this-epiphany

last week i blew incense into the corners of my kitchen and talked to anyone who would listen. hera, i said, freya, mom. --- this winter all i want is healing. all i'm giving is the gift of home to myself. i am flying over the rockies just to drive myself back with my brother in the passenger seat. he's 24 and being deployed to afghanistan in january. i still can't let him drive the winter mountain pass alone. when he was ten and i was sixteen, he'd crawl into bed with me in the mornings. we'd play james bond on the n64 and tell each other stories until school. when he broke up with his girlfriend he curled into my lap and cried. i wish i could keep the small things small. i don't know how to see him as anything but the child i sang to sleep after nightmares, who loved me to press into his hip bones with the arches of my feet and thrust him into the sky like flying. now he jumps out of helicopters. i want to be there to catch him, every time. ---

write a poem to celebrate the animal inside of you. too easy. --- there are four accepted methods for culling deer. 1. hunt them on hoof. claim the meat, the antlers, the hide. their last moments a frenzy, but a desirable one, because they have more room to draw it out. 2. bait them. a humane bloodbath. 3. tag them. fallow deer live in herds. use their weakness for social grouping against them. one will lead to others. 4. hunt them from the air. low-flying helicopters are a temporary disturbance to what will soon be a deer-free landscape. (5. invite the wolves, the wolves say.) ---

today i'm supposed to write a rhyming poem about the ocean, but i never rhyme, and i have written so many poems about the ocean that i'm over it. i am done pounding the same sands over and over and over. my time is so much smaller than that. these days my inner landscape is post-apocalyptic. it's the clearing in the woods behind my parents' house in sepia tone, the wild dogs circling. it smells like wood smoke and fresh meat. warm meat. hot blood. --- when my poems were ocean songs they were expansive. i felt them for miles. these poems are personal. feral. they're mine. it's just me and the wild dogs, here, and the dogs are mine too. --- i gave up half my life to move to the coastline, these days, i miss the woods. in the northern boreal forest, you can drive for hours and be nowhere. you can get lost and mean it. when you're that far north, you're on your own. survival means something different. ---