Category: home

alignment

I am full of emergencies.
-Ann Lauterbach, “Chalk”, from Many Times, But Then

self-portrait afternoon glare light. Oakland, CA (June 2015)

Read this as a horoscope:
you can understand a future
when Pluto enters the scene
but only if orbits retrograde.

The point is to keep your forecast
grey and also very specific.
What makes sense is yours to summon,
to own, and always let go.

Do not hoard misunderstandings.
Saturn will return and ask for their receipts.

A two-headed calf is born alive
just up and over the mountain range.
Rumor persists they continue to live happily.

We are told threats penetrate the softest targets first.
Similar to how human bone char was used to make sugar
for morning tea and aristocracy’s afternoon cakes
or how it’s now too warm for cold snaps,
that necessary step to create the juiciest of peaches.
To ask why starts to sound stupid and theoretical,
a conversation buried by power lines.

Neptune wants you stay curious. It is harder to stay afraid.
We heard gossip that the sun will eventually burn itself out.
What happens in the interim becomes your refuge,
a particular trope of heresy. Look for casual reminders,
those moments unfractured, soft enough to break.

resurrection

The miraculous is everywhere and in everything. Waiting for us to notice it. Waiting for us to appreciate it. Waiting for us to love it.
—Kobi Yamada, Noticing

Dec 2023, Oakland, CA _ photo by edward atlee

We moved a lot growing up.
There was no logic
to the dynamic loops:
only uproot and start again.

I learned how to memorize
places instead of people.
Absorbing landscapes by relearning
the way a sun found a room and
trusting seasons as my calendar
to digest thresholds of familiarity.

And here?
I seek forested paths back home.

monograph

[A]s my mother used to say, if wishes were horses, women would ride.
— Elspeth Probyn, Outside Belongings (62)

New Orleans, October 2017

The prompt was bold: how do you embody whiteness? My heart froze knowing that some of my truth has no accessible language.

So I thought about how we grew up nowhere, or more accurately, we lived around no one. A place where you learn orthodox norms, where conformity was practiced as integration. A place where we conversed in churches or homes, and almost never on the long road in between.

The days take flight and return again.

My writing practice captures moments, and contain all kinds of shadowed referents, insurrections, and commitments. There’s a way this claiming expands space to repurpose perfection. A response to how surviving trauma from decades past seeps into what I believe is real and how I frame what is just. I’m not afraid to tell you why my fears are justified. I have a story to let you know why this is true.

I am left wanting. I know dissonance can also be harmonic despite its agreed upon definition. There’s room in that idea to breathe. To release orchestrations that dance around forgone conclusions.

Weeks ago, I wrote: don’t let me forget where I came from and the day before that: resistance to belong a furious understanding. I read these reminders, now, as culturally weighted influences.  Next week, I will be in Berlin. A city that embodies trauma and healing’s relentless journey. A city where Audre Lorde taught, organized, and loved. A place of intentional inquiry.

cache culture is a collectivized monograph of intentional inquiry. A place to find my way in contemporary American culture. A place to expose how my gendered body has historically been named as white. I post curated moments that reflect culture and place because that’s where belonging takes root. My roots grew deepest in South Dakota, Ohio, Washington, and now California.

Berlin’s calling and its collective response is another cache.

I will be carrying William Stafford’s advice with me, but one of many influential guides on this poetics inquiry.

“We all share, in art. And to be worthy artists we must be ready to look around, give credit where we feel it belongs, help each other maintain that sense of community that will maximize whatever vision we are able to find and share.”