mother ginger

when I am far from my mother, ginger becomes her.

hugs me with her aroma, tea in the morning, soup in the evening.

purely good. a love that is lingering. tender and soft.

I peel with the back of the spoon, Joris said, I love how you do that,

it is so delicate, but what he didn't know, what even you didn't know,

was the peeling is an act of love, the cutting, the imbuing, the drinking,

even when it doesn't lead to drinking, the ritual of doing something that might

make you better.

plants

It takes so little to upset me these days.
I walk through days as though they are glass, rapping on the windows,
fogging up the glass. Wiping with my hands.
All day I keep my windows open. 
Feel so uncomfortably hot, need the cold air to remember I am alive,
that I am a part of this world. That I breathe, that I feel.
These things, sometimes, are not so quick to come to my mind.
Slow, slow, slow down, baby. Even slower, baby.
Almost so that you can't tell that you're moving,
that's the pace these days, you need.
Even though we don't see them,
the plants are growing.

In Enghave Plads

I had
a really good kiss
one night
over a bicycle
that left me
wanting more
all the way
home

a break from bad weather

I don't know what to do, so when I get a chance to, I sleep.

E says isn't this and its ongoing presence

a characteristic of depression? depression, as though a huge finger

is pushing me down deep into the earth from above,

is stopping the come-up.

(And when it takes its finger away

perhaps I will zing towards the heavens with equal force

unleashed unbounded high

before my eventual crash to reality).

Papa calls me. I panic, but I pick up.

(So painful these echoes of a past reality. Grief begets grief, recalls grief.

Male archetypes in my life that I do and do not know how to speak to.

That I did and did not know how to speak to.

Now E joins their ranks).

He tells me that things have been okay.

He has been quite busy with work, but really has been wanting to get out

into the day (as he has been accidentally doing these past months he places

his hand over the speaker and I cannot hear him, and I must chide him, his child,

and this lightness buoys against the secret darknesses of our conservation).

But it's nice, he says, to have a break from bad weather.

And I laugh, a sudden sharp hurt hopeful laugh, I could not have made two years ago,

maybe even, two weeks ago. And I say, as though it is explanation (it is not)

that sounds nice. he pauses,

are you needing a break from bad weather?

and I do not even have to say, yes, yes,

desperately.

dear morning light

dear morning light that seeps in my window
how is it you touch me with your changing hands?

today I got to thinking about the insufficiency of words

and the way in which they become so unable to communicate

when we most need them to communicate.

we overcomplicate, type, retype, but it is futile–

how do we say the thing we do not know how to say?

I love you I do not want to talk to you anymore

I hate you and I want you to be in my life forever

I am so afraid to change though I am already changing

how can meaning in all its contradictions and impossibilities

be crammed into words that are meant to say one thing?

as though a comma could change everything

(eat, grandma. eat grandma). it does and it doesn't.

we are not able to control how others perceive us.

we are not able to control the future.

I was doing my best, I was always doing my best.

and I can die, knowing that.

marie, yannic, and I

sit on the sidewalk curb

eating oranges and drinking yogurt

and talking about what the versions of us

two years ago would have done had they known

what they were about to embark on. 

yannic smokes a cigarette. then after marie asks if

we are not going back to class, and it becomes apparent in fact

that none of us will, he smokes another. marie says certainly

the biggest thing she has gotten from this is language skills,

are language skills soft or hard? none of us know.

maybe hard I say. yannic says her German is very good so sweetly,

his blue eyes twinkling. the madrid sun has tempered and in this shade

everything is orange like the skins marie piles into her empty yogurt cup. 

the moment is perfect. recharges me like a battery. 

makes me remember what it is that I want to live for:

tiny moments like this, the small teaspoon on my lips, 

yannic's hand cupping the butt as he lights it up again and the smell

wafts over me in the wind, and marie places her spoon directly on the concrete

without a second thought. it is a spring moment tinged with summer,

anything is possible and the smallest things are dangerously sweet

something one would give their life for over and over again

never getting anywhere, but never needing to.

I don't know anything

i.

I don't know anything

this is the only thing I know

the only thing that is quite clear to me.

ii.

I am sick of perfection.

Let me be reckless. Let me be foolish.

Let me be irresponsible.

I spend most of my time crying,

anyway.

iii.

Things I wish for:

to wake up and feel rested

to wake up not anxious not worrying if I should go back to sleep

the intimacy of a watch on the bedside table without the pain

comfort

to finish my thesis

to not be so tired

to know what to do

vi.

life perhaps

is a constant undoing

of past illusions.

(and what is built up

in their place?)