Writing of Stephanie McManus
Young and drawing in light
‘to grow up,’ holds the
moon’s shadow, swallows
the sun, quickly,
and it’s better than soup
warming the lips/it
burns | move along
or maybe this burning
place will hold
to gravity of the
heart, a slumbering stone,
eyes like a cup
of black tea. But, a human
cares against common sense,
same way I like to sink
into nowhere and give
a world and give a name.
I believe in the soft, distracted smile
turning my way and the girl who
draws vines on her white Keds
in permanent marker.
I believe in stately trees and turning
pages beneath their boughs
with searching hands.
The adept hand signing, “hello”
when there are no words to be heard
or knitting colorful yarns on
telephone poles. I believe
in gardenias that bloom between
the alley and the sun, the sounds
of Cohen from someone’s kitchen.
I believe god
is held in the mouths
of philosophers and children:
that beliefs are dangerous without
love and art is an act of goodwill.
I believe in ethics and the
responsibility of leadership but even more
in the resiliency of the human spirit
like a ghostly pounding heart
as we sleep.
I believe in the spaces between:
in pauses and think-backs and could be’s,
especially in “perhaps” and
I believe in the dog’s paw
that smells like sugar cookies
now that we are family.
I believe we should be careful
of words like, “inconvenience.”
I believe in the storytellers and song-
makers and especially in grandmothers
watching mothers turn the page.
I believe in simplicity of
needs: the hand that must be
held and the mouth that
must be fed. And, the
needs that go untended,
the boy clutching his teddy
as he dreams.
I believe in the untenable
breadth of the universe
and the starlit dust
inbetween it all. I believe
‘god’ is in the trees
and the wave tumbling
towards the shore and
the eyes of strangers.
We, built like river reeds
wrench the heart: holding on
who root claws
upon rock & between crevice
like orchids hold the very air
they need/ somewhere above the jungle
where rain prefers to pass,
and must pull pull hard
as feels unnecessary
when everyone says it should be easy;
but the air is thin
broken air.
All the reasons the heart couldn’t form,
a humble stem/kitsch in your mother’s attic:
there’s a hundred hours left
still,and the sun won’t really set
just sway into someone
a world away,
looks like you, looks like I,
holds a star like space holds/
limitless.
Even how love, was the baby frog I kept
in my pencil case to bring
along to school,
‘little buddy,’ because the softness
of empathy is there before words
get in the way
but only realized when we talk about it.
It’s likely not many notice
the beauty of someone young
holding their space fully/
or how outside of god
we hold the words of many gods
we have loved in our memory:
I still will sing
at the end of the world
walk into storms the same way
a ghost can only be ghostly.
Eat the cake! I really think it is fine
and to love peculiar things
like tiny frogs and funny-nosed sloths:
because love informs when chaos
gentle at the gate is hot
and all-too-ready.
Truth is to forget underwater
how the waves crash
beneath the seam
how the waves crash
truth in seconds
how under
the shower I crash
how in dreams I
collide with colossus
and tragedy and conquer/
uninhibited, un-able to
drive seed to
stem. Truth: I forget
to crash beneath
and end up above
the waves in holy
love thinking this
is who I become now
like summers I swam
between mangroves and hot
sea surging, that perfect
storm on the horizon – I love
so deeply in truth
underwater in the crash
of waves/ how the seam
defines if we will live or die/
the crash beneath
stormy skies
and showers:
and how wide
is the breadth of
a wilderness
that came before the place
we can not reside.
The way of a mind like a seed
on the wind floats up
instead of with the wind
somehow, or people born
wedged in sidewalk cracks
deep away from the sun
know where happiness
resides tumbling
upon its arrival:
in this I feel almost
a lucky misfit.
Even a self divided is
scattered like pages
lost within the house
with no binding.
I see windows in every room
that inform nothing except
where I have arrived from,
and, I, in every room
stitch a binding, day-
in and out, am
surrounded by a puzzle
of words on paper.
But aren’t us the
song? Aren’t us the
dream and
attuned to truth:
the paradox of remaining
genuine when a melody
unfolding.
