I lie in the belly of my bed
like a flame dying in a pool of wax—
ponder if Mother Earth will be swallowed
by the ocean as she boils in a belly
of poison. Outside my window I hear
her crying raindrops, and I am crying too.
Her heavy clouds spew a flood of water,
fill the ground, rage rivers, melt soil,
and crumble rocks. Even as she suffers,
she is still more powerful than us.
She knows humanity will die before her.
Her thunder blasts a distant horn—tells me
I know how to strike a match—begs me to ignite
this sunken Earth mother’s flame and make her new.
– Kathi Crawford
Author’s Note: “Put a Match to It” ignites the opening of a collection I am working on, setting the tone with its focus on climate change and the resilience of Mother Earth.…
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There is the mythology of birthmarks that they
Represent your past lives’ ends, how you met
Your maker at the edge of the field.
What do mine say about me? My stomach
Dyed brown from a stab wound in feudal Spain,
A domestic dispute over the manzanilla olive.
Or what of the matching café au lait splotches
On both my upper knees? Groveling on scorched
Stone steps before any Athenian god who listened.
How about the mark on my neck, just above
The clavicle? Some warrior in southern Asia’s
Attempt to open my airways one last time.…
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weapons aren’t just blades, knives and swords
they’re eyes that throw glances
sharp enough to cut through your ego
make you think of the ruins you’ve created
weapons are words we don’t swallow
that we allow to come up
through the broken and cracked pipes
that might burst with emotion
weapons are moving towards
uninhabitable lands filled with toxins
designed to kill the human spirit…
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my fire is not for symbolism
for your joint or cigarette
it is to make me a martyr for the war
the fight forced on those on the bottom
of the color wheel
my fire is not for symbolism
for white women to try and put out
with their tears made of punishment
and pride
it is for brown and black girls
who have never seen a way out
who have never had guidance…
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You were a person, you lived, and
you tried to avoid pain. But pain is entangled in life, and
can’t be extracted. Still–
like every human being, you tried.
You were a woman, deified and dismissed, both angel
and monster, always through a lens, always
compelled to be beautiful.
Beautiful to whom?
You were a mother. Your heart was split open
like a pomegranate– sacrificed,
though it never felt like a sacrifice.
You were a writer (possibly)
every tender meat hook of an image on the page,
reality poured through the sieve,
and so little made it through in the end.
You are tired.
No longer care to continue unpacking
mysteries, rising and falling with the karmic wheel—
up and down, the lesson never learned.
This page, too, will be turned.…
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my dad died two days before trump was sworn in for the second time. i’m not sure i ever saw myself in his face but i thought I’d at least recognize the pieces of me that came from him. etched somewhere against the life he’d lived and the things he saw. maybe side by side id be able to ware down the hardness of his eyes and see them in my own. I’m still a child, his child, one that has not known much else but ease, and ease looks different, it feels different. ease to me is, never being limited. I think your hardness came from the potential for so much more. the things you didn’t get to live and the things you didn’t get to see.…
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I walk past the same corner each day
where I would sit between classes
and talk to you, where the skateboarder
nearly collided
into me
as you spoke of your old friend
who was dying of cancer
but wouldn’t stop smoking
and I complained of my anemia
how I barely had the energy
to stand in front of a class
for thirty minutes
And all the time I was wondering
how much longer
we could keep it going
because this was a thing
we had been doing for twenty years
without ever agreeing to
or addressing it because
that might entail giving it up…
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