It’s July again, almost August, and I’m sweating and sneezing and sleeping. We got our very first batch of avocados from one of the trees in the backyard. They’re small and not ready yet. Originally, the sapling was a gift I gave my husband many years ago, maybe just two or three years after we started dating. The tree has grown and grown, but never bore us any fruit until now.
Despite the oppressive heat, we’ve been going on evening walks. We’ve made a game of finding kitties along our route. I pretend I’m catching them like Pokémon with my camera. There are so many cats in our neighborhood and people take care of them. There is one corner house that we estimate must have 15-20 cats that come around to get fed. We’re always seeing new ones appear. They hide in the bushes, lounge on the driveway or sidewalk, and sometimes stare at us from the roof.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been going more and more analog (which I intend to take into the classroom in the fall) as the internet becomes deader and deader, emptier and emptier. I subscribed to a gaming magazine called Patch and delight in receiving a new issue every month in my mailbox. Whenever I pick up a new book to read and spend some time with it, I feel so much closer to humanity. I do not feel this way when I go online; if anything, I feel much more disconnected and unsettled by not just difference of opinion and temperament, but what sometimes seems like complete separations of reality. Apparently, some people just experience an entirely different universe that I am not able to access. How we move further away from each other despite creeping technologies that insist on continuous oversharing, how we move further away from ourselves and our imaginations. Taking trips to the library has helped, which seems to me hilariously punk at this point. I’m glad I have my sister to take these trips with, in between getting slices of Oreo cheesecake.
I continue to work on my poetry manuscript, submitting new or revised poems when I can. Exploring different forms, I’ve fallen in love with the haibun (I think my manuscript will end up having a handful), and I’m also working on erasures and odes. I recently published a poem in the “In-Between” issue of Folio, which explores the fraught battlefield of gender and childhood. If you’ve ever felt like a misfit of any kind, maybe it will resonate.
Earlier this year, writer-friend Stephen Delaney published Our Place Is In Between, a chapbook of curious, occasionally fabulist prose and prose poems (featuring a kitty curled on the cover, which Jacob conveniently posed for). The chapbook includes a collaboration we worked on together. I’m grateful for the writing folks I’ve been able to get to know (whether in school or in online circles), since, increasingly and surreally, writing has become a radical act of communion and resistance.