And it keeps coming.

Snow again. Snow still. Snow continuous. 

It’s supposed to come down again today, and the streets of Seattle are well packed with the white stuff.  The ever-timely buses are running late, and packed to the gills more often than not.  When the bus started to spin its wheels and it took a half hour to get up a hill, I decided to turn home. No use getting out of the house if later I’d be unable to make it back.  Simply walked the 20 blocks home. 

Snow day means I’ll be looking into journals that might make a nice home for some of my work.  I used to have a large number of submissions out in the world, but lately I’ve fallen off.  I was waiting for results to come in, and I hadn’t realized how many were already back. With that lovely Rejection letter.  I need to sort through my files and pull out Finished work, but none of it feels quite right anymore.  My new work is clunky and scattered- thoughts pulled and pasted and rather disjointed.  My old work feels like narrative from a past that I can’t remember.  Maybe Elijah has the right idea, keeping himself entirely out of his work.  As much as I told my students “fictitious narrator!” it isn’t true for me.  I lie, of course, but the heart of it is the same as my own.  I’ve started to work on poems again, but I’m almost afraid of what I’ll find there.  So I set up scaffolding, scraps of text from other people’s works and books, weaving what I have between it all.  Then the weather crashes around me, and I start to write about the light in the trees, somehow, there it is- what I didn’t want on the page staring up.   I remember Chris Abani telling us, the first class I took during grad school, “Risk everything.”  I wrote it down in my notebook, underlined it a few times.  Called my Chris as I walked home, bubbling about the danger of words and how school was going to break me open in the best way possible.  

So here I am, broken open.  Wanting to risk everything (though didn’t I do that? moving? leaving? tearing the threads that tied me to home?). Snow surrounding, muting everything.  And I was excited about this, I am excited about this- I can’t do anything but this. (Oh what cost. What danger. How I move unavoidably forward.)