no false modesty

drawn from the month of August 2017: the dramas of poetry

Internal struggles are creative escape. A quiet move to form a space where survival can be shown joyful. Today this emanates as imagination externalized into poetry, an archaic organizing structure. I find active comfort in writing. A motion that has desperation as its wings. I write because it feels good. Not from a place of fear, but from a deep place of longing that has expansive connections. I write because I love.

I could try to name all the details, get them just so, while also aligning them to a truth I’ve silently cultivated. Yet dear reader you will bring yourself, whole and fractured, to my exposed interpretations. When I write about light, darkness, or a combination (such as stars) I may try to steer you in a direction that makes sense—to me—but you will pull yourself along freely, or not. All I know is how much you desire days that open themselves.

I believe that kind of desired stillness can be found in a “good” poem. A temporary place of collaborative movement where desire meets an experience that shows effort.

I witnessed the sea lion lay still and bloated. A murder of crows took fur and the wettest pieces of its eyes. Obscenely exposed, tender in its inability to no longer defend itself from harm, there was both stillness and flurry of excavation to what the crows found most useful.

The truth from that image is not mine to tell. My privilege as a writer is to show. May I be so fortunate to connect you dear reader on another experiential plane. Not forcing but gently holding together a moment of stillness, an honoring. And I may tell you one thing as I adeptly show another disparate possession. That gap is not mine to control. I owe myself only the structure and integrity around the truth of this moment.

I evolve. I decompose. I exist here.

***   ***   ***

Oscar Bluemner, Sunset of the St. Lawrence

***   ***   ***

curated from the near past: self-immolation

Fixing fences is a full-time job and a hard way to make a living. Those edges form a territory where scarcity implies there is something to want. It is not absence or loss. There is a lack but it’s expansive, wide and open.

This lineage has been stored as power taken—a binding agent of trauma and songs shared in darkness. Fear becomes us like the secret textures of a thousand trees.

If it’s true that perfection is a scarcity never to be fully actualized, my life was first performed where sin delighted to now wanting love when wrong. This claiming is mine and its purpose is to make meaning.

This is a collectively sourced confession.

Author: ginger k. hintz

All the suspense of being on your knees, heaven spread.

One thought on “no false modesty”

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: