The Rose Between the Lion's Teeth

I’ve been thinking of tenderness as of late. The stories we hide within ourselves, and the love we extend to other people.

It takes a particular person to manage the balance between necessary brutality and necessary gentleness. Rare are the people who are able to be as brutal as fuck with one hand, while cradling the head of a grieving friend with the other. There are so many factors involved.

I’ve been thinking about how we are getting through our days - protests or not - knowing that there are people being murdered by the hundreds every day. How to navigate ones day when connecting with the compassion for the entire family of even one murdered member of their group.

Don’t numb out or turn your head.

There is so much at stake with every piece of it.

How does one balance compassion with overwhelm, action with stunned shock. We must keep moving, but we must stay connected as well.

What is the humanity mathematics of all of this?  How to look a stranger in the eyes as we walk by and offer compassion while our own worlds may be falling apart.

It’s what has been stuck within my head these days. This human ballerina leaping delicately on the edge of a circular and spinning blade.



be well; be loved.

k.


image credit: Miu Miu SS23- Shot by Teaghan Rohan & directed by Paris Mumpower

The Struggles That Are Worth It, and the Ones We Leave Behind

The other night, I read the description of the back of a person’s hands looking like "crumpled waxed paper" in a book I was reading.  It made me think of my mother.

I haven’t remembered the faces of my parents since I was a teenager. Only their hands. My father’s dull gold wedding ring, and the dark hairs sprouting out from below his knuckles.

(pause)

This season has been one of excavation.

The house is gone (not gone, but not “ours”), and there was only one box I chose to send to myself. I always imagined that I would fill boxes. But there was nothing remaining of me, and my parents had largely been strangers. 

In the end, it was a standard sized, singular moving box. 

Unjustifiably large. 

Its contents wobbling heavily back and forth within it.



be well; be loved,

k.


(photo: Head Lock, Luke Smalley, 1998)
(description of the back of a person’s hand is not an exact quote because I’m too lazy to look it up, but was from Rabbi Lawrence Kushner’s book, Kabbalah: A Love Story)

Steady Sailor, or, The Beauty of the Picture You Take, Each Weekday Morning, in Front of a Poster of Tomatoes

 

 

I.

I have just returned from Illinois, Michigan, and the scrape of Ohio. I will return toward the end of the month.

II.

Earlier this evening, I thought of you. It was in the cool, blue light of the apartment you used to live in with the walls that didn’t quite touch the ceiling. Your museum living room. The neighbors that complained about your smoking.

I have a voicemail you sent me on March third of the year you knew me. You had brought a man home from the bar. You didn’t know why. You barely knew what happened. The fear and confusion in your voice is palpable.

Sometimes, I have this odd impulse to send it to you. I don’t know why. I never would, of course, and don’t even know why I still have the voicemail. It was something I held on to for evidence for you, if you ever needed it.  Then, as time went on, I had waited too long to delete it.  Now, with my romance toward archival material, it is too late to destroy it with a clean conscience.  And so, it rests.

III.

I have been reading a lot of research that is fucking me up. It stares me straight in the eyes with its information and blinks only when I do. The curve of its hands hold my jawline and ask me “Didn’t you know this already?”.  I did not. It seems like such an odd Keeper to hand me now, at this point in my life, the keys that unlock the rooms I’ve been trying to get into my entire life.

Behind me, I hear the grumbles of a suspicion only trauma can instill. It makes me smile the smile that sparks a person to defensively ask why I am laughing.

I am not laughing.

I am shining from within in recognition.

I am shining from within in particular love.

You with your hair freshly cut from the barber closest to your work.

You with a microfiber lens cloth dutifully kept deep in your pants pocket.




be well; be loved,


k.

(Photograph by Leslie Zhang for MWMW Studios Fall 2019)

The Same But Opposite

 

 

It has certainly been a while. 

Even when I have been writing here, I have not been writing here. 

Within the last several months, there has been:

Two deaths.

No funerals.

One body.

One box.

One breathtaking Virgo upgrade.

One chance.

Six courses of a Shabbat meal in One hotel room.

Five cities.

Two cities to go.

Twenty nine thousand seven hundred and fifty four gasps. 

Three gifts from One heart in Four days.

Thirteen rows.

Twelve days.

Six flights.

Endless thirst for the depth of conversations One offers.

Two necessary conversations after Fourteen years.  

Four days and two shared beds.

The absence of sound when I need it.

 (pause)

 

I have been thinking on concepts such as cognitive empathy and the beauty of how the boundaries we set allow us to love, appreciate, and feel those without regret. 

I have been pondering the question of how trust is built and its relationship to incremental risk.

My heart has been open, overwhelmed and excited.  

When you know, you know: But it is wild to feel the intervention of unseen and formerly uncertain hands. 

be well; be loved,

k.

 Image: “Deconstruction”. Yang Ling by Jumbo Tsui for V Magazine China May 2023 via Vampite Fitness Tumbrl

On Having Lost All Perspective

 
I've been trying to figure out that middle ground of authenticity and connection mixed with appropriateness when talking to particular people I care about who are in my life about my life. 

In particular- although not exclusively- the challenges I have with this are in conversations with cis straight people who I genuinely like and care about. 

Culturally, sex and perversion is just something more casually talked about in queer contexts.  Not always, but usually.

For this reason, a question of "So what's been going on lately?" is filled with images I filter and sort through in order to find one that feels appropriate. The recent queer sex in a hotel room a few hours out of town seems like an out-of-place topic for this conversation. My mind's fingers fumble over to run along my recent combination-kink of freshly shaven and oiled legs, deep emerald green panties, and butter cookie flavored lip balm. This, too, seems at odds with the context. 

So my mind tries to imagine what would fit with them and I end up thinking of stupid, stereotyping topics such as taxes. 

[Interestingly, I asked a queer friend what he thought he could talk to straight people about and he, too, said taxes. Why does this feel so certain?]

It's not just with cis, straight people of course. 

At this point it could be with anyone.

be well; be loved,

k.

Of Sight and Sound in Fragments

 

Sometimes, lists are the only way to communicate. 

A Morse Code of sorts when one is too bogged down or overwhelmed to jewel together words in order to create a beautiful sentence to lay across your collarbone.  

A list as of late would include:

-You with your penchant for the Midwest, your 1950s barbershop hair and wild eyes.

-The spike of a stiletto shattering your classic Christmas bulbs: Solid red, solid green, solid blue - their silver innards spread across a hardwood floor and the satisfying crunch under my shoe.

-My hand upon my mother's chest in my hometown. The waterlogged nugget of sponge I placed into your mouth. The sandpaper grit in which your tongue stuck to it.  My aim and learned accuracy of getting the morphine exactly and slowly upon those furthest molars: A slow steady short distance down that throat that produced every word I have ever heard you speak.

 

 

(pause)

 

It would also include the observation: It is rare that one hears the sound of a firecracker and hears only a singular pop. 

 

 (pause)

 

 

I have been reading about the art of Sophie Calle (thank you, E.), and thinking about the concept not of "love at first sight", but of the "love at last sight" that Walter Benjamin references in his book Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. 

 

Love at last sight.  

Tell me of the people and times it makes you think of.

be well; be loved,

k.