thanks for listening.
frequencies, quietude, and the un/expected!
every other week, or so, I read my friend’s newsletter. she’s already conquered my video game of loyalty and lives on the boss level of kinship with me, so I feel no shame in openly ignoring the mass messages that come each week. I love her beyond her classes, and casual sentence structure/s, and I’m certain this is known, and I won’t unsubscribe, because pals, so what’s in them for me? I say, before each read. & then I recall my real reason for skipping them:
I always have something to say in return.
it’s not that these are necessarily profound missives. though my friend has a true way with words, harnessing sincerity in language, they aren’t designed for heaviness; they are like a quick phone call, to catch up on the week’s happenings. sure, they are sprinkled with wisdom and Truths, and, in the end, it’s the places where I disagree most that get me talking to myself.
months ago—and I’m still thinking about it—she shared a hope that folks, upon meeting her, would remark, Yep, she’s just as I expected, and wow. I’ve never wanted anything less. no comment might wound me more than being just as expected. it seems like a personal attack. yet, I adore my friend, and how she’s just as I expected, and has been since our very first interaction, and, I think, how others expect her as well. I know absolutely what she’d be like if I saw her tomorrow after months and months without seeing one another. I love that she loves that and craves it, and delivers on the promise, and I love that her writing frustrates me so sincerely, not for the disagreement, but because I’m not nearby to say Dear Lord, make me unexpected.
I do like secrets; or, I like to operate in secret; or, I like to be right there for the taking, if only you’d reach out and grab me, seize me, claim me, see me, listen for me. I’m a frequency to tune into, and in the quietude of these years, with blips and blobs of shares, here and there, I’ve orchestrated symphonies in waves for those attuned, and it has been something, somewhere, beyond words.
in truth, it first felt like despair: who am I, poet-speaker-soother, without or with/in language? I was a year into a grad program—admittedly, a moment of self-inflicted crisis for any practitioner, but certainly for, you know, Black single mothers clinging to a semblance of calm in the afterlife of.. it all—and I was furious, hysterical, sick. I was, also, buried in research, and with that inquiry. central to this was a less selfish, but linked, question: if there are no words, to what might I listen, and in that what can I hear?
perhaps I cherished the abandoning of this expectation within myself. the demand to be the one who talked. who made terror sound like music. who made lullabies of horror. I won’t say I loathe the impulse; indeed, I find it quite human, and yet.. my research became invested in a pursuit of this historical imperative, for Black maternality to soften their degradation, for Black mothers to sweetly rock their children to bed beneath the alarms of their impending doom, for Black maternity to be in service of the ongoing American project of poetically narrating murderous days.
Dear Lord, make me unexpected.
I wrote a lot offline. pages and pages of sentences that sounded like absence to the thousands who had come to count on Tuesday afternoon sightings, and glimpses of a girl named Pearl. I took many more picture of my feet, as if to remind myself where I stood, and those I captured of us, or me, I resisted sharing, keeping something close, for a rainy day, or a moment when the words caught up with the speed of my mind, or the pace of the world. I wrote a thesis, made my work, and kept myself, quietly, alive. I turned forty and, hinting at my preoccupation with words’ fruitlessness, I made some lists. I thought, let something else speak, and wrote another:
Tenets of Self-Making Through Style
I will not save my best (most beloved, colorful, formal, “flattering,” aesthetically pleasing, or well-worn) pieces or looks for ‘someday.’
I prioritize according to my body’s needs and spirit’s longings, and cultural considerations as necessary.
I gleefully accept inspiration as community-building, and affirm, learn about, and practice sartorial choices that align with my hopes and dreams for myself and my people.
I reject boundaries while honoring sociopolitical and aesthetic histories.
I take myself seriously and express an embodied vision of ‘right self’ relative to my day, work, needs, and deeper concerns.
I recognize the historical, social, and personal power inherent in embracing one’s stylistic, aesthetic, and mutable ideas.
I reuse materials, moments, color schemes, materials, vibes, language, shapes, forms, and inspiration.
I accept compliments without excusing their value and without apologizing for occupying space.
I share my tips, inspiration, questions, and process with interested folk.
I will wear my whole self in all spaces according to my comfort and probably the weather.
I wrote in my journal, about third-grade memories and six-year-old Pearl, who fold into each other in time, like when the cloud that looked like a rabbit becomes a dolphin. I stretched at their sinewy connections, letting cottony ropes pull and make new story shapes.
I didn’t understand the particulars, but I knew Mr. Saddlemeyer was foul on the inside. I hated him, and his room full of plants, and his care for them, and not for me. How he called me undisciplined for forgetting to water this resuscitated thing when really, I wanted to touch real land, and I felt already stained by a kind of dirtiness of labor, its history, maybe. Maybe, I rebuked that, vowing decoration only. Anyway, my mother didn’t keep plants. She liked flowers.
By third grade, most of us had been together since kindergarten, and groupings, like islands, appeared. Gretchen led a group of tomboys with older brothers that played hockey and lived in the west, where the big, old houses made of brick, lined rows of oaky streets. I could ride my bike there if she ever invited me over. Sometimes, my mom would have meetings late, and I’d ride the bus home with her and BB and Stephanie and read in a front seat. Gretchen’s mother was an interior designer, which I understood from her home to mean ‘very interested in paint pairings.’ At a birthday sleepover that year, we watched The Twilight Zone, and I saw the plane goblin in the flowers on the curtain. I had a purple sleeping bag. My coat got stuck jumping the fence when we came home from sledding.
When Mr. Saddlemeyer asked us after break to write a paragraph about our best friends, I did not write about Gretchen, or Bridget, or Stephanie. I wrote about Ali and her friend who drove: two big girls I skated with, who sometimes talked about Thursday night television in the locker room, and a woman who fell over the seats at the airport trying to escape a boy she loved. I thought it was revelatory. Later, I would learn it was Friends. They took me for lunch during summer sessions, when we’d practice for hours beneath skylights at the Shaker Heights Parks & Recreation Department. They saw me land my first axel. I wrote about my theatre camp pen pal and Marissa, who was a lesbian for a while in Edinburgh and took me to a great club on my last night when I worked the Fringe in 2010. Jennifer, with whom I discovered Newsies, and therefore Christian Bale. I would sleep over on purpose on Saturdays to join her for church, which she hated, but the ushers gave me a white rose every time and those are the kind of rituals they should talk more about in the pitch. Her mom wore tan Dr. Scholl’s wooden slip-on clogs and cooked a pound of bacon every time, and said you shouldn’t drink soda, even diet, before noon. Claire, who was the first girl I ever knew to shave her head, and who gave me a copy of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret with a bumper sticker-as-bookmark inside that said “Friends Don’t Let Friends Vote Republican,” and I never have. We went to preschool with the three Arlooks, whose parents adopted the siblings as a group, and I never knew you could do that because my brother was just one kid. I wrote about a girl in California who I met at Circle Pines, and taught me to smoke fake cigarettes for the end-of-camp play, and we were so convincing that a counselor almost wrote us demerits, which only proved I really was destined for the stage. Mr. Saddlemeyer said it didn’t meet the assignment, so I wrote a new paragraph about the importance of care networks and how hierarchical designs of friendship supremacy kept brown girls like me isolated in a sea of lunchroom disses and peer pressure. Or, I wrote about how best friends are a level, not a person, and I told him it was sad he could only think of single best. I told him plants weren’t people. My mother said it was honest and told the assistant principal that Mr. Saddlemeyer’s plants made the classroom smell like awful. She was fiery and measured and made me read both versions aloud to my dad at dinner. She poured a teaspoon of creme de menthe on my ice cream. She said I have a sharp mind. That I was a smart girl. Though she never let me move to London, one of my best ideas.
The last time I thought of Saddlemeyer, I was halfway through a glass of wine, the kid was six, maybe, and the yellow glow of the desk lamp cast a golden hue on the evening. I pulled the television to the opposite angle, scraping its plastic legs against the top of the dresser. I was slipping into bed for a thriller episode, and the neighbor was watering her plants. I decided I was right to distrust her.
Pearl took forty-minute baths, letting every bubble disappear, and the water burn cold before running a second warm layer to drag out whatever game she’s playing that night. From beneath the duvet, I heard a faint, Welcome back!, signaling the night’s YouTuber fantasy had a second act, as predicted. I selected something periodical, British, unfinished from the last weekend’s unexpected reprieve from piano pick-up. My mom had been in the area, grocery shopping, and offered to grab Pearl for me on a whim. Like ever, I oscillated between masturbating and a crime drama, the latter winning for the zero degree of effort I wished to exert in the handful of quiet moments I’d have that day. I was already in the chair, and the remote was nearby, whereas the vibrator was still in the electronics basket, hidden beneath a Warby Parker bag from when the cleaning lady came to vacuum. The credits began to roll as the towel-wrapped and dripping gnome paddled across the carpet, her toes clean, their slightly overlong nails destined to scratch up my thighs in the nighttime crisscrossing of cosleeping. Perhaps I’d clip them in her sleep, like in the early days, when I hovered inches from her face, my finger beneath her nose, nightly chasing her pulse or breath. I turned my face to wipe at the corner of just my right eye, always the first to tear, so she wouldn’t ask what was wrong. She still thinks all tears are for sadness, and I’d like her to believe that for as long as possible.
It was then that she hurried to join me on the bed, her wet curls dripping down her back. It was then that the webbing between her fourth and pinky toes raised, clipping their tie against the metal frame. It was then that the split skin burst, a fountain of brilliant scarlet pouring forward. It was then her face snarled, and her breath sucked into her throat, a little gasp, and wild eyes fixed on me, a brow curled and questioning, a putrid heat in the hinge of me, a molten ringing in my ears; we were still a moment.
I don’t recall the screaming or the desk table turning over, and I must have thrown my soaked nightgown away somewhere between my father’s kitchen tourniquet and daybreak. The stains came out of the comforter. I never finished that season, and I haven’t thought about Saddlemeyer since. The next morning, Mom said I did a good job. That I’m a smart girl, ‘always have been.’
& in the midst of it all, the research continued. art-making continued. mothering continued. over and over, I returned to the only equilibrium I know in the belly of the best, the wake of living, the aftermath: it is the doing of our days that becomes a life, and I, for one, choose to listen, in the cacophony of unspeakable wordlessness to the frequency of good grief and, in that, do I hear the call of the mothers and artists on whose shoulders I’ve built my dreams, tended my gardens, and wiped my tears. I’ve come to know them and, perhaps, count upon them, too. or, at least, I listen for them.
I hear you listening for me, too.
in the quietude of these years, as I’ve dipped toes in and out of public realms, I’ve written and made work I am proud to share as I continue developing the next stages of an operatic project. I’m not sorry I’ve been distant, but I do miss our togetherness, and I’m keen to tune into one another.
next week [on Friday, July 4, to be exact, and with no allegiance to anything, gimme a break], two new sound works will be available for you.
the first, current, under acquisition by the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection + Archives, was in exhibition in installation in Chicago in July 2024; eleven copies of this single-side first edition remain.
the second, Blues, is a two-sided conceptual composition and will be accompanied by liner notes, ephemera, visuals, and a brand new text. I’m opening the pre-sale for the first press, available 11/11, to you because, I think, you’ve come to unexpect me, and my gratitude for that attunement knows no bounds.
over the next week, I’ll be sharing new writing, secrets, pictures we’ve tucked in our pockets, poems, and responding to some notes from friends + folks, as the finishing touches are finalized on the new site.
want to claim a copy, ask a question, prompt a post? you know the way.