That winter evening I was a year into my separation — poised at the cusp of divorce, at the cusp of pandemic, at the cusp of my city’s shuttering — but that night my body was close to the bodies of these strangers, whose stories I would never know. We didn’t need to speak; we were sharing the heat and the darkness, tucked away from the chill. We were sharing our very bodies, sweating and exhaling into the same thick air we were all breathing. A few weeks later — once the virus filled our hospital wards and the city plunged into quarantine — everything about that night would come to seem not only impossible but unthinkable: that closeness and casual touch, all that mingled breath and sweat. That night would eventually seem like the distillation of what we lost. But back then, it still belonged to us, our bodies shrugging and sighing, our toes curled and our foreheads beaded, our bodies leaking tears of ache and release. We were part of something together, something big and silent and many-headed. It held us all.
Mark Strand was my first. It was ten years ago on a cold but sunny March morning that I stood in the parking lot of my gynecologist’s office, waiting for a minivan to pull away and a pregnant women to enter the building. The coast clear, I taped “The Coming of Light” to a yellow post. Sunlight warmed the paper as if the words in Strand’s poem were coming to life—
Even this late it happens:
the coming of love, the coming of light.
I took a picture, hopped in the car and sped off, my heart racing. Taping a luminous little poem to a parking lot post hardly rose to the level of guerrilla art, but still, it felt subversive. A voice in my head said, This is not what a grown woman should be doing. Another voice said, Fuck off!
Representation is having someone from your culture, your race, your community, your tribe, your hood, who you can bounce your stories off of. Who you can riff off of, who you can be inspired by. It is being able to read their story and borrow their vision of your shared home, so you can know your story is real too—so you can dream of better futures when the distance and nightmares of our past have made it too difficult to do so on our own. And so that you can do the same for your peoples, and those to come.
Sometimes, saving the world just feels so difficult. It is easy to put the idea into the too hard basket as we struggle through daily life, trying desperately to ignore that niggling guilt that says we should be doing more to save our planet.
Luckily for us, Carolyn Managh's book Penguinkind gives us a highly readable guide to saving the planet, one small step at a time.
Once she longed for a drawer filled with every color.
Once she stole a toy ring and chewed its plastic nub.
Once her dreams were motionless as summer heat.