FWIW: I don’t want to be talking about this, I want to be watching squirrels eat the bread I left for them outside my tiny windows and making art and artist books. But my gov is snatching bodies off the street and spending a billion dollars a day dropping bombs on sidewalk chalk. So, here we are.

Otherwise, there’s the art:

fuck the system Reiki-Infused Watercolor Artist Books

Do any of these catch your fancy? Check out the full collection of 13 books here (should open to a link for iCloud photo album), choose your favorite. Send me an email. I never check my DMs. Suggested price: $300, pay what delights you. Will be listed to the general public next week.

fuck the system ACEOs are LIVE

They look something like this. These too are Reiki-infused. You can find them at my page on ebay. Please. Don’t be bashful. Tell your friends. Start a bidding war. You have seven days.

everything works out for us ACEO Series

35 (unless I mathed wrong) tiny works laid out on the table. They really capture the wild energy I can feel, the energy of the collective. I’d prefer to throw paint at a canvas or whack it with a paint dipped pickle ball racket. Use my whole freaking body to make art. To move energy. And not necessarily make anything beautiful.

But I don’t have the facilities to make such things happen without destroying furniture, etc. So rapid fire paintings it is. I honestly wasn’t sure I could pull this kind of layering off. But I really love them. A practice in following intuition.

Titled as such because I turned otherwise 8-inch paintings that were not working, into small pieces I fecking love. Plus my intuition told me to call it that and nothing else came forward. Plus let’s make it a mantra.

Will be listing in the next day or so and will update then.

Hope you all are well, alive, and not in a detention center. I hope you are burning things down. Swearing. Expressing yourselves. I am so grateful you’re here.

be feral,

Libby

Damn, this essay. Just, DAMN. I asked if he’d write me a lyric essay on practice, and he’s written a dream essay. I want to devour it whole daily. Such swoonworthy, alive writing. Such a sumptuous invitation into his poetry practice. So many tender, tender threads to follow. Poeting has been difficult lately and this, this sparks a small, poetic fire in me. I hope you all enjoy his work as much as I do; subscribe to his publication Poet Chaotique and purchase his book Salt-Rimmed Breath on Jazz-Thigh Gospel.

in gratitude,

Ryan Stephen Thornton is a bisexual, maximalist poet, performance-maker, and PhD researcher in Theatre & Performance at York St John University. His writing blends comedy, queerness, absurdism, and the poetics of everyday noticing into maximalist sprawl. He is the author of Salt-Rimmed Breath on Jazz-Thigh Gospel (2025) and the creator of Poet Chaotique, a Substack devoted to mischief, language, and excess. Find more of his work at Poet Chaotique.

My chair catches on the same snag of rug every morning. Small resistance, quiet percussion. I’ve learned to treat snag as metronome & stumbling as a door. I don’t start writing so much as accidentally fall into it, flitting between chorus-line dust motes, edging the kettle & calling its cathartic whistle a fettered scream. Rhythm first, sense later (or not at all.)

Virginia, ahoy! “it is all rhythm… A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.” I read that as an instruction to listen with the knees. The wave hits; my calves answer. Words arrive panting after.

I keep a drawer of misheard phrases. Poetic friction. Mishearing isn’t a flaw; it’s a slip-road. A wrong word opens many a right door. Pattern-recognition does the rest: I’m just a switchboard operator connecting accidental calls. Carry two pockets: one for small astonishments; one for misunderstandings. Swap them when you forget which is which. Misread signs on purpose. CAUTION: WET PAINT // WET PAINT: CAUTION // PAINT CAUTION WET—three separate poems. Lament that they rarely provide you a bucket with which to wet it.

Barthes, our patron saint of delicious trouble, offers permission and a dare: “Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other.” I run phrases between my fingers like ribbons at a haberdashery. I thumb the nap of a sentence. I test edges for loose threads I can pull distractedly. If a word doesn’t graze, I swap it out for one with burr.

On Tuesdays, the street smells of fresh-cut limes versus snarling hot brakes. I inventory without blinking: gum fossilised to the pavement (spearmint, 2014); traffic cone crown on a statue; child dragging a stick across railings making an alphabet of kuh-lunk-a-dunks. I copy its swagger. Write a sentence that begins with a sandwich and ends with a constellation. Do not apologise for the bridge you had to build to get there. Alas, the bridge is the thing!

“If you were very, very small, smaller than a leprechaun, smaller than a gnome or a fairy, and you lived in a vagina, every time a penis came in there would be a natural disaster. Your dishes would fall out of the cupboards and break and the furniture slide all the way to the other side of the room. It would take a long time to clean up afterwards.”

― Mary Ruefle, The Most of It

I teeter between tempos. Kerouac in my ear: go—go—go; Woolf in the other: listen until the room rearranges itself. Koestenbaum is useful at the border: I want to reach a point where mania masquerades as regular, not unreal. Yes—let us pass for regular while smuggling fireworks under the coat.

Maximalism is not greed, it’s gratitude. Not “more more more” so much as “oh—also this.” A willingness to let the frame be porous. A sentence begins with a bus timetable and ends with a mouthful of dripping fruit, taking on three hitchhikers, & a musical instrument. It shouldn’t work; sometimes it doesn’t; but when it does, you can hear the sentences grin. I feel their mischievous breath against my neck. Commit too far. If the image asks for a pigeon, build it a coop. Not all the pigeons are real, one is an impostor… aaaaaaaaand spiral!

I don’t edit by subtraction so much as by tuning. I read aloud until the line sits right between the teeth. The mouth is a strict fingering trill on a brass-based blow-by-blow. If a phrase resists the bite, I replace it. A word that refuses the tongue is a word simply auditioning for another poem. Taste your drafts. Literally. Read them aloud with your tongue in your cheek. If a line can’t survive the mouth, it’s a filthy liar.

A daily exercise in pattern: I map the neighbourhood sounds as if they were a drum kit—bus-sigh bass, pigeon-feather hi-hat, branch snap crash, neighbour’s car-door slam snare. Once the kit assembles, I invite a phrase to play on it. Often the phrase isn’t ready. Often I am not. Rhythm is patient in a way meaning is not.

I trust repetition until collapse. Yes yes yes yes yes until the word sheds its wet coat of meaning & stands there by the fireplace as rhythm alone, naked as the day it was stripped of syntax. That’s when it belongs to the body, which is the best kind of belonging. Find one tiny thing and stare until it grows a history. Milk froth qualifies. So does a bruise. So does a tea stain in the shape of a country you’ve never visited.

There is a small, boring miracle on the kitchen counter: the way a spoon rests across a jar of honey, glinting like a minor saint. I note the angle, the meniscus, the way the afternoon does its soft theatre through the mottled glass. I also note that I am late, again, because noticing is a jealous child kept distracted.

A truth I learned from Hollie McNish & Lindsay Rush at the same table: the ordinary will confess if you give it another minute. The trick is to lower your voice until the ashtray tells you who it’s been with all night, to ask the unsliced bread what it thinks about mornings, to believe the cardigan knows the weather better than your phone. It sounds silly because it is silly. Silliness is a tool in the seriousness kit.

I report from bus stops more than I report from the desk. Two strangers performing a duet of deliberate non-noticing; the third character—silence with elbows—wedging in between. Rob Auton would ask the silence for its autograph. I settle for describing its shoes. Polished. Practical. Delirium with power.

On shame and show: there is always a moment I want to pare it down, to tuck & tweeze the glitter back into the jar. Restraint only looks good on other people. Then the fridge sings its F-sharp again and I remember the point: maximalism is a thank-you note to attention. If I’m going to err, let it be toward abundance.

If there’s a hinge, I keep it hidden until the hinge insists on squeaking. Not all poems need WD40. By then the page is already crowded: bus sighs, fridge hymns, sandwich tragedies, amber-quenched understudies, bureaucratic surrealism, domestic saints. I’ve delayed as long as I can. Here it is, then, the small motor behind the larger machine:

Wouldn’t it be funny if—

You can feel the pitch change when that arrives. The sentence leans forward in its seat; the paragraph puts its drink down; the day says go on, then. Sometimes the question is a prank. Sometimes it is mercy. Sometimes it is a little green door I open with my shoulder because both hands are full.

I don’t search for answers. I follow the tilt. When the question snags on a rug, I step harder. When it wants an encore, I give it a costume. When it grows teeth, I offer it my sleeve and let it sneeze.

Maximalism is not an argument. It is posture—arms flung, pockets open, tongue out, willing to be foolish for the sake of the voltage that runs through a good line. A poem, a paragraph, a shopping list: all acceptable conduits. Lyndsay Rush asks, “Why shouldn’t I”—and I have no rebuttal except to add, why shouldn’t you?

If the piece feels like a sitcom that refuses to cut to credits, that’s on purpose. I want the camera to keep rolling long enough for the prop table to confess, for the extra in the background to steal the scene, for the smoke alarm to deliver its cacophonous soliloquy. I want to discover, mid-sentence, that the door I thought was decorative actually opens.

So here—take this laugh I’ve been tending. It is not a punchline; it is a practice, a power source. Stand next to the rug-snag awhile. Let the room find its tempo. Rub language against the nearest life. When the amber understudy clears her throat, breathe with her. Ask quietly, then louder, then with both hands, Wouldn’t it be funny if— and don’t be surprised when the world answers in perfect rhythm.

Poet Chaotique

All things chaotic, exotic, erotic, and poetic.

By Ryan Stephen Thornton

invitation to guest post

I love honoring you, honoring your practices and poetics. Won’t you share them with me? unraveling, unmoored will soon be hearing from book artist, researcher, and educator Isabella Myers. Guidelines can be found on the About Page. Please message or email with questions.

unraveling, unmoored thrives on reader support; without you, we wouldn’t be here. We’d be somewhere else looking for you. We’d love to connect with more like-minded poets, artists, and practicing souls, and you can help us find them by talking us up in all of your digital and analog spaces and sharing this post with everyone you’ve ever met. With gratitude.

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I sincerely have no idea how to human with other humans. Do you know how? Do you know how to love and be loved in return? How to invite someone into your life and not panic when there’s too much closeness? Do you know how to allow them to be on their own journey, whatever that may be, and stay self-contained? Do you know how to make amends when things go awry and you hurt someone?

I hope so. I don’t.

photos

1. Am turning my car into a camper car. After spending some time in the woods with the birds, I knew desperately that I couldn’t continue to be bound to this basement apartment. Instead, I intend to be an itinerant artist-poet-bird witch. I felt peace for the first time in weeks. The transition has been breezy so far almost as if I’m aligned with Source on this one. It’s amazing how easy it is to get help removing the backseat of your car. You can support this transition by contributing to a Ko-Fi goal or sending cash on Venmo @libbywalkup.

2. The garden is producing an insane number of tomatoes. Yes, they are delicious.

3. I lost this favorite rose gold pen down the sofa months ago. Every time I went to fish something else out from underneath, I looked hopelessly, but the other day, my eye was drawn to the upper corner, and there she was trapped on a piece of wood. It took 20 minutes to maneuver myself and it out of the electric leg rest mechanism, but we persevered. She’s not without her battle wounds, namely a large nick, but we can enjoy each other’s company once again. It’s not much, a small symbol of hope, but a symbol nonetheless. Send your small moments of hope in these tumultuous times in the comments. Others probably need to hear them.

4. A full moon in Pisces creeping up on the edge of town, much much bigger in person than my phone was able to capture. Called the blood moon. There was a lunar eclipse Sunday. If you’re feeling some kind of way still, that’s a lot of energy to process, it’s recommended to cry in the bath and be easy with yourself. There’s another eclipse coming up on the 21st, and then the equinox, and then my birthday on the 24th. So, take care of yourselves. And if you want to contribute to my eating whatever I want and doing whatever I want for my birthday, my Venmo details are @libbywalkup.

5. (and 6.) WIP. I’m exploring with watercolor and, of course, more lines and circles. All I want to do is draw, really, I have so few words. They all feel inadequate and ineffective. Drawing recenters. Focusing on my spine pulls me back into my body. I’d like to be more analog. The digital world, particularly social media, disembodies me.
   
   Does it disembbody you? I don’t know if we can be connected if we’re not connected to ourselves first. I lost myself the last six weeks or so. It led to a massive meltdown, and I hurt someone I was feeling close to.
   
   Being social media-free and sending zines to paid subs in the actual post won’t fix any of that, nor was it the cause, but it’s something I’m more and more drawn to. I don’t know what it looks like yet or how to make the transition a smooth one, but at Commonplace Zines is already doing it. Who’s in? (Upgrade to Paid to support this endeavor, which will be made remarkably more complicated from the road… because I like things to be complicated.)

   ---

invitation to guest post

I love honoring you, honoring your practices of all kinds, from the unhurried practice of baking sourdough bread to the dedicated practice of relearning to read after cognitive disability. Won’t you share them with me? unraveling, unmoored will soon be hearing from poet . Guidelines can be found on the About Page. Please message or email with questions.

uunraveling, unmoored thrives on reader support; without you, we wouldn’t be here. We’d be somewhere else looking for you. We’d love to connect with more like-minded poets, artists, and practicing souls, and you can help us find them by talking us up in all of your digital and analog spaces and sharing this post with everyone you’ve ever met. With gratitude.

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Priyanka Jaiprakash is a writer from India whose poetry is shaped by love, longing, memory, and absence. Her work moves between clarity and mystery, like breath between silence and speech. For her, poetry is refuge as much as release—an opening into the heart in a world too often led by the head. She dreams of gathering these poems into a book someday.

What compels you to write?

I began writing mostly in my late teens. I was always a very sensitive and empathetic child drawn to art — drawing, painting, language, films, and to emotional scenes or dialogues. I also had a very vivid imagination, which I think laid a natural foundation for writing.

As I grew older, nature began to draw me in. I remember one morning in college, I saw a tree and underneath it was this carpet of little yellow flowers, so breathtaking that I wrote a couplet about it. I shared it with a family friend who was like a friend and guide to me. She praised it, and that encouragement stayed. Around that time, I also kept a diary, filling it with moments that moved me deeply — my longings, my unrests, and things I could not say aloud. Writing became a way to release what I could not carry, and to immerse myself in what I wanted more of. As an introvert, I rarely shared my inner life with others; I either spoke to God or poured it onto paper.

With time, my writing began leaning towards the theme of love. I was fascinated by its expressions, both luminous and dark. I developed a profound appreciation for poetry, and especially shayari — poetic couplets in Urdu — and found inspiration there.

Later still, my writing stopped being just about my own mind. If you are an empathetic person, your inner world becomes a blend of your own experiences and the borrowed fragments of others. I began to write poems drawn from what I witnessed in people close to me, or even those afar whose lives and experiences touched me briefly, but deeply. You write in a “second-hand, first person,” inhabiting others without erasing them. Empathy lets me borrow the first person without stealing it; I call that a second-hand I.

I believe we are all inherently connected — that’s what makes compassion and empathy possible. Yet from that same web of connection, each poet gathers a different thread. That’s what makes poetry both shared and singular — unmistakably the poet’s own.

What do you think are some essential ingredients of a good poem?

I think a good poem has many possible ingredients, and each person relates to them differently. For me, I value depth of feeling, details, vivid imagery, clarity, and subtle nuance. I love when a poem makes me see the familiar in a new light, or captures something delicate that might otherwise escape notice. I love poems that press on the hidden pulse of experience, so that it resonates deeply.

I also appreciate poems with musicality — not necessarily rhyme, but rhythm and sound, the way the language moves in the mouth and ear. These are qualities I try to bring into my own poems.

If you had to describe your poems to someone who’s never read them, what would you say?

My poems often lean towards psychological depth, but with a minimalist, restrained voice. I draw often from nature and the ordinary objects of daily life to weave my verses.

Themes of longing, memory, absence, grief, silence, and surrender recur in my work — sometimes without my noticing, and sometimes with deliberate invitation. I am drawn also to love — not only the romantic kind, but devotion, beauty, and a love that leans towards the spiritual, towards something higher. In my poems, love isn’t the subject so much as the lens — the way the world comes into focus.

Many of my poems take on a meditative quality — perhaps because they rise from a place of silence. Sometimes I feel I don’t write on silence, or the unspoken, but with it.

I also like to experiment — I tune each poem differently, shifting the dial between clarity and mystery, a surreal take and plain feeling — until the resonance clicks.

Which writers have influenced you, or mean a lot to you?

Almost everything I read influences me in some way. Recently, I’ve been reading Ocean Vuong. But I feel a special kinship with selected works of Mahmoud Darwish, Kahlil Gibran, Rumi, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Mary Oliver, Anaïs Nin, Albert Camus, among others.

In Urdu shayari, I admire Ghalib, Faiz, and Faraz.

What are some of your favorite lines?

“All roads lead to you, even those I took to forget you.” – Mahmoud Darwish

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.” – Sylvia Plath

“Love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.” – Kahlil Gibran

“Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They are in each other all along.” – Rumi

“I wish you a kinder sea.” – Emily Dickinson

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” – Albert Camus

“I have built, deep in my heart, a chapel filled with you.” – Marcel Proust

“Morning without you is a dwindled dawn.” – Emily Dickinson

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.” – Mary Oliver

“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” – Anaïs Nin

“You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.” – Rumi

“The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no further.” – Sylvia Plath

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” – Anaïs Nin

How do your poems change you?

I think we often write to make sense of what we feel, to give voice to what remains unspoken. Writing helps me find clarity — and as that clarity deepens, I find myself subtly changed or reshaped.

How do you know when a poem is finished?

I don’t. I think a poem is never truly finished. It only briefly completes in the poet’s throat.

I often struggle to shape words into exactly what I mean to say. Sometimes it feels as though English doesn’t have enough shades of words to capture every nuance of the human heart. In Hindi and Urdu, for instance, there are many more subtle distinctions of love that don’t quite translate. In English, you have to lean instead on imagery, rhythm, and metaphor.

Often, while refining, I end up overemphasizing or underemphasizing certain feelings to make them more interesting or evocative. But there is always room for improvement.

Plus, with time and experience, I believe I could always rewrite the same poem with greater depth or layers.

Perhaps that is the true nature of art — it lives in its incompleteness, as Leonardo da Vinci once said: “Art is never finished, only abandoned.”

Do you think of writing as an act of solitude, or an act of communion?

Both. Among art forms, I feel music is the most transcendent — for it has the power to raise your vibrations instantly. Yet music leans on words for depth. Words woven in music can lead us to places within us we didn’t know existed.

What does writing give you that nothing else does?

Writing gives me a way to live through the heart. My career is mostly head-driven, but poetry restores a sense of balance. If I had been more self-aware earlier, I might have chosen a path nearer to art. The act of creating — of shaping something from silence — brings me a strange sense of satisfaction.

Porous

by Priyanka Jaiprakash1

I’m porous— 
like a sky that forgets its edge. 
I dim my needs, 
stretch my limits like silk 
over sharp corners, 
until I snap— 
lose shape, 
unspool from myself, 
and vanish into the fog of what I’m not. 

Drawn to fall

by Priyanka Jaiprakash2

I’m enchanted by your smile— 
each glance a feathered breeze 
that stirs the petals of my soul, 
and the softer you look at me, 
the more I 
fall, 
fall, 
fall, 
like ripe autumn leaves, 
into you. 

The Inke of Goodbye

by Priyanka Jaiprakash3

She said to herself—
the waiting ends, 
and the time has come to leave.
Will the moment of meeting 
also be the moment of parting?
 
I’ve spent years that have passed 
in the blink of an eye,
building bridges in this city 
that was never mine.
 
I’ve scattered my soul 
in the spots we call our own,
planting little lights of love 
on every path we roamed.
 
I’ve laid down roots
in these restless sands—
as the wind turns,
it lifts parts of me like loose strands.
 
I’ve inked my skin with a love of a kind—
like a piece of music
mastered and memorised 
across many lives.
 
Now, I break free from this hard-soft shell—
an identity stirred into my soul, 
woven into my skin.
I leave behind a part of me 
out of my own will!

Subscribe to Priyanka's Stack

invitation to guest post

I love honoring you honoring your practices of all kinds, from the unhurried practice of baking sourdough bread to the dedicated practice of relearning to read after cognitive disability. Won’t you share them with me? unraveling, unmoored will soon be hearing from book artist, researcher, and educator Isabella Myers. Guidelines can be found on the About Page. Please message or email with questions.

unraveling, unmoored thrives on reader support; without you, we wouldn’t be here. We’d be somewhere else looking for you. We’d love to connect with more like-minded poets, artists, and practicing souls, and you can help us find them by talking us up in all of your digital and analog spaces and sharing this post with everyone you’ve ever met. With gratitude.

Share

If this piece inspired you or otherwise spoke to you, consider upgrading to a yearly subscription or sending a one-time tip to unraveling, unmoored.

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One of my favorite contemporary artists, Roberta Boffo, who blows me away with her meticulous detail, shared a photograph on YT the other day, her studio wall filling with her works and she wrote: I will never get enough of being surrounded by my own work… it is peaceful.

I don’t know if it’s the breathwork, the EFT Tapping, or the guided affirmation meditations I’ve been doing, but this hit different.

Some weeks ago, I posted a progress pic of my circles drawing, still in progress. I was stunned but not surprised when the likes, comments, and restacks started rolling in at speeds I’d never experienced.

I was excited and beside myself, but I wasn’t surprised. The secret? I told via a Substack live over at The Sober Creative that I have been lavishing this drawing with love since I started it.

I love her so much. I mean I really love her. Every time I pass her open on the table I swoon and tell her that I love her. I have loved every minute of watching her come into fruition.

I know that sending that love to her amplified her energy and she has been loved by you all, too.

Boffo’s energy also vibrates through every process video she posts, every photo, every update she makes, and every comment she replies to on her posts.

That love is even in the grueling, sometimes painful task of leaning over a 30-inch sheet of paper, making thousands and thousands of stipples, she says she loves the pain with, as far as I’m concerned, a bit more glee than I could muster. But I do most of my work from bed.

So I’m thinking about how all these years of insecurity and fear and faulty thinking and trauma neurobiology (which was not my fault and is not your fault), etc., has prevented me from loving my own works.

I’ve been dismantling my life. And I have found beautiful letterpress prints that took me hours to typeset, print, and trim tucked away like a secret into folders and my response was that I just wanted rid of them.

I have been browsing the small pile of lit journals I’ve been published in which have been hidden in a bin in my old studio as if I’m embarrassed of them.

I don’t openly share works that have been published digitally because I feel like they’re so old they don’t count anymore.

I have been living in fear of my writing, rather than in love and gratitude and appreciation of it and I haven’t been able to see just how this fear has stunted and blocked even my making work with ease let alone putting it out into the world in joy.

For a long time I wondered if I was a writer at all.

Maybe I was trying to force myself into loving a thing I just didn’t love. Maybe it was a temporary medium I needed for awhile and I can just draw circles for the rest of my life. It felt like mental gymnastics trying to convince myself that I needed to love the process of writing.

And yet, I didn’t stop writing. Not ever once did I stop writing completely in the last 20-something years, which is why I have so many wayward notes and journals to sift through now. So I’m asking myself: what is it that I do love about writing?

I love the ideas that drop into my head easefully and frequently, and I love percolating on those ideas, and I love allowing some of them to grow in language, and I do love playing with language, and I love love love watching a collection of pieces that have come into completion develop around me, I love printing those pieces out and putting them somewhere I can look at them and admire them, I love writing in notebooks and I love how many notebooks I’ve filled in my lifetime so far, there are so many.

I love love that there are so so many drafts and ideas and notes and emails and experiences that I sincerely wouldn’t have to come up with another new idea for the rest of my life and I could still publish a full-length collection a year until the day I die (which is I hope many many years from now).

I love that there are so many ways to share my work and connect with readers. And I love that there are so many ways to receive monetary love for this work, I absolutely love, for all its faults, that the internet exists and shifted everything.

I love watching a collection form in my mind and in reality (even though I’ve never allowed one to fully come into form in reality, but I love the idea of it).

And I wonder if, through this juiciness, the ripeness, the delectable-ness of what I love about bringing poems and essays and collections into being, I come to love the process of making them come into being, too.

I wonder if by focusing on what I do love, I might stop browbeating myself into loving the process. Or trying to convince myself that I must love the process. Or worrying about what a project is before it reveals itself to me or what container it must live in —

Or I might stop trying to decide if I’m a book artist or a traditionally published artist or both or neither — or whether I’ll make any money on this drawing that’s seriously taking forever — or worrying about if I’m doing enough or if I’m the right kind of person with the right background and the right connections.

And I might stop worrying about if my brain is too scattered or I have too many projects on the go or that I really haven’t been keeping up with my bookkeeping and don’t have much to keep up with in that department to begin with — or — or —

And I wonder, amongst all this worry, is it the love that propels us forward rather than the fear?

(I know you know the answer to that, and I do, too.)

It comes from actually hanging those poems on the wall and loving on them every time I pass them. From going over them each day, or the latest draft and loving where it’s at in its own process: I love how verbose this one is getting, how I’m trying to get everything in all at once, look how beautifully ambitious she’s trying to be.

What we give our attention to amplifies. If we give our work anxious attention that amplifies, if we give it loving attention that amplifies and resonates.

So today I’m considering my work, all of my work — my drawings, my student work in book arts, my writings, my growing Substack, crochet projects, sewing projects, all the unfinished things — and I’m not freaking out about how I’m going to get it all done or what it might be or whether or not any of it is anything to begin with or who might read/collect things, I’m thinking—

damn, damn, damn, this letterpress print I did is sexy and why on earth do I not have it framed and hanging on the wall? And why on earth did I think the 30+ extras wouldn’t be wanted?!

I’m thinking — that book project, Hypersigil, I did with a friend, and really did sell like hotcakes, in which I handset, letterpress printed, and bound her long poem — it’s worth honoring with a custom box for the printer’s copy and proof book that’s half bound that I keep meaning to finish.

The poems and essays I’ve published are worthy and deserving of being talked up regardless of how many years ago they were published.

The thing about vibration shifts is that by the time we notice we’re behaving and feeling differently, the momentum is already underway and all I have to do is stay on the train, I could hop off and go back to dishonoring my works, but it’s more painful and a lot more work than just staying on the train. So I intend to stay on the train.

But, I wonder — if this is the first time you’re considering such a train exists, chugging along however slowly — if you might be able to step on it intentionally.

If you might go looking for things you already love — or even don’t hate — about your work or about your practice or about your process. Even if it’s that your cat sits with you while you do it or that you do it at all or that you’re still thinking about doing it and haven’t given up hope yet that something might stir even if you haven’t written or painted or whatever for a very long time.

I’d love to hear whatever appreciation rampage comes forward for you.

in gratitude,

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I love honoring you, honoring your practices of all kinds, from the unhurried practice of baking sourdough bread to the dedicated practice of relearning to read after cognitive disability. Won’t you share them with me? unraveling, unmoored will soon be hearing from poet Priyanka Jaiprakash. Guidelines can be found on the About Page. Please message or email with questions.

uunraveling, unmoored thrives on reader support; without you, we wouldn’t be here. We’d be somewhere else looking for you. We’d love to connect with more like-minded poets, artists, and practicing souls, and you can help us find them by talking us up in all of your digital and analog spaces and sharing this post with everyone you’ve ever met. With gratitude.

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I love the way that Jason's poems tend to unfold, revealing a layer of emotional depth and meaning with each read that drops deeper and deeper into my body and awareness. For a self-identified logical guy, he writes from a position of unerring intuition and is enviably, wildly prolific. It’s been a delight to connect with him; he’s been a spark for creative focus and clarity.

You can download his latest chapbook of protest poems, Wait Out the Burn (Ghost City Press), for free with an option to donate directly to him or purchase his recent collection, The Strange Misgivings of the Sadly Gifted (Dead Man’s Press Ink), a collaborative collection with his son who died suddenly in 2021, whose drawings accompany Jason’s poems.

with limitless gratitude,

Jason O’Toole is Poet Laureate Emeritus of North Andover, MA. He serves on the advisory board of the New England Poetry Club and as treasurer of the Independent Living Resource Center San Francisco. His newest full collection is The Strange Misgivings of the Sadly Gifted (Dead Man’s Press Ink).

How do you get inside a moment that becomes a poem? How do you know when a piece has come together/is finished? Does it feel a particular kind of way in your body?

Sometimes I feel a rhythm or hear a melody, and the words drop in over time. Other times, I will hear a phrase in my head and write it down—and if it’s especially evocative a poem builds around it. Either driving or being in water are conducive to being in the right headspace for poems to form.

That might be as simple as taking a shower and clearing my head, or swimming in a peaceful lake with loons, swimming against a river current trying to make sure I don’t get swept under, or chest deep in the ocean on the lookout for sharks. Sharks figure in my dreams and some poems as I spend an inordinate amount of time tempting fate in the Ocean.

When a poem is “finished” it feels like a temple bell is rung, vibrating in my chest—or like strumming a guitar chord after you’ve tuned up.

Hermetics

by Jason O’Toole1

Do not think of here
And there.
Think of here to there,
and back again. 

Time is a circle, says Nietzsche,
Be an optimist, a realist, but never a nihilist. 
There is no demarcation 
where light ends and darkness begins.

Eternally is here, croons Jeffrey Lee,
dead, yet rambling.
As above, so below – 
an effervescent spectrum.

Here, there, and everywhere
sing the alchemical Beatles,
two now dead,
yet everywhere.
omnipresent, immortal –
bullets and cancer, notwithstanding.

Am I with you, my son, in eternity,
though linear time is all I see?
There are more colors in the rainbow
than stars in the sky.

You dreamt the title for Strange Misgivings. How do some of your works come from dreams?

I’ve woken with entire poems or songs written in my head—and a handful of times have read them just like reading a book in waking life. Usually, books and signs in dreams are a hallucinatory jumble like bad AI Art. The title of my collection The Strange Misgivings of the Sadly Gifted came to me in a dream—I met an older man who was supposed to be me—and he handed me a book with that title with a cover by my friend Sara Lucas (Hello the Mushroom). I said “That’s a great title,” and the old man said, “Ya think!?”—then I saw that the book was mine. Sara wound up painting the cover art.

You’ve been writing poems since you were young. Tell us more.

My fourth-grade teacher Mrs. Everett at the Albany Academy for Boys had us memorize and recite poems. I found that I had a talent for it. I recall learning Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, and Longfellow at school, then devouring poetry books my family had at home—e.e. cummings, A.E. Housman, Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and Dylan Thomas. My dad was a folkie, and Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan and Irish rebel songs were always on the stereo. I met Pete many times and got to hear him play, even sailed with him on his sloop, The Clearwater.

Clearwater

by Jason O’Toole2

Indian summer day
aboard Pete Seeger’s sloop.
Net is cast into the Hudson
flop onto deck 
three eels, saturated 
with PCBs oozing into river
from General Electric capacitor plants
north of Albany. 

Pete is angry,
for these American eels.
He will not live to see
the dredging of this poison,
thirty years off.

Sky above sails
fills with plumes of acid
smoke, burns the wings
of moths & wildflower petals.

This sloop named Clearwater,
as a child I grasp 
hopefulness versus 
dreadful odds.
I know smallness. 
I don’t yet know futility. 

My grandparents had artist friends with a library full of the Beats, so I discovered Burroughs, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, and others before I was even 13, and attended some of Ginsberg and Anne Waldman’s readings. When I found out who influenced my favorite poets, I read those, too, and discovered William Carlos Williams, Pablo Neruda, HD, Ezra Pound, and in my teens, went through a Rimbaud phase.

I really enjoyed rap and hip hop when that hit NY—and bought some of the first singles as they came out, along with mix tapes off the street. Kurtis Blow, Melle Mel, and later on, Chuck D and KRS-One lyrics meant a lot to me. Punk, New Wave, and No Wave were a big influence as soon as I heard that on college radio in the late 70s. I was attending a few concerts and shows by 1980 or 1981, and helping to organize all-ages shows by 1985. Most of those lyrics were low effort, but Patti Smith, Television, The Clash, The Jam, The Gun Club, X, The Birthday Party, Swans, Minutemen, Sonic Youth, and Gang of Four made me think. I played in some NY bands as well, and some of my lyrics were better than others, but I was going for effect and volume more than anything.

The first poems that I shared outside of school lit mags, which were a bit compulsory, were in punk and art zines starting around when I was 15 years old, such as this one, which ran in a little photocopied zine I put out with :

I Left

Jason O’Toole3

I left the window open
In flew an angel
of death

He said
Hello, I will come back
when you are done.

I said
Can I have your number?
It was on my head

I could read it in the mirror
The mirror turned black
& cracked

Then the angel grabbed me
by my throat and said
I will be back.

I closed the goddamn window

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I love honoring you, honoring your practices of all kinds, from the unhurried practice of baking sourdough bread to the dedicated practice of relearning to read after cognitive disability. Won’t you share them with me? unraveling, unmoored will soon be hearing from book artist, researcher, and educator Isabella Myers. Guidelines can be found on the About Page. Please message or email with questions.

for another poem by Jason, click on Where is my mind?

unraveling, unmoored thrives on reader support; without you, we wouldn’t be here. We’d be somewhere else looking for you. We’d love to connect with more like-minded poets, artists, and practicing souls, and you can help us find them by talking us up in all of your digital and analog spaces and sharing this post with everyone you’ve ever met.

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Why are we so hard on ourselves?

I’ve been drawing a few years now, and these are some of my first experiments. I’d written them off as too whimsical to be wanted.

I got into book arts a decade ago or more, and started a journey into skill-building that opened my world up.

I felt capable for the first time I can remember. I think it was being around all those hefty cast iron board shears and nipping presses and using tools in general.

I sometimes wondered if this is what men feel like when they use a power drill, which I’ve not done much of, but I will say I do feel quite powerful when using one. (And also nervous, how does a stud finder work, seriously? Just kidding. No really?)

Most of my cohort had backgrounds in art and printmaking. Admittedly, I frequently felt inadequate and defensively declared, “I’m a writer,” at awkward intervals, hoping to validate my place there.

But a silly little urge crept up on me: I felt drawn to draw.

It’s not the first time I had a desire, my MFA thesis included child-like drawings (because my hand was indeed child-like). They started coming to me while sitting on a bench in Prague, watching a tram pass. But I didn’t recognize it as any kind of bigger urge.

I learned about book binding and book arts back then, in my writing MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. For some reason, I avoided the actual binding classes offered, but at the tail end of our program, after browsing various displays of book sculptures, I asked a friend to walk me through a binding. (Of course, I chose the most complicated case binding of the two she offered. A Secret Belgian binding. Give it a try with this tutorial.)

While there, however, I took a sound art class and a performance workshop in Prague and started to vaguely explore text art, but had a real block on what that even was (spoiler, it’s so much stuff). I had two group exhibitions as well as my writing work.

At some point in all of this, I scanned all my old journals and found my 8th-grade art portfolio.

To my absolute shock, my journals were filled with doodles, and my portfolio was all right. I mean. I remembered the clay man I made that my teacher made me make more defined, where I wanted him to be more of a blob, a ghost, sad, water-like, though glazed a dark red.

I don’t think she realized that it was my vision driving me, not that I was incapable of sculpting a more man-looking man.

I found him in three pieces under my sister’s bed alongside my very first diary when my parents were moving out of our house in ~2001 (I was 19). I was so devastated and so resigned, I didn’t even attempt to glue him together again and just threw him away.

I also remembered the clay vase I made from a mold that got wonky because I decided to imprint with a pattern after I’d taken the mold out. No, it did not hold water, but it did stand.

I did not, however, remember that I’d done a linocut that I quite like or that I’d done a big still-life pencil drawing of my fave stuffed friends.

Once I found them, I vaguely remembered getting help on the pair of hands that are far too accurate a likeness to be mine alone.

I had no idea that I’d ever matted and mounted anything before my college photography class. Oh yeah. There’s photography, too.

I didn’t take an art class after 8th grade. I sang and played euphonium and danced, but no art. And I convinced myself the last 20 yrs, for some reason, that I wasn’t a visual person and that I couldn’t draw, while failing to notice that my writings were full of imagery.

And of course, failing to understand that drawing is training the hand to make shapes and to make what it sees. And art is training the eye to see.

I’m glad I didn’t get a BFA, I would have learned a lot of the basic skills and tools that I’ve had to pick up ad hoc and still feel insecure about, but for so long, my insecurity overtook my writing and still hampers my progress.

And I think the same would have happened for my visual work if I hadn’t come back to it now in play and curiosity rather than deadlines and critique and believing there was some measure to live up to.

But it is kind of a lot.

It’s kind of a lot to find myself finally under all these layers of fear and insecurity. To find all this work I’d forgotten about and unfinished poems and thousands of photographs and so so so so much evidence that despite what I’ve been telling myself, I am indeed a visual person and I am indeed creative.

Like my soul was always calling me to make stuff, I just had to make it without looking. I had to make it accidentally.

Slant-wise.

Make a few lines and circles over here. Leave a comment that becomes a poem over there. Write an email that happens to be an essay. And all of the photos. I’m not kidding. All of the photos. What do I even do with them?

It’s difficult to turn on the TV (even to watch shows I like) right now or read others’ work because there’s just so much material to work with. There are too many things to make, and I get overloaded and anxious consuming. But I’m also so overwhelmed by all the things there are to make, all this self-discovery, that I can’t really take it all in, and sometimes I can’t move.

I became this person by accident, despite my best efforts to have in place something more conventional, and much safer, like a real job, and now it feels there’s no other option but to be myself without a net. Stumbling as I go.

with gratitude,

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unraveling, unmoored seeks guest posts like these and more. Guidelines can be found on the About Page. Please message or email with questions. Coming up next week, , shares his poetry writing process. Bells ring in his chest, folks.

have I not written about my junior high art portfolio before now? this is the closest i found

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When I asked Melanie if she’d be up for writing a guest post On Practice, and she pitched writing about her reading practice, I didn’t quite realize that I’d been, through her Substack Notes posts about the books she’s been reading, on this journey with her. Melanie’s writing is daringly vulnerable and utterly human. I hope you enjoy.

Melanie Cole is a writer and poet from Tacoma, Washington. She writes about themes of family, natural disaster, the natural world, faith, and the unusual. You can find her work in Grit City Magazine, Dandelion Revolution Press, the Tacoma News Tribune, and on The Mighty. You can find her at Melanie Writes and her Stack.

My mother makes fun of me for being a “wanter.” There’s always some silly little thing that I want. It’s true. I keep a running list in my head of strange little things that I want for no real reason other than I am somewhat of a magpie of a person. I am by no means a hoarder, but I like keepsakes, if only because they are keepsakes. For two years, I have gushed over a Tiffany blue leatherbound copy of Truman Capote’s novella, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It is my favorite book, and most of the general public is unaware that Capote wrote the story before the iconic film was made. What I like most about the novel is that it is narrated by Paul Varjak, who plays only a foil to Holly Golightly’s character in the film. Varjak’s narration plunges the story into depths that the film cannot reach. It is heavier. Disquieting.

The problem with purchasing the $100 copy of that Tiffany blue leatherbound book is that I can’t read it. I mean, of course, I can read it; I am perfectly literate. I was tested as a first grader and was reading at a college level then. But now, I live with two disabilities, each developed in adulthood, that cause severe cognitive impairments.

One of the first ways these cognitive impairments presented themselves was in my inability to read and process large amounts of information, such as that in a book, an essay, or a work report. It may seem strange that I am a writer who cannot read, but rest assured, I employ an arsenal of AI tools at my disposal to read back to me every word I have typed and every change I have made, whether it be an essay or a fictional story. These tools help me comprehend what I’m staring at, so it all doesn’t look like a babel of words.

I’ll tell you now that I didn’t hold out for that $100 Tiffany blue leatherbound copy of the book. Wouldn’t it be a nice bookend to this essay to say that I finally purchased it? But no, I’m disabled and I don’t work because of it, so there will be none of those kinds of extraneous purchases in my future. However, what I did find was a beautiful clothbound version of the book for just $15. It’s definitely a collector’s item.

I started collecting books because I could not read them. I used to go to the library and check out armfuls of books that I could not read. Just the appearance of being a reader, I thought, might make me one. Last October, I had Frankenstein, Dracula, and From Hell on my proverbial nightstand. From Hell was the only one I was able to follow because it is a graphic novel. I was able to follow some of Dracula. I gave up on Frankenstein after the letters.

I felt as if I was missing out on a big part of my life. In college, living in London, I read on the Tube constantly. Whether it was for class or fun, I always had a book in my hand. When I graduated into my mid-20s, I collected an entire bookshelf of political philosophy and cosmology. I read Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan, Karl Marx and Hannah Arendt. And slowly, I just couldn’t do it anymore. I was rather randomly diagnosed with epilepsy.

One day, I just dropped down on my bedroom floor and had a five-minute tonic-clonic seizure. In tandem, I developed something called schizoaffective disorder. Both of these conditions greatly impacted my cognition. I had to leave my career, partly because I couldn’t keep up anymore. I couldn’t keep up with any job I had. I couldn’t understand simple directions. More importantly, I couldn’t read and comprehend.

I resigned myself to audiobooks for the rest of my life, to which I often fall asleep and lose my place completely. This summer, however, I had an idea. Could I listen to an audiobook and read along with it?

I started with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. It is dense and commands attention, and every small detail matters. There was no falling asleep when my eyes were on the page. I had listened to the audiobook about four times before, but this was my first reading of the physical book, and I have to say that I gleaned so much more from it than all of my listenings combined. It was a daunting book to start with. I could have picked something easier in my library, but I finished it, and I was proud of myself.

Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises was next, short but filled with minute details, especially in the bullfighting scenes. Some might think this is a phone-it-in book due to its length, but it is masterfully crafted, and I felt as if I was reading the very personal journals of Jake, the narrator. My reading became quicker this time. I read at times beyond the narration, which made it a bit confusing, but I learned to course correct and move forward.

Next, I chose Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird because I thought I would find it familiar. The more I read, the more I remembered the storyline. I thought this would ignite my comprehension. It did. My experiment appeared to be working. Although, because I knew the story so well, I felt myself starting to get a little lazy and began listening to the audiobook rather than reading along with it. I had to remind myself that just because I knew the story didn’t mean there wasn’t value in the exercise. I needed to keep going. And I did.

And so, one day, I just cracked open my clothbound cover of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It had never been read. And I read it. In one sitting. No audiobooks, no Speechify, just me and my imagination. I imagined the handsome voice of George Peppard narrating the story and the likeness of Audrey Hepburn (though Capote wanted Marilyn Monroe for the role) bouncing in and out of her apartment, ringing bells at all hours of the night because she has forever lost her key. I read about the trail of heartbroken men who loved her and of the death of her dear brother Fred. And through it all, Paul Varjak gives a disarming account of a young woman who is so mixed up within herself that she doesn’t know which way is up. And I read it. All of it.

Reading Breakfast at Tiffany’s on the page for the first time gave me something new, just as reading all of these other books did. On the page, there is more room for imagination, for character development, for the breath of a story. Finally, I can read in the way I want to again.

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unraveling, unmoored will soon be hearing from on his poetry writing processes. We seek guest posts like these and more. Guidelines can be found on the About Page. Please message or email with questions.

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unraveling, unmoored thrives on reader support; without you, we wouldn’t be here. We’d be somewhere else looking for you. We’d love to connect with more like-minded poets, artists, and practicing souls, and you can help us find them by talking us up in all of your digital and analog spaces and sharing this post with everyone you’ve ever met. With gratitude.

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woke to a silly sunshower / or at least they make me feel silly / and a note come through the post from Reba Elliott saying it perfectly: “Summer has been slow and fast and mostly too hot and I did mean to write you sooner, but things take the time that they take…” / the sun later was consumed by rain clouds, and this afternoon I went out barefoot to stand in the slow, gentle drops and hug the trees.

I’ve been swimming instead of writing and drawing instead of reading / and feeling bad about that / but then found an email I wrote Reba ten years ago in which I understood that July is a slow, heavy time in my body / and noted as such generally about the hot summers last year here / everyone else rushes off to the lakes and scrambles to mow lawns / tend daily to gardens and attend street fairs / people rummage sale weekly and throw down at family reunions, birthdays, weddings, graduation parties, backyard bbqs / while the atoms that make up my body too easily expand and contract with the weather / too susceptible to the environment / my cells empaths to atmospheric emotion / I spread out / get slumpy / thoughts thicken / everything around me moves too fast / there’s nothing for it, really, except to allow / and on a whim early in July, I found myself in a nearby watering hole / the perfect place, I’ve come to understand, for atoms to expand.

if you’re not on Reba’s email or snail mail list and haven’t heard, they’ve started a new project: nota press currenly eager for your submissions, have a look at guidelines / Reba has been making ephemera, hand-printed and bound books, and other fun paper shapes and art for the last forever, everything I have ever received from them has brought me such delight.

and from here I leave you with a swimming poem by my friend / I hope a loon some day allows me to be their swimming companion / the poem can be found in his recent collection The Strange Misgivings of the Sadly Gifted, which I recommend / it first appeared in the journal Sparks of Calliope / he’s reading Saturday, 26 July, noon ET, from his book (and possibly others) at The Purple Couch, N. Andover, Mass. It will also be streamed live over at his publication Operation Risk You/on the Substack app, recommend subscribing / we’ll hear more from Jason on his practice in this space in a few weeks’ time.

are the lakes cold where you are?

with love and gratitude,

Cold Lake

by Jason O’Toole

Hold your bones against the wash
All your currents open
Chest deep, northern waters
Cold lake waves numb
Sunburned shoulders
& Black fly bites

Pebbles under toes
Painlessly smooth
Sparkle when wet
Gloomy once dried
Disappointingly so

The silent appearance of a loon
Come to claim the bream
Darting past your knees
Impossibly long she submerges
Reappearing beyond the dock

To the Iroquois she was a witch
Off limits to hunt
& besides,
They never had much of a taste
For gamey loon meat

Fearless of you
She shares her lake
Not that you gave her a choice
After sundown
She’ll share her voice
Beckoning her mate

Now is the silence
Before that long, forlorn note
That transforms sounds into music

Cold lake waves receive your bones
All your channels open

in the shop

I’ve posted to the shop three works on paper. And am progressing near daily on the circles drawing. Soon, my friends, soon. I find sitting to draw, or as it is, fill in around the circles, is the July way to regulate my nervous system. I can feel myself step back into myself; my body relaxes and my thoughts clear. I’d love to see one of these drawings framed in your home. <3

in the post

Last week I was eager to head to the post office and put some poetry postcards in the mail as well as a couple of hand bound books. I’m not sure what’s next exactly, but I’m excited to make some envelopes from paintings gone wrong. To be on the mailing list upgrade to paid.

in the world

Oh gosh, I’m pleased to share this with you. invited me for a chat earlier this month over at The Sober Creative. And it was such a soothing experience. We chatted about art making, generational trauma (TW: domestic abuse), and practice. So, so grateful to Josh and those who tuned in. You can watch the replay here. He has such great chats with artists and poets.

invitation to guest post

unraveling, unmoored has some exciting guest posts coming from on learning to read again after disability diminished cognitive processing and on his poetry writing processes. I’ve got drafts in my inbox waiting for me. We seek guest posts like these and more. Guidelines can be found on the About Page. Please message or email with questions.

poems

unraveling, unmoored needs your help. We thrive on reader support; without you, we wouldn’t be here. We’d be somewhere else looking for you. We’d love to connect with more like-minded, poetic, artistic, practicing souls, and you can help us find them by talking us up in your other digital and analog spaces.

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what to say about the time of now? I don’t know. It’s June. It’s muggy. The world is falling more and more apart and I’m broke and paralyzed, nervous system-wise, about money; I can’t bear another bout of burnout. But there is poetry and there is art. I found a sequel to an orca whale friend, and you lingering in my inbox waiting for me to find her, poems can be feminine, can’t they?

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Last Monday, as the Strawberry moon, near full, rose out of sight, I burned old poems and notes in my sister’s fire pit. I meant to say something cleansing or releasing, but nothing came forward. Dismantling old energy doesn’t require much effort; you’ve just got to be ready to let it go.

I’ve been sorting through things: old emails, notes and files in the digital space, printed photos, and now the two boxes of journals I had Mom bring with her when we met up a few weeks ago.

Many of the spines are labeled by year, and the older, pre-2016, have been scanned and saved digitally, though I couldn’t bring myself to read them at the time, and now, now, I’d like to throw them (or at least some of them) into a fire pit.

The journey started as a release of old energy. To use things up. To downsize my digital and physical imprint, if I organize the external, the internal follows.

I started with 26,000 emails, including the archive, and am down to just under 5k, at that particular email address. I packaged up the first round of ephemera I’d collected and sent it off gleefully, hopefully to folks who enjoyed receiving it.

I didn’t know how this endeavor might play into my writing projects, but the hundreds of drafts and notes that are spread across digital and physical spaces lingered in my awareness. I knew this practice would bring my attention to them, something I’d been frequently called to do, but for whatever reasons, resisted.

What I didn’t expect to find were so many worthwhile bits of writing in the emails themselves. But there they were. Documenting that transitional time in my life between 2008 and 2013, in which I moved from Fargo to the UK and then back again. Spent another couple of months in the UK, hoping to stay, then back again. Then, in August of 2011, off to Chicago for a couple of years before returning once again to Fargo.

While also being fun and expanding, there was a lot of chaos in all that movement. A representation of where my nervous system lived at the time. I never got a chance to sink into a place, call it home, one foot always in whatever old life I had come from, and one anticipating the transition to come. Rarely fully present or rooted.

As I work with and share the already formed poems from this time and sort through these emails, saving bits that seem worth mining for language or points of reference, a collection started to form in my head.

And while pilfering the boxes of journals, looking for the notebooks from this era, I found my first collection: single edition, hand-lettered in Bic and multi-colored gel pen, with a jean cover, published circa 1998, and folks, there were some pretty awful poems in there.

However, I was struck by the quantity. The notebook is full, and there’s a whole stack of drafts I’d completely forgotten slipped into the jean cover that were edited from my story.

I’d gone so off considering myself a poet somewhere in undergrad when I started to feel not enough in comparison to the deconstructions we were meant to do of Frost and Whitman in English 101, that I started writing micro-fictions I later tried to make into a novel, and wrote poems I didn’t call poems.

Stunned, I was stunned to find all those drafts tucked away, calling me home all this time to my true self-expression.

But some of them needed to go. The mean things people did to me and how I responded, with grace and probably feigned understanding, was just heartbreaking. I’m no longer available for that trauma energy. So I crumpled them up and burned them under a full moon.

Are there things you’re ready to burn?

in gratitude,

a hello

The other day, I posted this drawing in progress. If you’ve been around, you’ve seen it at different stages. The response has been overwhelming. And a fair few have joined me here.

Let me re-introduce myself: I’m Libby, an intuitive poet and abstract artist who likes drawing circles and lines. I’ve a number of master’s degrees. I live in Minnesota. I meditate a lot. I’m neurodivergent. This is the only job I can do and also take care of myself.

I share poems and drawings and little bits of living present. I send art and poems in the mail. I publish other folks regarding their practices, and I love publishing poets. I understand animals better than I understand humans, and if you upgrade to paid, I’ll send you a handbound journal until supplies are out and donate money to an elephant sanctuary.

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What art, writerly, mind-body, or life practice are you leaning into? What does your creative life look like? What were the inspirations for your favorite pieces? What is poetry, art, mindfulness, practice to you? If you’d like to share about your creative, poetic, spiritual, well-being, or otherwise living life practices, please get in touch. unraveling, unmoored seeks collaborators. More info can be found on the About Page. Please message or email with questions.

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There are trails through the trees to the riverbank at Gooseberry Park it’s the most forest found in this prairie city. Last weekend, I sat at the river’s edge and had a chat with a yellow warbler and yesterday I found a duck couple who casually paddled their way from one side of the river to the other, two turtles sunning on a log embedded in the river bed: one larger and still, reaching their neck out to the sky, the other smaller and restless, moving about the log, poking their head up from the opposite side. I liked to think they were parent and toddler. And, surely, thousands of minnows nipping for food and rippling the water’s surface over and over again. I watched an ant navigate the terrain of the trail at my feet and wondered what poisonous plants look like because I really don’t know and should probably learn. I met a two-trunk tree: lovers dancing tall, reaching for the light as I reach for stillness.

I don’t know who this poem was for or who I was missing, but it dropped down on me one morning in Bath, waking with my foot entangled in the bedsheet.

with gratitude,

Holding on to You

by Libby Walkup

The quilt
still pulled
down

Read more

Corie Feiner is the Poet Laureate Emeritus of Bucks County, PA, and the author of Radishes into Roses and Who Was Born at Home? She is an international performance poet and slam champion with an MFA from NYU. Called “wonderful” by The New York Times, Corie has won numerous awards for her poetry, performances, and educational workshops. Her latest project, A Poem for Every Pose, combines her love of yoga with her craft. You can learn more about her, and join her growing community of yogis, poets, and seekers of inspiration on her community-building Substack publication.

Do your works come together by accident while journaling or ironing, or are you more intentional?

The poems I am sharing here are from a series that I have assigned myself as part of a mission to integrate poetry into yoga practices worldwide. This is a new sort of project for me that has been ongoing and developing since 2021. It started with what may be considered an “accident” with my first poem for Hero Pose (written after a particularly powerful yoga practice) and has evolved since then to 89 poems.

Many of the poems are written early in the morning with a strong intention on what I am going to write. However, a good amount of the poems also came suddenly while traveling or during a yoga practice, where I stop and get it down on whatever I have, whether it is my journal, my computer, or my phone.

I am compelled to share with you that I often thought to myself, “Who am I to write these poems?” But I got support from two very close friends, got out of my own way, and just kept going. These poems came as a gift, and I realized that I could either take it or turn away.

So I took it. And actively take it every day.

What tools do you use (i.e., prompts, workshops, books)?

For my Poem for Every Pose project, I have an assignment, so my prompts are the poses themselves.

I also teach a somatic poetry workshop for women called the Bodylove Poetry Writing Workshop where we explore and write about different body parts. This is an outgrowth of my healing journey to reunite my mind/body/spirit and also to celebrate my miraculous body. During these workshops, I offer writing prompts, sacred writing time, and take this space to also write.

Outside of both of these projects, I write whatever I need to write and mostly do not share it with anyone. These poems and scribbles are just for me.

I have a simple composition book with stickers on it, whose pages I use generously. The simplicity of the Composition book gives me permission to take up space and write as much or as little as I would like. I had a lot of fancy journals, but I found myself not wanting to “waste” my pages because they were so pretty. So as much as I like the beautiful journals, I realized that my goal was not to look like a writer, but to write.

What inspires you?

I get inspired and excited about reading, writing, and life quite often. It is how I am wired. But what inspires me, in particular, to write poetry is how much I discover about myself and how good it feels to get in the zone of writing.

I am also inspired by my vision of performing my yoga poems at more festivals, retreats, and events, creating poster prints, cards, and books, and having them integrated into yoga school curricula. It is essential to work with my crazy-ambitious goal in mind in order to get past all the muck of not “feeling like it.”

How do you get inside a moment?

I used to mostly only write when a flood of feelings overwhelmed me, and the only thing I could do was get it down on the page. This feeling felt like heat in my chest – sometimes desperate, sometimes mad with smiles – and words would keep repeating in my head, then my mouth…

As I grew as a writer, I came to understand that inspiration can also be a practice. I show up to the page the same way I show up to my yoga mat. It brings to mind a quote by Chuck Close, “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work." (Insert smile here.)

My routine is to wake up as early as my body will allow and just start writing. I have been writing long enough that I allow the poem to be bad, to be messy, to be whatever it wants to be.

When I am writing my yoga poems, in particular, I set my intention, start writing, and often stand up, practice the pose, write more, look up instructions and any relevant mythology, write more, and then revise, revise, revise.

Some of the yoga pose poems – especially the ones with solid metaphorical names – came more easily, like Mountain Pose or Goddess Pose, but others with more mechanical names, like Extended Side Angle Pose, took more effort.

But I have learned to trust the process and to trust and honor the vision of my project.

How do you know when a piece has come together (does it feel a particular kind of way in your body)?

When crafting a poem I intend to share, I am known to revise it anywhere from five to thirty times. I know that it is coming together when I am able to read it out loud all the way to the end without interrupting myself to change something. When I reach the end, I feel a tingle in my entire body as if someone else had just shared a gift of a poem with me, and I feel blessed… or somehow more healed. Sometimes I will touch my chest or even shed a tear.

Even after that, I send the poem to my two readers, who are both writers and yoga instructors. After their feedback, I make any final changes and share it here, on Substack.

The three poems I am sharing here, Mountain Pose, Goddess Pose, and Star Pose, are from my Starshine Salutation Sequence, which is a longer sequence of poems that align the reader/listener with their hearts and with irrefutable and unconditional self-love.

-Corie Feiner

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Mountain Pose

by Corie Feiner

Every day is a new day to relearn how 
to stand, to lift my head away from sink dishes 
and screens, to roll my shoulders 
 
from their good-for-nothing slouch, to hold 
my neck high as if there was a string 
from heaven pulling me upwards saying, 
You were born of us, too. 
 
Today, I stand like a mountain and tell myself, 
This is where everything begins. Still and solid
with arms that flow by my sides like wild rivers 
shimmering with life. 
 
Here, I become a witness to time itself 
watching my thoughts come and go 
like wind-swept clouds knowing no matter 
 
what storms come my way, my feet can hold me 
to the earth as I crumble and rise, crumble and rise 
humble and holy, dirty and divine. 

Sanskrit Name: Tadasana

Goddess Pose

by Corie Feiner

When I squat into goddess pose 
there is so much to reclaim –
 
starting with birth. 
 
My birth. Your birth and all 
the births before us that were full
of squatting and bleeding and grunting 
and knowing that we can 
make it through most any pain.
 
Next are our centers which we have been taught 
to either hide or give away. 
 
And next still are our breasts
which were made to be shown, 
to be kissed, to be sucked, to be loved. 
 
I have to stand like this—
hips, hands, and feet shining outwards 
 
as if I could become a goddess  
with nine heads and eight limbs, 
the sun as my crown, the moon 
as my core and dance                                                             
 
a divine sexy mama dance 
that can create or destroy anything – 
 
this is the only way anything new
has ever been born. 

Sanskrit Name: Utkata Konasana

Star Pose

by Corie Feiner

To be in star pose is to stand with your heart 
so open it could feel worthy of taking up 
any space it needs. 
 
It is to hold your body upright, to spread 
your arms and legs so wide you can swear
they twinkle, your breath shimmering 
with light. 
 
It is to remember that you, too, are made of 
the same stuff as all star bodies that guide even 
the most storm-tossed ships back to shore. 
 
We have seen the beginning of time over 
and over again and, each time, it seems 
like the end,
 
but know this, as you stand there, that you 
are a wish in someone else’s sky. 

Sanskrit Name: Utthita Tadasana

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What art, writerly, mind-body, or life practice are you leaning into? What does your creative life look like? What were the inspirations for your favorite works? Have you recently published a book of poetry? If you’d like to share about your creative, poetic, spiritual, well-being, or otherwise living life practices, please get in touch. unraveling, unmoored seeks collaborators. More info can be found on the About Page. Please message or email with questions.

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I’m warming to dry heat.

I know in these parts (Red River Valley) there’s a real risk of wildfires considering the strength of the wind. I also know that a drought could very seriously affect food production. I know I have to drink more water and hydrate my skin more.

But if I step outside of the things that I cannot control and step into the experience my body is having: having a walk in 81F/27C with 26% humidity feels so so so much more pleasant than 81 and 96% humidity (there’s no thigh rub, my friends, there’s no thigh rub!).

And it has me asking Siri what the driest parts of Italia are (the south and Sicilia) and am watching those places on the weather app. I wonder if the mugginess creates the sensory overload, rather than the heat itself. It has me coming to realize that it is, in fact, sensory overload. Because of course it is and, damn, have I been gaslighting myself about that all this time?!

I’m peeping the small villages my ancestors emigrated from: Cantalupo nel Sannio, Isernia, Molise, and Montefalcone di Val Fortore, Benevento, Campania. I’m browsing properties for sale. I’m learning the difference between a province and a region. I’m looking for birds to love; it bums me out that Europe doesn’t have hummingbirds or purple martins.

I’m wondering what the fruit and veg tastes like (I’ve heard the produce in the States tastes bland to folks who’ve lived elsewhere a few years, and I’d like to find out).

I don’t know how to make this happen, but I’d like to find that out too: living and working at my own pace, following my curiosities, trusting myself to rest when I need rest, listening to the birds, and receiving a livable income?

I know, I know, it sounds wild to me, too, convinced as I was that if I wanted to earn income, I had to suffer. But my body has been showing me since primary school that there’s no other path for me, lest I want to live in a state of severe depression and chronic pain. I have to find out.

This is also why Italy appeals: the vibe of Italy is savor living; the vibe of Italy is work to live, not live to work; the vibe of Italy is two-hour lunch breaks; the vibe of Italy is il dolce far niente (the sweetness of doing nothing); the vibe of Italy is everyday awe and beauty. It’s a lot of other things, too. It’s not all sunshine and roses, but I’d like to find that out.

with love and gratitude,

an orca whale friend, and you

a prose poem by Libby Walkup

So I was having a dream about an orca whale friend. We communicate telepathically, in case you were wondering, orca whales can speak English, it’s just easier this way, hearing what the other’s thinking. We’re hanging out in her garage, where her pool is, after some pretty hefty rescue action on my part in which her nose became an elephant trunk. Still, either way, you show up and are chillin with us, and my childhood friend's dad shows up with a joint attached to a lolly stick as if it were a sort of roach, that's how the cool kids are doing it, he explains without speaking. And he smokes you up. Then a discourteous friend of yours shows up: he keeps picking things up and setting them on their sides, like my childhood friend once did when she visisted my room, so I become irritated, I'm protective of the order of my orca whale friend's garage, considering she has no arms and her trunk has transitioned back into an orca whale nose, to keep it tidy herself, anyway, you announce this plan, you tell me: I can do it, Libby. I can make cacophonous iron and wine music. And I could hear in my head then what you meant. You went on working out details for bandmates and sound, and anyway, how’s your winter? Haven't heard from you in a while.

in the post

The thank you (renamed reaching for gratitude) zines went out in the post last week! You have no idea how much joy it brings me to make and share these things. I’ve already started considering the next mail event. A small poem written on a postcard. I’ve got a collection of ~30 postcards. If you’d definitely like to receive a poem, upgrade your subscription with this link. You’ll receive 90 days free and the next 15 subscribers will also receive a handbound notebook. Remember to add your address with the link you’ll receive via email.

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What art, writerly, mind-body, or life practice are you leaning into? What does your creative life look like? What were the inspirations for your favorite pieces? What is poetry, art, mindfulness, practice to you? If you’d like to share about your creative, poetic, spiritual, well-being, or otherwise living life practices, please get in touch. unraveling, unmoored seeks collaborators. More info can be found on the About Page. Please message or email with questions.

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When I started this publication back in 2021, I fantasized about living by candlelight, traveling by horse and buggy, and altogether moving more slowly and living a quieter (though, of course, horses and buggies are actually quite loud) life. I yearned for it.

I’d just finished a master’s degree at the UI Center for the Book, where I developed skills in book binding, box making, and letterpress printing and spent a lot of time learning about and looking at v v v old books. Like, think Gutenberg and pre-printing, scribed manuscripts.

I edited poetry while setting each letter individually in metal type on the printer’s stick. I sewed folded signatures of paper together with needle and thread. I frequently had to wait for glue to dry. Despite the demands of being in a graduate program, there was no hurrying these practices.

Below Rodgers Johns, of taken out of context, beautifully captures the essence of the slow, rhythmic practice of baking sourdough bread daily in the weeks leading up to the birth of her son, which of course launched her into a whole different set of practices and presence.

I love the flow of Tarn’s writing, and of course, baking sourdough is a much more accessible and useful historic practice than turning to horse-drawn buggies, living by candlelight, and letterpress printing.

I hope you savor her words as much as I do,

Tarn Rodgers Johns is a Berlin-based writer, creative and crack dweller, currently moving through the season of mothering a new human. She publishes to her own Substack, taken out of context.

In early February last year, on the brink of motherhood, I invited friends over to participate in a bread-braiding ritual for Imbolc, the halfway point between Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox, and the welcoming back of the light.

The end of my pregnancy was characterised by a frenzy of baking. The process of mixing and kneading, waiting, waiting, waiting was comforting and familiar. In those liminal days, baking sourdough bread was the perfect practice to channel my impatience.

Already on maternity leave, it structured the day: mix at 3 pm, let sit until 4, fold at 6, shape and put into the fridge before bed, bake the next day, and repeat. After a while, I didn't need to watch the clock, the process became intuitive. By the time my due date rolled around, my freezer was well stocked with loaves. In those early, messy days of postpartum, I found comfort in eating slices of rye, spelt, and cinnamon and raisin toast in stolen moments, to keep me going in the early hours of the morning.

A reminder of a different, more spacious time.

My partner will attest to the countless flat, rock-hard loaves that I produced in the years (yes, plural) that I was figuring out how to make good bread. Unusually for me, as a notorious (to myself) quitter, I stuck at it. The results got better as I picked up techniques and tips from people on Instagram and videos on YouTube. I experimented with different types of flour, proofing times, and methods of baking in the oven until my bread started to emerge in a way I was satisfied with.

Unlike commercial yeast, sourdough doesn’t behave predictably. Sourdough starter is an ecosystem in miniature, a buzzing microbial community that emerges from the most simple of ingredients: flour and water. The microbes themselves come from the flour, the kitchen, the sourdough is fermenting in the baker’s hands. I imagine in times gone by, sourdough starters would have travelled down the generations, a unique microbial footprint of a family or a village.

Over the past year, while my baby thrived, I couldn’t say the same for my sourdough starter. It languished in the fridge, developing a thick layer of grey watery ‘hooch’. Sourdough only really stays healthy through a continuity of practice; the microbes need to be regularly turned over and fed, and all of my caregiving capacity was occupied elsewhere. I told myself I’d make bread again when I had more time.

My son turned one recently, just as spring started to show her colours, and he loves bread. A few weeks ago, I collected some new sourdough starter from someone on a community forum and baked my first loaf since he was born. The new starter was made with rye, and it was very enthusiastic; the dough puffed up surprisingly quickly, and the first result came out a bit too flat and overproved.

The next loaf was better, and eventually, this unfamiliar sourdough starter and I settled into a new rhythm. For a while, I baked every day. Then my son got a cold and developed a new tooth. The new sourdough starter looked at me forlornly every time I opened the fridge. Less forgiving than its predecessor, the next time I had the itch to bake, it was past the point of revival.

One day, I will return to the delicious effervescence of sourdough once again, but this season of my life calls for something with a bit more predictability. A few days ago in the run-up to Easter weekend, I fished out a sachet of dried yeast from the cupboard to prepare some Hot Cross Buns, or Osterbrötchen, as my German family calls them.

They were delicious.

—Tarn Rodgers Johns

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What art, writerly, mind-body, or life practice are you leaning into? What does your creative life look like? What were the inspirations for your favorite works? Have you recently published a book of poetry? If you’d like to share about your creative, poetic, spiritual, well-being, or otherwise living life practices, please get in touch. unraveling, unmoored seeks collaborators. More info can be found on the About Page. Please message or email with questions.

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It’s a perfect spring Sunday afternoon. 60 degrees, cloudy, and windy. Just on the edge of balmy. And the clouds, the clouds are fantastic, rippled sheets across the sky.

Copper and I went for a walk. He had a good poop, in case you’re conncered, I’m always concerned with his poops. They’re informative. But I think he’s experiencing pain.

We walked through the alley on the last stretch where a loving citizen has hung bird feeders, and though the three or four birds near them scattered as we slowly came through, the chatter from the tree had me dragging my feet.

I could have stood there for ages just listening.

When we arrived home, it seemed a good time to take down the snow fence installed in the yard in the autumn, though hardly necessary this winter. The neighbor’s dog, Frenchie, cried for me, so I gave her some pets over their fence. And then one of the kids came out, 12 or so yrs-old, and hopped on the trampoline in sandals and a floral dress, I presume she was wearing for Easter.

I waved, she nodded, Frenchie ran about their yard, crunching a plastic cup, I worked on pulling stakes out of the ground and releasing the fence from them. Around us, the wind blew, Grandma’s many windchimes sang, and the birds, too. It was idyllic, the kind of idyllic that requires a slow camera pan.

Maybe a close-up, slow-mo of the dog shaking the plastic cup. A close-up of a wind chime, a bird somewhere in a tree. A squirrel hunting for food.

The kind of idyllic you might see in a commercial or a horror film just before something cray happens. Because it was just that perfect and pleasant.

It’s the kind of spring day where setting up the hammock or strolling through a park feels like the only thing that should be on the to-do.

We don’t get many days like this before the bugs, the humidity, and the heat come along; it feels prudent to stop time in it. To move slow. To sit. To listen. Allow it all to expand around me in the everythingness that it is.

Though, of course, once the fence was rolled up and stored in the garage, all three of us went back into our houses. Me to my basement where it’s still cool and dim.

If you’re feeling like the transition from winter to spring is just a bit much or you’re recovering this week from holiday time and need a bit of indoor slowness, may I offer my current obsessions?

I have increasingly found it difficult to watch regular TV, as if processing audio AND visual is too much for my brain, but it doesn’t stop me from trying! I’ve found some pleasant, slow things to watch that don’t require much thinking or processing, except for the beauty:

• All Aboard! is a BBC series you can find on Britbox, or find the first episode, a two-hour British canal journey, on YouTube. The three episodes of this series take you on a real-time Kennet and Avon canal journey, a coach tour through the Yorkshire Dales, and a sleigh journey across the arctic wilderness in Norway (super cute reindeer butt in this one.) There’s no music and no voiceover. Just real sounds of the environment and occasional text on screen offering information about the environment or historical data.

• introduced me to walking tours on YouTube. Just folk holding a camera and walking in real-time through probably whatever city you’d like to explore. Some put up text identifying buildings or scenes of interest, but the audio is the sounds of humans walking and talking around you (which I find quite nice when I can turn the volume down!), animals, ocean sounds, wind, etc. I’ve been indulging in everything Italy, considering my desire to be there, so might I suggest this long video of the Amalfi Coast? (Camera speeds can be a bit jerky if the videographer’s equipment isn’t quality, so keep that in mind when looking around for other options.)

• PBS Living, found on Amazon Prime, offers a variety of Visions of episodes in which aerial video (and occasional on-the-ground shots) are taken with high-def cameras over a variety of cities and countries. There is music and quite a lot of voice-over talking with information about what’s being filmed, which is useful if you’re into that kind of thing, but I also watch with the sound off. Shot in the late 90s and early oughts, they’re a bit dated, but still pretty cool. Sincerely, I have looked for these episodes on the PBS website and can’t find them. You might try Visions of Italy: Northern Style (1998), which is one of three episodes on YouTube. If you’re not obsessed with Italy, you might like one of the other episodes: Israel, Germany and Austria, Greece, France, Britain and Ireland, or The Great Cities of Europe

I suppose the most optimal and effective path forward for me is to free myself from TV altogether, and probably generally screens as much as I can, but for the moment, I’m relishing being transported elsewhere with so little effort. For the moment, I’m savoring the possibilities in this contemporary world.

april giveaway

Just three days left to register for poet Ricki Cummings’s giveaway. Friends, family, and current subscribers are encouraged to enter. There are eight books of poetry (four of Ricki’s newest collection The Failure Experiment and four are hand-printed and bound books by me!), a zine with an essay by me, and 90 days of the new unraveling, unmoored comped. Click through to find the registration link toward the bottom!

Ricki Cummings On Practice

in the post

I want to send you mail. I’ll be sending out the remaining Thank You zines this month. Upgrade to Founding this week, and you may still receive one!

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What art, writerly, mind-body, or life practice are you leaning into? What does your creative life look like? What were the inspirations for your favorite pieces? What is poetry, art, mindfulness, practice? If you’d like to share about your creative, poetic, spiritual, well-being, or otherwise living life practices, please get in touch. unraveling, unmoored seeks collaborators. More info can be found on the About Page. Please message or email with questions.

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I’ve been thinking about these poems I wrote in the spring of my MA back in the day (like this one). I wasn’t on the poetry MA, I was meant to be writing a fiction manuscript, but these pieces just started coming to me.

I woke with them circling my head or I’d journal a bunch and start cutting away the excess lanuage. So much of them are unutterably filled with grief, loneliness, and longing. And I certainly had been feeling a lot of that, maybe most of my life, but, folks, that spring, when I was writing these aching poems, was also the first time I was swept away with joy, that I can remember.

Just like, the kind of joy and presence where I was going look, look everyone at the clouds! Look at how alive they look! How defined! Have clouds always looked so stunning? Could you imagine spending your time looking at anything else? Hey, hey everyone? But they all thought I was high or having some kind of breakdown.

So what’s up with all the grief-filled poetry when I was feeling so joyous?

It finally came to me. Sure a British spring is a wonderous thing after all those weeks of grey, but also, I had started free-write journaling (morning pages, expressive writing, whatever you want to call it) three maybe four days a week.

And studies do show that expressive journaling (i.e., emotion dumping on a page) regulates the nervous system, which therefore instigates healing of traumas. And when our nervous systems are coming into regulation, thoughts in relation to those emotions and experiences being healed start to come forward and move out.

In other words, these poems are not a representation of my past grief and sadness (though I suppose they are that too); they are a representation of my healing. Of my releasing that grief and sadness from my nervous system onto the page!

What an effing eye-opener. It completely changes my relationship with them. And mixed with the ongoing task of deleting old emails from that time, I wonder what else is there. I wonder what else I can find.

This one may need more attention, but the thing I’m interested in is the relief of grief about a relationship long, lost past coming forward. Grief, I know I didn’t realize was still living in there. And also the words I couldn’t bring myself to find, the experiences I couldn’t bring myself to name/remember.

Reflection

by Libby Walkup

In the mirror
one sleeve through
I've forgotten
what it is 
to feel [   	]
outside your arms.

the last
hand 
on this hip,
the last mouth 
on [         	].

april giveaway

Last week, poet Ricki Cummings wrote about her practice, and we launched a giveaway. There are eight books of poetry (four are hand-printed and bound books!), a zine with an essay by me, and 90 days of the new unraveling, unmoored comped. All persons wishing to be included in the drawing must register, even if you’re a subscriber. Click through to find the registration link toward the bottom!

Ricki Cummings On Practice

in the post

Do you want to receive post? I’ll be sending out the remaining Thank You zines. I know a few folks have received one of these. If you’re a Paid subscriber and have one, can you remind me? Upgrade to Founding and make sure I have your post address before the 15th. <3

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What art, writerly, mind-body, or life practice are you leaning into? What does your creative life look like? What were the inspirations for your favorite works? If you’d like to share about your creative, poetic, spiritual, well-being, or otherwise living life practices, please get in touch. unraveling, unmoored seeks collaborators. More info can be found on the About Page. Please message or email with questions.

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It’s not because Ricki and I go way back to passing poems folded into notes in the hallways between classes that I’m so excited about this guest post and collaboration, it’s because I too fully believe that everything is the Work. Living is the Work. Existing is the Work. Whether we write it down, draw it, or directly use whatever it is is irrelevant. As long as we’re breathing, we’re still creating. And so many of us are very, very hard on ourselves when we’re not actively writing things down or making things because we forget that we are not machines and that whatever we are doing, we are still doing the Work.

Ricki Cummings is a trans writer currently living in Chicago. Her most recent books are The Failure Experiment (2025) and confessions from a drainage ditch (2023). She is the author of the chapbooks A Void and Cloudless Sky and Hypersigil. Her work has been published in Poetry, Vallum, Court Green, Calibanonline, Solstice Literary Magazine, Columbia Poetry Review, and Allium, and has been shortlisted for Vallum’s Award for Poetry. She received her MFA in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago.

On Practice

I should make one thing clear: what I have is not a practice so much as a set of guidelines that I attempt to sort-of adhere to, and it's a combination of two ideas, one interpolated from several sources such that I may have actually synthesized my own idea, and one specific one.

The former is Everything Is The Work. If you're an artist of any sort, but specifically a writer, everything that's going into your head, everything that you're turning around and mulling and stewing on, every little scrap you collect or write... that's part of doing The Work. Writing isn't always sitting down and banging out 4000 words or an entire sonnet, sometimes it's the act of noting the way the sun looks at a certain time of the year, or spending time you should be writing suddenly researching firearms from 1836 or the gravity on Mercury, or just staring at the wall while your brain chews on all those things.

More importantly, those things don't have to be done at a particular time of day. Strict adherence to schedule is great for some people. Other people slip a day and the whole thing goes to shit. Give yourself leeway. You're still doing The Work. Are you breathing? Then you're Working.

The latter idea, the specific one, is the daily routine of author Ursula K. Le Guin, who wrote that her day looks like this:

5:30 a.m. – Wake up and lie there and think.

6:15 a.m. – Get up eat breakfast (lots).

7:15. a.m – get to work, writing, writing and writing.

Noon – Lunch.

1:00 – 3:00 p.m. – reading, music.

3:00 – 5:00 p.m. – correspondence, maybe housecleaning

5:00 – 8:00 p.m. – make dinner and eat it

After 8:00 p.m. – I tend to be very stupid and we won’t talk about this

Note how little of it is actually structured. She is awake for almost two hours before actually sitting down to "work." Her afternoon/evening seems to be very little "writing" "work," but considering that reading feeds the writer brain, that music feeds the general creative brain, that correspondence and connection keep us grounded in our position of community (usually of fellow artists) and is still writing in the strictest sense. (Housecleaning I still haven't found a Work connection for, but I assume it's in there.)

But then there's that last one. "I tend to be very stupid and we won't talk about this." One could reasonably make the argument that Le Guin was a de facto genius. Yet she still puts in her schedule a time for her "stupidity." Is that because she's decided that's the time all the stupid happens? No, that's the time she has observed when the stupid happens. Much like grammar, Le Guin's routine is descriptive rather than prescriptive. It's what works for her.

Now, like I said, I have no practice as such. I'm writing this on my laptop I bought for grad school (has it already been six years since I finished?), in a plaintext editor on Linux, an operating system I've only recently switched to. This is far from my "normal" setup. And yet, here I am. Working. Some people get precious about their tools, their time. But none of that matters so much as just Doing The Work. And so many artists will tell you that there's One True Way to do it, but fuck them. That's for their work. William Stafford would get up a six AM and immediately start writing, every day, for his entire adult life. Hell, even Le Guin got up at 5:30. All I do is remember that it takes a couple hours for my brain to spin up to operating speed, and from there I try to write in the morning, do socializing and leisure in the afternoon, and get some real rest in before bed. At any point in there I reserve the right to stupidity.

You get to set your own schedule. If you only get time to work at lunch or during your work breaks, do that. Stephen King wrote most of Carrie in the lunchroom at a laundry service he was working at. But you can bet he was working out plot while moving shirts into the drying machine. Thinking up lines. Probably a little being stupid, too. The important thing is that you get something, anything, done, because It's All Part Of The Work. The details are unimportant.

You are you. Be you.

-Ricki Cummings

excerpt from Hypersigil

by Ricki Cummings

All this time I thought your name
     meant “earth”.
Instead, your name is my name
     but older.
We are both prone to madness
     and shadow,
cave-ins and strained backs
     from lifting our lungs
     when no one else could.

excerpt from The Failure Experiment

by Ricki Cummings

Inside the solar plexus
lies ganglia and the word.
Scales fall from my eyes
and are replaced with coax
cable and copper traces. I think
therefore you are; this
cybernetic solipsism
is only fibrous networks,
only logic giving rise
to what electricity thinks
is love: salt water, silicon,
and neuropeptides.

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Back in 2019, when Libby was learning letterpress printing and book binding at the University of Iowa Center for the Book, she, Ricki, and artist Jessica Wagar collaborated on this really, really gorgeous hand-typeset, letterpress printed, and handbound book, if she (Libby) does say so herself.

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What art, writerly, mind-body, or life practice are you leaning into? What does your writer life look like? What were the inspirations for your favorite works? What does poetry mean to you? If you’d like to share about your creative, poetic, spiritual, well-being, or otherwise living life practices, please get in touch, unraveling, unmoored seeks collaborators. More info can be found on the About Page. Please message or email with questions.

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I picked up circle drawing a few years back. I can’t tell you what’s so pleasing about it, but it quickly became one of my fave Zentangle patterns. It just really pleases my eyeballs and my body.

A few weeks ago I finished a 6 x 7 inch sheet of circles, filling in the negative space with black and (happy accident) brown ink and just, like, could not contain myself.

Almost every drawing I do, I want to make it bigger, but have been hesitant. It feels daunting and I fear I’ll lose interest halfway through or it’ll take too long or it won’t come out/I’ll eff it up and have wasted a larger (read more expensive) sheet of paper with nothing to show for it.

Just like some really basic fears that I fully intended to ignore at some stage, and I finally have.

And I’m so pleased because I have loved every single moment of this 18 x 24-inch drawing coming into being. Every circle (or near circle, and some not near circles at all) I put down is, if not a pleasure, then an astute representation of where I’m at.

Which, I love observing: my hand starts moving too quickly or wobbles more when I’m hungry or tired. If I slow my hand down, my breath slows with a sigh. When my eyeballs get unfocused, I need some water or just to stop and probably to nap.

And when I set the drawing on a table, I marvel at it every time I pass it by. I mean, just, like really love on it. I talk to it. I tell it how much I love it. How beautiful it is. I don’t even care if this is weird! Because I love it so much.

I can’t see the patterns forming when I’m drawing, so looking at it from a distance, especially just after adding circles, is a whole thing. every. single. time.

Last week, I had to take care of some other things and didn’t have the time or energy to make any progress and I physically yearned for it. Stopped to admire it on several occasions. I frequently wanted to drop everything and draw more circles.

And when finally I was at a stopping point between tasks and there was nothing immediately pressing, I picked it up again and spent a couple of hours with it. My hand felt rusty, and I was full of delight. (I’d prefer to be making circles right now than writing about making circles, but I also want to share it with you!)

My 8 pt Micron nib has worn down, and I don’t know how to prevent that from happening, but I’m going to eke out every bit of ink that I can from it because I am not wasteful! (I’m sure this is a Puritan virtue instilled in me.)

I’m not planning anything, just sort of following intuitive nudges to make bigger or smaller circles and so I have no idea what the final work will look like exactly and that, mixed with the sense of pleasure at each added section, slow as it may be, seems to be curiosity enough to continue on.

dreaming italy

Y’all. This has just, it’s got me. Like I am got, and I don’t think I can stop it even if I wanted to. Or maybe I have been working really hard to stop this train for most of my adult life, and it’s made everything so much harder. So I’ve just, I’ve got to get it out.

I have been reticent to want anything out loud. For so long, whenever I declared a desire or put an intention toward an outcome, things—never quite fruited. I have felt like a snake oil salesman making promises I was never able to follow through on, to myself, mostly.

The girl who cried wolf, except the girl who dreamed shit up she could never really have: qualifications I thought I wanted (ahem, still don’t have that PhD), careers I half-assedly tried to pursue, projects I only just barely started (all those drafts of writing!) and the ughest one of all: wanting to move to Europe.

In my head my life is so much more exciting than it ever has been, mostly.

I’ve been saying it for so long with no real follow through, even I began to think it wasn’t something I really wanted, just, you know, maybe it’s pleasant to dream of cruising UK’s canals in a narrowboat or having coffee under a vine covered pergola at the back of my Italian villa overlooking lush fields? It’s a dream. A fantasy. No one has it in real life. (Except that they do.)

And it tends to spike up when things don’t feel that great in my real life. So, you know, it’s just escapism. Right? A broken record of escapist fantasy.

A broken record in bullet points:

• I’m working toward getting my Italin citizenship: I began collecting the documentation to get Italian citizenship by descent years ago and went on in fits and starts whenever I had some extra money. And, actually, just a few days ago the Italian government implemented a provisional declaration that restricts citizenship by descent to only those with a parent or grandparent born in Italy.
  
  And maybe I could convince my octogenarian grandfather and mother to apply together and see where that cookie crumbles, but it’s actually quite a relief to have that longstanding to-do taking up space in my brain off the list. Like, I think it’s easier to just apply for residency. And I had a lot of fun receiving birth certificates from Italy.

• I want to move to the UK: I don’t know how many times I’ve told friends I wanted to move back to the UK, how many hours I’ve spent researching whatever graduate program aligned with a current special interest, browsing job boards in fields even tangential to my qualifications, and even just looking at the various visas to see if they’d changed, to see if I may more easily qualify.

• And now: As soon as I earn the required income I’m getting a digital nomad visa!

A couple of years ago, I found out that some countries had created digital nomad visas, and just after Italy announced one of their own in April 2024, I had an experience that brought my deepest desire to live in Europe into sharp clarity. I mean, the absolute sharpest clarity.

For a hot second, I thought a path was opening to a move much sooner than I thought I could manage, and I sprung into such momentum. Suddenly, everything seemed so clear and easy. Unfortunately, that situation wasn’t what I thought it was, and I spent a long time reorienting and healing.

But, I just haven’t been able to let the desire go. I’ve tried to convince myself that getting a campervan and traveling around the States would be wildly fun (and even easier, especially with Copper). I wouldn’t have to learn a language (something else I’ve done in fits and starts). I’ve considered a move to the PNW, after all, the weather is very Britain-like. I’ve considered small, New England towns with their Old World charm. I’ve even considered an expat village in the Mexican mountains.

But my body just keeps telling me nope. Nope. Nope. Big fat effing nopes.

So I say this hesitantly, nervously, even with just a bit of fear and shame: I have been dreaming big about moving to Italy. I mean, I am literally having dreams of sipping espresso at a cafe in a little medieval village seldom explored by tourists, the warm sun on my skin, surrounded by stone and cobbles in the middle of a mountain forest, the slowness of Italian life filtering into my very being, jotting a few lines down in a notebook, and Copper chillaxing at home, waiting for me to return and start my work day (i.e., writing and editing this newsletter or drawing circles).

I don’t know how to get from where I am to where I want to be, it feels like an impossible financial leap, let alone an emotional or logistical one. Like if you saw my bank account, snake oil salesman indeed. So right now, I’m just working on the energetic leaps. Clearing out all the fears and insecurities about attracting collaborators, growing this publication, selling art works, being able to actually take care of myself in a way that’s sustainable so that I don’t once again end up back here so burntout and in a severe depression just from, you know, being alive in a neurodivergent body trying to live like I’m in a neurotypical one, tail between my legs, feeling like a failure.

Like whatever happens going forward, it has to be set up in a way that allows me to rest when I need rest. No pushing really hard, no hustling, just ease and peace, and pacing myself. I think I’m getting closer to that in practice, but whether or not it’s working in the real world, i.e., reflected in my bank account, is another story. All this feels like a huge and improbable dream.

So I want to share all the possibilities with you, I want to dream with you going forward, if that’s okay, but can I just leave this here for now, a small whisper to the universe: please clear a path for me and Copper to easefully, sustainably, and safely get to Italy?

in the post

March: the first ephemera packets went out without a hitch last month. Readers at the Founding level (okay, my mom) and randomly selected readers at the Paid level received a random assortment of mail art, letterpress print projects, and paper art I’ve made or collected over the last ten years. I even sewed the bleeding envelopes, y’all. It was a bit extra, but in the spirit of using things up, it made a nice dent in my paper stash.

April: I’ll be sending out the remaining Thank You zines. I know a few folks have received one of these. If you’re a Paid subscriber and have one, can you remind me? And anyone who wants one, please upgrade to Founding and make sure I have your post address before the 15th. <3

invitation to collaborate

Next week, I’ll be sharing an essay On Practice by poet Ricki Cummings, along with a special surprise announcement. I know. You can hardly wait, amirite?

In the meantime, what art, writerly, mind-body, or life practice are you leaning into? What does your writer life look like? What were the inspirations for your favorite works? If you’d like to share about your creative, poetic, spiritual, well-being, or otherwise living life practices, please get in touch. unraveling, unmoored seeks collaborators. More info can be found on the About Page. Please message or email with questions.

with love and gratitude,

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Just weeks before I moved to the UK in 2008 to embark on an MA in creative writing, an old family friend expressed how brave I was, said she couldn’t imagine doing anything like it, especially solo, and asked how I felt.

Terrified, I answered.

Mom said, And excited, and then looked at me, Right?

I muttered something to appease whatever prevented her from allowing me to be where I was at in that moment, which was beside myself with the unknown, all the little logistical tasks that needed doing before I left, the money that needed to be earned between two jobs that were pushing my burnout limits to the absolute edge, saying goodbye to everything and one that was familiar, clearing out my apartment, packing, entering into routinelessness, and then getting on a plane to land abruptly in a new life where the only person I knew was a woman I’d met for about five minutes that summer through my great uncle and aunt.

Those who’ve done it, you know: it’s terrifying, thrilling, confronting, lonely, exhilarating, harrowing, challenging, and makes us so so alive. It’s often the best decision we ever make for ourselves.

But throughout that year, I was confronted with so many parts of myself I hadn’t had to look at before. Deep feelings of loneliness and skin hunger reveal themselves in my writing. Eventually, I understand now, my nervous system began to regulate and my trauma heal, but it was a long way to go to get back home to myself.

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