so this is love

I do a meditation focused on opening my heart chakra. I'm supposed to sit, breathe, drop down into my heart and feel love. I am not good at sitting. And being made to focus on my breathing sometimes makes me short of breath. My mind wanders. Do they mean my actual heart? Am I to picture the organ? No, of course not. I am to imagine love and locate that in the vicinity of the organ. I'm sidetracked, questioning what love is supposed to feel like. Is it a habit of familiarity? Fondness? I don't feel warm and fuzzy. Have I ever been loved? Do I know how to love? I work hard to emote. To conjure what love is supposed to feel like. Instead, I feel like a student during a pop quiz. Certainly, I don't know anything about love.

But then I go hiking. Through all seasons this is a place I come to; a living breathing shelter that embraces me. And isn't embrace love's address?

Ah, yes. This is love: to be embraced by birdsong and cricketsong, wind and blue sky. Embraced by vervaine, chickory,wild petuaina, milkweed, partrige pea, broom snakeweed, coneflower. By syamcore and oak and shag bark. Rabbit and dragonfly and deer. Embraced by a place that has existed beyond my imagination, that will exist in a different iteration beyond my imagination. All of this life going on and on and on.

Here, my heart opens, my breath deepens.

I know what it is to be deeply deeply loved by Earth.

This beyond-feeling knowing, I carry within me.

It's finally here!

In late 2023, I embarked on an adventure in publising by getting to be Poetry-Editor-in-Residence for Flying Ketchup Press. In this position, I got to co-create a one day poetry fest, publish a full length collection of my poetry, We Remember Ourselves, as well as come up with a theme for an anthology, create the call for submissions, select the pieces then put the anthology together in what I consider, a narrative arc. I have learned a tremendous amount about publishing while thoroughly enjoying myself.

Coming up with an anthology theme was easy. Several years ago, during Women’s History Month, I began what has become a yearly habit of posting articles, poems, images, quotes and such on social media regarding the experiences of those who identify as women. In preparation, I would collect material from all over the world, a practice that has deepened my awareness of the ubiquity of misogyny, patriarchy, male-centrism, and its impact on female expression, agency, well-being, and self-knowledge. This practice also inspired inquiry into how a person who identifies as female can do so authentically with depth and breadth of articulation if female is rendered and curated by those who don’t identify as such and what’s more, those who consider women as objects, helpmates, or an inferior iteration of maleness.

This inquiry seeded Of Our Own Accord, an artistic platform for those who identify as women to share both significant and quotidian details redressing the inadequate, imprecise representation of women’s embodiment, often appropriated or disregarded in popular culture, public policy, and societal assumptions.

Given the response to our call for submissions, the biggest Flying Ketchup Press has ever had, there is a hunger for such a fem-centric space. In fact, the hardest part of creating this anthology was the selection process. Nearly one hundred individuals from all over the world submitted multiple pieces of work for inclusion in Of Our Own Accord. Unfortunately, we could not include the outpouring of work we received, given practical & financial considerations of publishing an overly long anthology (perhaps such constraints are man-made???).

A quote by Adrienne Rich sums it up. “Women have often felt insane when cleaving to the truth of our experience. Our future depends on the sanity of each of us, and we have a profound stake, beyond the personal, in the project of describing our reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other.” Thus, in this collection you will find artists sharing their candid and profound “sanity.”

These works shed light and widen awareness of the embodied experiences and often unexpressed happenings of those who identify as female, offering geographies and legends in the shape of poetry, prose and visual art. It is our utmost hope Of Our Own Accord inspires and invigorates the educational, religious, political, societal, relational and policy dynamics in which we who identify as women live, move and have being.

I am grateful to Flying Ketchup Press and Polly Alice for giving me the opportunity to create a theme for an anthology then midwife it into material being. It was a joy to put together Of Our Own Accord as so many writers trusted us with their hearts expressed through gorgeous, raw, funny, haunting, edifying, challenging, inspiring, moving, and meaningful writing. I am honored that I got to weave their work into a rich tapestry masterfully punctuated by Polly’s artwork that seamlessly amplified the narrative arc of the anthology while holding their own as stunning art.

Of Our Own Accord can be ordered directly through me or Flying Ketchup Press. You can also find it on Amazon where it hit #1 in poetry anthology sales the first day it went live! In keeping with the theme of the anthology though, please consider purchasing directly from FKP or one of the writers in the anthology as that puts money back into the press and directly into writers' pockets.

If you're in Kansas City, please join us for our anthology launch where you will have the opportunity to hear the writers published in Of Our Own Accord read their work, some of whom will be joining us via Zoom. You can purchase the anthology at the event as well. The launch will be held Sunday, July 28 from 4-6 at Blip Roasters.

because

because I am inspired by my older two daughters' activism on their college campuses