Hi there.
Three years ago, I met with a new friend, the talented singer-songwriter Alexa Ro, at a tea shop in Eugene, where I’d just moved. In the course of a couple hours, we spoke about what we were going through, from finding distinction within our family patterns to recognizing the collective cultural struggles of which our personal ones were just a part.
Between these discussions, we wrote, then pieced what we wrote together. She taught me a word that evening: murmuration, the phenomenon when a flock of starlings move as one through the sky, despite having no clear leader.
Three years later, the product of that evening is now published and available to read online at Collaborature, a blog devoted to prose and poetry created through collaboration.
I’m proud to share what we created together here, and grateful for the reminder that we never know what kind of life the work we create in a single occasion can have after that.
Enjoy.
Murmuration
Eyes closed, a single cell: whistles alone in the woods heart beats ripple along meridian lines. Dawn rakes across my jaw, turns what's inside out helping stew the society I slept in the brine of. Our murmuration is always in formation, god's thumbprint flocked astray acupressure on the whorled crust. Before the names went up in lights, they echoed away in the dark, projected on pancake made-up screens perjuring our subliminal record. We come from a long line of cautionary tales: a corset binding the river, funnels youth where I can bloom. Wish pennies down the drain the well in me knows well enough it could be so much better than what we’re pulling up. Anger burning as warped optimism brings love to a rolling boil and dissolves what is for what could. Hold on hope by white knuckles, let go and sticky fingers slip from the cliffhanger on a crystal future standing by an eternity of torture. Watch the fall through skyscrapers money flies like paper airplanes all games for the well to do. As we tend a garden on the razor's edge whose limits grow between irises and tulips, the same wind caressing chimes resounding through pursed lips. All in this fire breathing love of change, for even if I found myself where would I lose it?