Sometimes
I feel out of the loop
with all the magic
I hear so much about.

Sometimes
the trees won’t talk
and the ancestors won’t come
and all that’s here
is this mind
I know all too well
struggling to break beyond itself
without breaking down.

Sometimes
it feels like I’m supposed to
be somewhere (and someone) else;
like I didn’t get cc’d
the enchantment memo
and my forgetting
revokes my membership
in a club
I didn’t know I joined.

What to do when soil is just dirt
and stones are just rocks
and rivers are where electricity comes from?
What to say when I turn to my phone
to numb my numbness
once again?

This morning,
I walk down to a creek
lined with plastic bottles
past six hunting dogs chained
perpetually
to cages.

Slow steps past
mailboxes adorned with Christmas glitter
actual white picket fences
and the glowing screen
flashing through dirty windows.

Shoreside,
pushed against a concrete pylon
I watch the water
and feel what I feel;
tender echoes below the hardness
in my chest.

Life,
curled in
clutched
embracing itself as the aches
I carry like an old worn wallet
that still smells
like my grandpa’s used to.

Suddenly the water winks
and my shoulders drop.
10,000 generations brought me here
to gaze upon the ways
we survived, and still survive,
with bodies loving themselves
the ways they must.

The tension in my jaw,
the knot of anxiety I haven’t kicked yet,
perpetual busyness:
layered love waiting
for someone
someday
to stop.

As I lean back
finally
something ancient speaks.

“Start here.”