one day,
I will let my feet sink into the mud without hesitating
Hiiii! Kelly here. Slowly becoming a human again post-poetry tour and lots of travel! Thanks for all of your patience as Larissa and I have taken this much-needed break 🙏🏻. We will be getting back to all emails, DM’s, etc. from hot people slowly in the coming weeks. AND we will contact and announce the winner(s) of our “Poetry School” with Crista Siglin Writing Contest soon - we haven’t forgot about you!!
Below is my response to Larissa’s beautiful watermelon poem from the other week.
But first, continuing on our commitment to platforming other voices, I wanted to share this post by
. Most of it is behind a paywall, BUT I highly recommend supporting the educational and community work Dr. Ayesha Khan is doing!! It’s validated my feelings and helped me a lot.
In this post, Ayesha talks about how we can only access collective joy by carrying collective grief. And how “a lot of the ‘boom and bust’ activism” of recent years “quickly leads to burnout & collapse”. (Relatable, right?).
But, how do we avoid this cycle? Ayesha goes on to explain…
“There is a name for the type of activism that is unrelenting in the pursuit of collective joy, a type of activism that demands that people keep engaging in communal rituals & traditions — it’s called cultural resistance.”
I think I can speak for both Larissa and I that writing hasn’t exactly felt exactly right as we continue to watch a genocide unfold from our phone screens. But at the same time, poetry is the exact communal ritual we should be engaging in as a form of cultural resistance.
We hope that Poetry Trapper Keeper can be a place for you to process and hold your collective grief. As beautifully embodied by Issa’s poem the other week, our inbox (poetrytrapperkeeper@gmail.com) and DM’s are open if you’re looking for a community to write, process and share with.
Okay! On to that poem I promised…
One day,
I will let my feet sink into the mud without hesitating … but I’m a fool to dangle this static river memory off the edge when you think you’re empty but you’re not Sappho tits-out tetraphobia weaver by trade turn down the volume on October and find your own initials carved into everything already whose woods are these anyway ?? bombs, but make it fashion carrying cliches in my pocket like little pennies my love language is stabbing time ‘till all the clocks in town run dry tearing my teeth into every second licking the strawberry foam off every hour.
Thanks for reading, until next week 💗💗
Love the poem. Can't wait to see you ladies back!!!!