We are still here
First, something nice: Anna Jo Beck selected my latest zine "Here's to the Land," about the North Carolina state toast, for the March 2025 installment of her Zine-A-Month subscription. If you sign up here by February 28, Anna will mail you a copy of what may be the first zine ever written to contain the phrase "botanically improbable and too horny"! I've been a zine-a-month subscriber since the beginning and I look forward to opening it every month, so I'm especially delighted to have this opportunity.
And also, poems
To care for my mind and heart I’ve been practicing turning away from doomscrolling and towards poems. Instead of looking straight at all the worst things that have happened in the world first thing in the morning, I've been progressing through the stacks of books I've meant to read. It feels almost glib to suggest but it's also helped me stay focused on what I can control: putting one foot (metrical or physical) in front of another.
I've had The Wild Fox of Yemen on my to-be-read list for ages and I'm glad I made the time for it in winter mornings this year. It's blurbed with a question from Kaveh Akbar, whose wonderful novel Martyr! I also recently finished: "What would we write if we didn't feel obligated to other people's understanding, if we weren't obsessed with making our work legible to empire?" And there was plenty in this book that wasn't fully legible to me: untranslated lines of Arabic alongside English, aphorisms and figures of speech that originate in an unfamiliar culture. It's beautiful work because of it. And I think it's an apt moment to remember that as much harm as this age of rapacious empire keeps bringing there is and will be resistance. One line near the end of "My President Asks Me About Redemption” that really captured me: "We are still here, we will always be here, we, the dirt under the nails of your country, crusted red from digging."
Another poem of place and resistance that I loved recently was one that came through my inbox and caught me with its title: "Stevie Wonder boulevard" by Tamar Ashdot. As befits a poem titled after someone who wrote some of the finest songs ever to celebrate love, there is a lot of love in this poem - for music, for place, for light. I lit up at:
my
father changed our family name to waterfalls. i think i will
change it again. if i could do it over, i would name myself
art & truth & music. every week i drive on Aretha’s road.
i bring her songs to the classroom and ask my students
what they hear. they tell me about respect
and blackness and passion. how all music feels like purple.
Making art & truth & music your name and bringing people together in a purple feeling—what a way to be, what an experience to hold inside a poem. What a relief, when the world is on fire, that poems are still out there renaming everything in it.
I don’t ever know how to sign off except with hope and care, so there you have it, for whatever it can offer.
yours,
Erin