crumbs #1

poems for spring, poems of my own, what i'm reading and listening to, and other bits

I’m trying to be more of a collector. Someone who thinks in theme and sees throughlines. Truthfully, I might be a little too scatterbrained for that, so I can’t exactly call these collections—that’s too much pressure. These are simply the crumbs I’ve collected for you lately.

I’ve been thinking a lot about those lines from Lana del Rey’s Blue Banisters lately. The ones that go, “Summer comes, winter goes / Spring, I skip, God knows / Summer comes, winter goes / Spring, I sleep, Heaven knows.” This isn’t a new thing. These lines haunt me every year, when the pollen starts collecting on windows and the body I’ve spent my winter in starts to feel too warm and suffocating.

We romanticize the transformative seasons of our lives to ease the suffering. It’s hard to exist in an in between, to feel good about yourself and your life and everything else when the world is shifting, when we’re coming into who we are again, looking for who we might be instead.

During the spring, I find I listen to this song at least once a day. It’s a comfort and a warning, wrapped into one. A stronghold for the the hope I have that, this season, I’ll be better than I was only a few months before.

“Cheers for spring; for life; for a growing soul.”

—Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Witch Wife

By Kiki Petrosino

I’ll conjure the perfect Easter

& we’ll plant mini spruces in the yard—

my pink gloves & your green gloves

like parrots from an opera over the earth—

We’ll chatter about our enemies’ spectacular deaths.

I’ll conjure the perfect Easter

dark pesto sauce sealed with lemon

long cords of fusilli to remind you of my hair

& my pink gloves. Your gloves are green

& transparent like the skin of Christ

when He returned, filmed over with moss roses—

I’ll conjure as perfect an Easter:

provolone cut from the whole ball

woody herbs burning our tongues—it’s a holiday

I conjure with my pink-and-green gloves

wrangling life from the dirt. It all turns out

as I’d hoped. The warlocks of winter are dead

& it’s Easter. I dig up body after body after body

with my pink gloves, my green gloves.

The first time I read this poem, I felt like crying. I don’t know how many times I’ve gone over the last stanza, imagining hands in the dirt, digging up new lives. Or maybe old versions of myself that could only feel new now, after so much time buried, asleep. I think it’s the desperation I cling to. The dying and undying hope.

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The only book I’d really love to read this month is Just Kids by Patti Smith. If you know me in real life, or have read my most recent post, this is not very surprising. I’m pushing myself to grow creatively, generally—in all the ways that matter. Patti has become a kind of guiding light for this, and I refuse to mention this to my therapist because I don’t want to hear what she has to say. So far, it’s been good for me. I can feel the slow turnover, the cells of my old self dying one by one to make space for the me I could be if I stop being so fucking afraid of everything.

One thing I’ve been trying and failing to be less afraid of is grief. I wrote an entire novel centered around it, and it barely made a dent in my coping (or lack thereof). I’ve been putting off Smith’s book for almost two years now, scared shitless over what it might make me feel. What it might make me face. But I don’t want to live this way anymore, shrinking away and closing myself off. That is not a life.

“Yes, I deserve a spring–I owe nobody nothing.”

—Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary

Lastly, I leave you with this:

Spring

down by the creek,

i laid in the sandy dirt,

counted the jagged edges of rocks

digging into the flesh of my back.

one at my right shoulder

two at my left

three where my spine aches from carrying too much

four where his fingers used to wind around my hip

i name those places,

as if i’m giving them a kiss

to counteract the kind of pain i’ve always found

a little too pleasurable.

the lapping water whispers past

my bare toes, covered in dirt and

aching from dragging myself here

to where the freshwater nymphs

sing to me, begging

come home

come home

come home

—Natalie Rosselli