“The purpose of a human being is to flourish like the purpose of a fork is to pick up food. Flourishing, as in living up to your potential and being kind and not wasting a lot of energy worrying about the past or the future. Identifying what you love to do and what you're best at and then organizing your time around both in a smart way.” - maria semple
“I like the lady horses best, how they make it all look easy, like running 40 miles per hour is as fun as taking a nap, or grass. I like their lady horse swagger, after winning. Ears up, girls, ears up! But mainly, let’s be honest, I like that they’re ladies. As if this big dangerous animal is also a part of me, that somewhere inside the delicate skin of my body, there pumps an 8-pound female horse heart, giant with power, heavy with blood.” - Ada Limón
From north to south, and back again- I’m welcomed home by a snowy owl. After spending five weeks amongst the barred. Now, Minnesota- under siege, spun open, small circles binding beLoved neighborhoods. These words allows me to queer again my intimacy with place, pain, the plurality of love and hate.
Always a poet or twenty to celebrate in December. Their work, as sentinel, watching weaving wearing the frayed grief and pulsing creativities of a whole year. Imagine! Twelve months worth of words queerly catalogued- ready to reference in this next project we call 2026.
Closing out the year. Rounding a corner. Shellacking favorite “love poems” on my piano, celebrating “ruins” (literal places - perhaps abandoned or forgotten spots - and the emotional devastation of grief, aspirations, feeling in ruins while navigating love, art, work, and family).
Whereas mainstream American narratives focus on the individual, the Blackfoot way of life offers an alternative resulting in a community that leaves no one behind.
I landed in Burlington, Vermont today. REturning to a beLoved home for the first time in 15 years. Embarrassing!? that I’ve been away this long. Not made time to come back. REkindle a key relationship that would shape and become my Queer Intimacy with Place. REmind myself of the state’s dapper geology. REcall unique ways of queering ecology and culture.
"The steel between my thighs is lightning, and the breeze on my back is my wings. The blackness is an oil spill of indigo and cosmos spread before me. I is fire in my lungs, and each breath feel like it almost want to both drown and deliver me. I is riding so fast, I hear every conversation of every winged thing that prevail in the night, and it shudders a sparkle into my spirit, and I can go faster. My skin is glowing, and I is levitating over life, over myself, the hurt, the streetlights. I ain't understanding how gravity release me from the earth, but I is flying. I is pumping my thick thighs until they tingling, pumping and taking the sky into my chest and my legs and it is effortless, like I always know how to do this."
“I’m really tired of watching women of color, in particular, being ignored. So I’m not sorry.”
I attended an event last week about Third Spaces that opened with the question, “If your soul was a work of art, what would it look like?”. That night I had wild, imaginative dreams about my soul being both art work(s) and sex toy(s). I reposed the question, “If my soul was a sex toy, what would my pleasuring feel like?”. Upon waking, I spent time thinking about my sexuality and my community’s sexualities as third spaces.
I look out at lusty blue on blue of horizon, past where I saw a whole fox, tail still fluffy, fire orange fur, frozen solid in deep winter,
as hard as questions in my head’s hollow, “How? How is this possible?” No answer- the round reality that each day dispenses
loses its flavor after minutes flat. Yet the magic!! cracks open, loud Loud frozen water.
The professional athletes, wicked wizards with blades and sticks,
Gendered and agendered bodies, bruised and brave and bellowing,
With (a life time of and) three periods, Win!
The final whistle blows, we all head home
To wait for the cis men in our lives to finally catch up.
Shrubby cinquefoil is often associated with resilience and endurance. This flower blooms from spring to early fall, providing long-lasting beauty. Its vibrant petals symbolize joy, strength, and pleasure in plant speak.
‘The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.’ Audre Lorde, “Poetry is Not a Luxury'“
Like my mama said last month after I tried to convince her drinking diet coke is not the same as drinking water, “Dammit honey, sometimes you just have to hydrate your pleasure!” I paused, laughed aloud on the phone, and exclaimed, “That is brilliant!”
Poetry. Before, after, during, always, Yes, there’s a deep and interesting kind of troubling poems do. Troubling as in stirring up- and- creating space for expressions of troubles. Art asks for both.
- Tracy K. Smith
The mosses remember that this is not the first time the glaciers have melted. If time is a line, as western thinking presumes, we might think this is a unique moment for which we have to devise a solution that enables that line to continue. If time is a circle, as the Indigenous worldview presumes, the knowledge we need is already within the circle; we just have to remember and let it teach us. That’s where the storytellers come in. -RWK
Every year, after birthday month adventures, I return, rejuvenated from east coast directness- sexy, smooth, and simple. Schnazzle in the speakEasy. Folx telling me what they want. I spread risky creativity (as in pleasure inducing intimacies expressed) over friendship, family, the familiar 5 generations deep.
When Audre said, “The love of women healed me,” she meant the care, gratitude, and intellectual affirmation she found in women’s community and cultural spaces. But she also meant the erotic thrill and sensual excitement she felt about the women in her life. Those who were lovers, and those who were not.