Exhumations from Tomorrowland
on republishing, returning + other acts of practice.
a poem is a gesture toward home.1
I read this line over and over, attending to its parts, unfolding it.
from my home on Normandy Rd., it was down the big hill, across Lomond, and one block more, a quick left, and I could race your bike for six whole blocks without stopping (if you caught the light). this sometimes daily trek to the Shaker Heights Public Library often glided by without a thought, but I could get there now in my sleep. and when I took my daughter last June on a midway stopover in our grad school road trip, it was as smooth and familiar as ever, and I only cried twice.Â
or that time in Rome at the end of the Vatican tour, when all that remained was an unassuming door, a little small and drab, if I’m honest, with a small sign indicating exit. so I pushed, and it creaked, and we stumbled into the Sistine Chapel, knees suddenly wobbly and throat tightening, and I was electric with knowing that art is created by human beings, no more or less, and I am also capable of such splendor.Â
or the glow of the sun at the moment of my child’s birth, or the first time I taught House on Mango Street, or walking in St. Ann’s on Mardi Gras morning. the moments that have seized my attention are both triumphant and mundane, and they lived.
poem.
gesture.
toward.
home.
each word becomes a sentence, a unit of meaning, hinged around one little verb: is.
to be: a gesture.
the poem moves.
the poem been.
the poem lived.
I think I'd like to have a flower box that's overgrown with haphazardly growing blooms and which frames the tattered shutters of my pink house. I think I'd like to open these rattling windows wide, as the sunset cast its orange shadow across the cobblestoned street below, and beckon you to come in from playing. you would kiss your playmates and race in, dirty-faced and sticky with late summer sweat, and the sounds of night taking over the town would fill the staircases. somewhere inside is a oversized table draped with fancy lace for no reason at all, a bowl of cherries holding it in place. and candles drip onto a desk in the corner building back a mound only recently chipped away. the smells of lavender from the garden and orange marmalade linger on my fingertips as I finish a letter to that certain someone, traveling too far from me that week. you'd come close to rub your cheek against mine, those ever-darkening curls tickling my nose, and for a moment it would seem like it had always been that way. soon enough, you'd beeline for the kitchen, ravenous and eager to explore freshly stocked cupboards, and pour a second glass of wine, drinking in the long road to delight.
I adored her, Someday; with her promise and her allure and her clean bedroom miraculously rid of the clothes pile in the corner chair. she crooned of possibility and grandeur. I liked, even seduced, the fantasy of myself within her electric embrace. all that wanting. how precious. how exquisite. what a wonder I was, and how content to hope and imagine. I am, after all, excellent at daydreaming tomorrows.
what good is an archive in boxes? who is or gets served by Cisneros on display?
attention requires embodiment.
I don’t have a writing habit.
I don’t have many habits.
I do few things unconsciously.
I am conscious.
I am being.
I be.
I is.
that’s a practice I cannot help but revisit.
when I revisit yesterday’s words, I see every day is tomorrow, and today is someday, and I have always been and have not yet arrived and am returning all at once.
with Serge playing softly from your bedroom, you'll wander the hall knowing just where to find me. slipping beneath a curtain of leaves and stepping gingerly around my charcoal and pens and stacks of books, you'll slide into the chair and flip quickly upside-down, your ever-darkening locks skimming the floor. as the blood rushes to your head, we'll wait for the other to speak first, both content to sit silently and stay in conversation with the dreamings of our imaginations. and then you'll ask me how we came to rest here in this space and city and moment in time. you'll turn and slink off the chair pushing the air around you and forcing the smoke of the incense into a halo about your ringlets. and I think you'll lie on the floor, feet where your back just rested, staring out the window hoping something magical floats by, awaiting my response and wiping sleep from the corners of your eyes. putting my work to the side, I'll follow your eyes until we are both taking in the fringes of the neighbor's curtains dancing in the window across the way. clearing my throat, I'll tell you that there was a moment, a thousand moments, some infinitesimal and some glaringly, achingly immense. in each, I looked at you and made a choice. every so often, I was aware, but mostly I instinctively acted. without fail, and without regret, I always chose you. and art and love and forward motion and love and sense of worth and love and hope and love and new beginnings and love and possibility and love and you, always you, and forever you. and that's how we came to be here despite and because of it all. and you'll probably say ok and race to catch the ringing phone, and leave me with my work and this room and my choices and the light and our love.
as artists, our finest creations might be the precious myths we tell of our own becoming, leveraging chronologies to notice + name the seeds as if we weren’t out here conjuring harvest from desert. many days, it seems, ‘practice’ is a fiction broiling toward irresolution. or, my practice is this, as it shifts to accommodate the nature of the work, its languages, and materials, its shapes and schedule, its indigeneity to the constellation of ideas floating in the soup of me.
from a childhood magnified by the bountiful stacks of the Shaker Heights Public Library to the thunderous teachings of the Oglala Lakota Sioux; through the backpack tutelage of Anna Deavere Smith, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Ntozake Shange; from the Mississippi to the Blue Ridge, I conceived of my potential to be seen and known beyond sight and sense in art-making.
I fell in love with the speculative in a high school auditorium, and again in a black box in Alaska, and once more in the Sistine Chapel, and again at 6:06pm on a Tuesday in July, and beneath the bloated belly of a nation, daily, and in every poem I’ve ever read or written, and in the surging urgency of audacious imagination.
I am writing tomorrow in the moment.
I am the stardust and willfulness of a thousand stumbles and false starts which have collected like water droplets into the heavy rainstorm of my being. at my beginning, not much more than a whisper of possibility and a dark slick of curls, but I have lived now a few decades within these brown, round walls, gliding through space, a busy mind nestled within a cautious body. I carry fading scars, sore wounds, ancient worries, and dizzying joyfulness in my swaying hips, my steady gaze, my booming voice which at times cracks and breaks and falls off over sweet and sour truths. I have been a creature of contradictions seeking an anchor in stormy waters.Â
as a girl, I heard the woman of my daydreams singing back at me. I let that fiery ball called someday creep from my anxious belly up my throat, forcing out a scream. I shouted from bridges covered in starlight & desire, desperate for guidance, clarity. I grasped at life, clinging to versions of myself that fit the moment and whim. true, but incomplete. I longed for someday to be this very instant, to be beyond the journey, finally at some unknown destination. I was yelling to deepest self, for underneath the hopeful moonlit paths of seeking was a fractured soul desiring fullness. womanhood has been this. a dirty battle between imagination and fear, and I on both sides fighting with all my might. I couldn't see my whole self for the mists of longing & consequence obscured my view.
daughter, it was in your eyes I first looked upon my whole self. your first breath was the gold leaf which filled the cracks of me. what love! and genuine magic to know you. in motherhood I came to know that which I have been, I will always be, and that which I desire to be, I have always been. all the moments until this one are buried within me, holding you up, child, and lighting your path.Â
and when I leave this world, I will have dented and bruised and filled the space about my body with the flailing of raw, honest living. I will exit as I entered, a powerhouse of wailing vibrancy, and this time will have been the transition, the breath, the pause between all that I could become and all I ever was. a woman, fully.
the benefits of sharing anew what has been shared before are many; this list has been edited for current cognitive capacity.
I recall I have been here before.
I recall I have been this before.
I recall I am ancient.
I recall ancient things.
I recall the present ancient.
I invite presence.
I sit with/in.
I recall the feeling of scribbling the long-ago words.
I feel my hand trace the sentences again.
I resist editing.
I resist revision.
I resist re-reading too closely.
I resist resisting close reads.
I resist resisting closely.
(thus) I dialogue with memory.
I allow her.
I mean to say, in re-sharing old notes, I come home to the basement of me, to the storage bins and boxes, to the waterlogged accountings of being alive here. the rehash is its own investigation, an archival purging.
recycling my own evolution fans the flames of origin in me. shedding the dead skin smoothes and enlivens the present. I am not relinquishing someday; I allow her now.
& now.
[breathe]
& now.
until soon, xx ajo
 Brown, Jericho, The Tradition. Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 2019.