was going to love her.

I have a small family. Painfully small. Various issues and estrangements on both sides have left us with precious few connections. We’re tight as can be with the few of us there are, but that wider circle decoupled a long time ago, and for pretty much my whole life, we’ve been our small unit. My mom has reconnected with some of her cousins, and I met the granddaughter of one of the cousins. And I’m so happy I did.

It’s definitely not a given that I would adore any family member I got to meet. There was a reunion of sorts when I was in my 20s, and those folks were kind of awful. My cousin is from a different branch of the family tree, so I wasn’t worried she’d be like those cranky, classist, petty folks I’d bumped up against 30 years ago, but still. You don’t know what you’re going to get until you get it.

And what I got was a lovely, smart, funny young woman with whom it turns out I have a lot in common.

Feels nice to stretch out a little, make room for more family in our tiny circle.

Our tiny circle —
mother, brother, sister, me.
Small, smaller, smallest.
The shrinking net around us
now stretching open,
now stretching wider, wider
welcoming new ties,
our whole makes a greater sum.
We are expanding,
spreading our arms, embracing,
opening our hearts to love.

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Only one more day of writing chōka left! I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward to the end of this challenge, but I’d also be lying if I said I hadn’t enjoyed this month. I’ve really liked exploring this form. I might just have to continue chōka-writing after April’s done. I’ll take that fun offline, though, and certainly won’t be aiming for a poem a day! It’s time to turn my attention back to the #52essays2017 challenge, start playing catch up with all these missed weeks that are glaring at me from my calendar.

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A chōka is a Japanese form poem with a specific syllable count per line. The shortest form of chōka  is: 5 / 7 / 5 / 7 / 5 / 7 / 5 / 7 / 7. The 5- and 7-syllable lines can repeat as many times as needed. The poem’s end is signaled by the extra 7-syllable line. The final five lines can be used to summarize the body of the poem.

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X is for: Xenial

It’s about hospitality to strangers, which reads to me like kindness and generosity.

Tonight was the sixth anniversary of a women’s poetry salon I’ve been attending off and on since the summer of 2014. (Yes, for someone who spends a lot of time talking about how she isn’t a poet, I sure spend a lot of time immersed in poetry, don’t I? I know.)

The salon is a lovely space, a welcoming group of women who are unfailingly supportive and encouraging of one another. There are a couple of guys who attend, and they are just as lovely.

Aside from the beautiful welcome the salon extends, I feel free there. I let down my writing defenses — the ways I try to keep myself “safe” when it comes to writing poetry. I have let myself write in new ways, let myself stretch and try and trust the moment in ways that I would have had to struggle to do before I joined the group. One of my strongest Black Lives Matter pieces came, nearly whole, from a writing exercise we did in the salon.

Tonight was the 6th anniversary party, and it was great! Excellent readers, friends in the audience I haven’t seen in ages. Nice all the way around. Tonight’s chōka was inspired by one of the conversations I had early in the evening.

Plumped and Full

I said to a friend
I feel like I’m coming back,
back into the world.
It’s a good feeling — airy,
light, full of power
like everything is open.
It’s a good feeling,
finally back to myself,
my lungs plumped and full.
It’s time to stand up, to sing,
take pleasure in all of me.

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A chōka is a Japanese form poem with a specific syllable count per line. The shortest form of chōka  is: 5 / 7 / 5 / 7 / 5 / 7 / 5 / 7 / 7. The 5- and 7-syllable lines can repeat as many times as needed. The poem’s end is signaled by the extra 7-syllable line. The final five lines can be used to summarize the body of the poem.

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Q is for: Quotation

“Land is power.” Ruby McGee

Tonight I had the distinct pleasure of watching an amazing documentary, Dirt and Deeds in Mississippi. It tells another amazing “hidden figures” kind of story, some Black history that was rolled up in cotton wool and tucked way out of sight. In this case, the story of Black land-owning farmers and the role they played in the fight for rights — civil, voting, human — in Mississippi. It is an eye-opening, painful, powerful, important document of history. I could watch it on a loop for days.

Ruby McGee was the first Black person to be registered to vote in her county. Today, she owns and operates the family tree farm that gave her the freedom to take some of the chances she took as a young woman, that enabled her parents to run a Freedom School. She talks about what being a landowner gave her, says that it meant she didn’t have to work in white people’s kitchens. She talks about the idea of “knowledge is power” … and says no, “Land is power.”

And that resonated so deeply in my chest. I wanted to clap my hands and shout, “Yes!” It reminded me:

Got land to stand on,
then you can stand up,
stand up for your rights
as a woman, as a man.

“Achin’ for Acres” by Arrested Development was about exactly this, the power of owning where you live, owning the ground beneath your feet.

And it reminded me of my sadness, my personal heartache when family land has been lost, on my mother’s side, on my father’s. Those are pieces of ourselves we can never get back. I feel the empty spaces left by each even now, years later.

It reminded me of something I heard John Boyd Jr. say a while ago in an NPR profile piece: all of us are no more than two generations removed from somebody’s farm.

It reminded me of Constance Curry’s amazing book, Silver Rights, also about Mississipi.

This movie touched so many chords. And it spilled over into tonight’s chōka.

I have so much pride
seeing my ancestors fight
seeing them stand up
refusing to cave, to give.
This is what it means:
strength, power, faith, love, honor.
This is who we are,
fierce, unendingly stubborn
and sure. Sure of us,
sure of the fact we were right.
Sure that — live or die — we’d win.

My family isn’t from Mississippi — at least no one I’ve found yet — but Dirt and Deeds felt like home all the same.

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A chōka is a Japanese form poem with a specific syllable count per line. The shortest form of chōka  is: 5 / 7 / 5 / 7 / 5 / 7 / 5 / 7 / 7. The 5- and 7-syllable lines can repeat as many times as needed. The poem’s end is signaled by the extra 7-syllable line. The final five lines can be used to summarize the body of the poem.

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Long Distance

The miles between us
all the things we never say.
Already miss you
though we’ve just now said goodbye.
Forty-eight hours
could never be enough time
never enough time.
We are too few and too far —
my heart sits alone, longing.

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A chōka is a Japanese form poem with a specific syllable count per line. The shortest form of chōka  is: 5 / 7 / 5 / 7 / 5 / 7 / 5 / 7 / 7. The 5- and 7-syllable lines can repeat as many times as needed. The poem’s end is signaled by the extra 7-syllable line. The final five lines can be used to summarize the body of the poem.

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M is for: My Mother’s House

“Home” is wherever my mother lives. Which means home has been places I’ve never actually lived like Boulder, Colorado, and Rockville, Maryland. Anywhere she is, when I go there, I’m going “home.”

And here I am for this Easter weekend, for the belated celebration of Fox’s birthday. Home. With my family. The place I can always be the absolute, 100%, full, entire Stacie. I can say every nonsensical thing, can be as unclever as I sometimes am, can look a mess, can just breathe deeply. I have that ease with some of my friends, but it’s still not the same as what I feel at home. Even when it’s tense here, there’s still that comfortable pocket of freedom to be myself. I feel supremely lucky to have this space.

And tonight, Fox and I are hanging out, listening to music, watching videos … and it’s all I want.

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Orishas

A Lo Cubano
pulsing on the stereo —
this music, my heart
every beat calling my name.
What is the secret
connecting this to my soul?
Piece of history
or a piece of who I am:
under my skin, beyond words.

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A chōka is a Japanese form poem with a specific syllable count per line. The shortest form of chōka  is: 5 / 7 / 5 / 7 / 5 / 7 / 5 / 7 / 7. The 5- and 7-syllable lines can repeat as many times as needed. The poem’s end is signaled by the extra 7-syllable line. The final five lines can be used to summarize the body of the poem.

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T’s Day

Today is a day off in the A-to-Z Challenge, but even if it was a day on, we’re too early in the month for today to be “T.” But today is T’s day all the same.

Today is T’s birthday. My beautiful, funny, intelligent, writer-thinker-singer-dancer niece turns 18 today. The fact that I didn’t write any poems last April means I missed a year in my collection of birthday verse for her, but certainly represented no falling down in my utter adoration of who she is.

Eventually, I will make her a chapbook of all my April 9th poems. For now, I’ll just post this year’s addition and wish my god daughter, my dearest, darlingest niece a happy 18th. I can’t wait to see what’s next.

Eighteen

Today’s gratitude
is easy, a constant love
a genuine force.
Reshapes the capacity
of my heart. Reshapes
my understanding of love.
Reshapes awareness
of who I am in the world.
Eighteen years loving
with everything, my all.
Eighteen years knowing
that love can look like laughter
look like truth-telling
like one beautiful, brown girl.
My heart knows your name,
sings you to sleep from afar,
makes you a praise song
a joyous shout to the gods —
gratitude as you become.

I have no real way of knowing if that poem is any good. I do know, however, that I teared up while typing that last bit, the envoi. That has to count for something … or, rather, something other than my general sappiness.

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A chōka is a Japanese form poem with a specific syllable count per line. The shortest form of chōka  is: 5 / 7 / 5 / 7 / 5 / 7 / 5 / 7 / 7. The 5- and 7-syllable lines can repeat as many times as needed. The poem’s end is signaled by the extra 7-syllable line. The final five lines can be used to summarize the body of the poem.

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In my stocking feet.

I was never one of those tall girls who stooped over to hide her height. Never. Not even when I had crushes on shorter boys. My height has always been a source of pride … and more than a little vanity.

I was surprised when I learned there were tall girls who tried to make themselves look smaller, tall girls who didn’t love being tall. I couldn’t fathom it. Being tall was like having a super power, winning a lottery, being born with a tiara. Who wouldn’t want that, wouldn’t revel in it?

Well, clearly, lots of girls. Lots. So how did I, the poster child for low self-esteem, not have issues with my height? How did I wind up loving my height?

I credit my cousin Pam, a woman on my dad’s side, a woman I’ve never met but whose signature feature — her fabulous height — was a subject of note in my house.

My father’s family had lots of tall people. My father was just a hair off of 6’5″. His Uncle Ambrose was taller. All those men were tall.

And then there was Pam. The main thing I was ever told about Pam? That she was six-foot-two … in her stocking feet.

(Just like that. No one ever only said she was 6’2″. She was always “six-foot-two in her stocking feet.”)

And it was said with a kind of wonder, an amazement at what she had managed to achieve. And somewhere along the line being as tall as Pam became one of my strongest wishes. Fox, my sister, shared this obsession with me. Both of us running around wishing we could be six-foot-two in our stocking feet. Thank goodness I had Fox for company. I didn’t have to dream myself taller all on my own … and I had someone to commiserate with when I stopped growing before hitting the six-foot mark.

In my stocking feet? I’m just edging up on 5’10” … not short, exactly, but I’ve long-ago had to accept that I’d never get my wish of being like Pam.

 

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It’s the 10th annual Slice of Life Story Challenge!

Head over to Two Writing Teachers to see all of today’s slices!

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