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 đđ». We will be getting back to all emails, DMâs, etc. from hot people slowly in the coming weeks. AND we will contact and announce the winner(s) of our âPoetry Schoolâ with Crista Siglin Writing Contest soon - we havenât forgot about you!!
Below is my response to Larissaâs 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!! Itâs 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 âa lot of the âboom and bustâ activismâ of recent years âquickly leads to burnout & collapseâ. (Relatable, right?).
But, how do we avoid this cycle? Ayesha goes on to explainâŠ
âThere 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 â itâs called cultural resistance.â
I think I can speak for both Larissa and I that writing hasnât 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 Issaâs poem the other week, our inbox (poetrytrapperkeeper@gmail.com) and DMâs are open if youâre looking for a community to write, process and share with.
Okay! On to that poem I promisedâŠ
One day,
I will let my feet sink into the mud without hesitating ⊠but Iâm a fool to dangle this static river memory off the edge when you think youâre empty but youâre 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 âtill 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 đđ
Love the poem. Can't wait to see you ladies back!!!!