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

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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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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!

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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.

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 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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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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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

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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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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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invitation to collaborate

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.

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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It’s 4:35 am. I’m making a cup of tea. I went to bed and was so hot I couldn’t sleep. So I switched blankets and then I was so cold I couldn’t sleep. And then I was still cold, but sweating and couldn’t sleep. Then Copper left the bed for the living room chair and I decided to fuck it. I got dressed and boiled some water. For some reason, I can better regulate my body temperature when sitting up? No, seriously…?

Tired as I am, there’s a quiet pleasure in the early morning darkness. A cheekiness in doing something else when I should be sleeping. I never did like that word: should.

I drank two cups of tea, drafted a writing, and drew some circles all before the February sun rose into my small windows, effectively engaging in the most important activities before many in the Americas even rose from their sweet little beds.

Today will be particularly slow with lots of naps. I have found to expect little else when the moons are coming into fullness or newness.

the scenic route home from Wales

a haiku by Libby Walkup

scraggly sheep dot green 
mountainsides lit by hazy 
rays peaking through clouds 

invitation for reflection

Years ago I was visiting a friend in Bath, UK and we drove to Hay-on-Wye to see Zadie Smith at the summer lit festival. She read from her poignant collection Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (2009), it was fabulous (and yes, about that long ago!), but this is the moment I really loved about that journey: pulling over onto the side of the road, mingling with the sheep, trying to capture the whole thing: the rays of the sun, the cloud shadows moving across the mountainside, the green, green of the Welsh grass so nurtured by rain, all on a very shitty camera (probably an old iPhone 5). I could have sat down there on the side of the road and cried for how beautiful it all was.

I don’t know if “stopping time” includes re-visiting these awe-struck moments of our human experiences, but I feel fuller doing so. What’s a moment from your experience that you enjoy coming into presence with over and over again? Have you tried to capture it from different angles or through different mediums?

in the post

This month family gets post love. While culling my collection of old photos for the ottoman pouf project, now more or less finished, I found some photos from way back I felt called to send back to those captured. Of course, I meant to have them all out before now, so they’re accompanied by distinct holiday cards. Shrug. Love is love.

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unraveling, unmoored seeks submissions On Practice and Poetic Musings. I can’t wait to share your words with this publication’s growing readership. Submission Guidelines can be found on the About Page. If there are any questions, please send a message.

With love and gratitude,

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I wrote this during and after my departure from Chicago in 2013-2014. There’s an earlier draft in which I go into conversations I was having with a friend at the time about our arduous efforts to minimize our belongings to the barest possible number and my desire to have the perfect packable wardrobe full of versatile clothing I’d never actually wear in real life.

You know, all those convertible, multi-wear wraps and tops. I did buy one and though it was a pleasant piece of cloth, I wore it once as a skirt to someone’s wedding. Skirts and dresses aren’t really my thing, so you can see the problem: it was clothing for the person I wanted to be rather than the person I am (or was).

My relationship with stuff is a complicated one, whether overwhelmed by my inclination to hoard digital content or stripping down to a packable life, both extremes sort of overshadow the privilege it is to even think about stuff so much. To think about having or not having. To have the opportunity to choose. That’s what this piece points toward.

With the holiday season upon us, I hope the things you keep (and the things you buy) and how you spend your time, bring you and those you hold dear, the most possible pleasantness.

May you spend this Black Friday and weekend in the ways that you most need.

The Things We Keep

by Libby Walkup

The sun half filtering into the alley shimmers my breathsteam as I push  
through the back door of my Chicago apartment building.  

A man leans into the industrial trash bin and sifts through. He pulls out 
metal and plastic and adds them to his already heaping, well-organized 
shopping cart. 

Cans, glass, plastic, and, curiously, a small collection of costume jewelry, 
all separated meticulously by color or type into the grocery bags, some 
tied and hanging from the metal wires.

·· 

In Minnesota my uncles chuck 40+ years’ worth of rotted wood, 
metal scraps and carpet cuttings into a dumpster. They prep  
for the retirement move. 

The two-car garage once packed so tight, the sedan grazed two old sawhorses 
on the right and on the left the chest freezer's door-dinged with black. 

Tato, my grandpa, can’t watch as the uncles make the decisions he can't. 

·· 

I sell two utility shelves, leave a piece of 60-inch plywood in the alley, give  
my sofa-bed to a friend, donate as much as I can cart to the thrift store, sell  
as many books as online bookstores take, and give a full cart +  
the cart to a neighbor I meet just days before I leave – including my plant,  
Carl.  

What's left of my Chicago life I pack into two Prius trips headed for home.  

Who am I trying to shed? 

·· 

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1.

Spring equinox has come and gone.

The weather here has been undecided. By here, I mean Dilworth. I’ve been in Dilworth some weeks and started this draft a while back. The weather is still undecided well into April.

It was so warm my first week here, I picked up some summer socks on a short trip back up to the north woods where most of my stuff still lives.

2.

Dilworth dogs barked, the kids played, parents got their motorcycles running. And then it snowed.

The wind, as it is here in the flatlands, has been nasty, there’s a thin layer of snow on the ground this morning (March), and I’ve been wearing two pants to walk Copper.

3.

I love it. Or, while my eyes are watering and it’s still only 26 degrees F in April, the wind whipping me in the face as I walk Copper earlier than I once, not that long ago, regularly got out of bed, I remember that soon enough I’ll be walking him with sweat so thick down my back it’ll feel as if I’ve just taken a shower, but I won’t smell like I have, the wind will still be battering my face, and we’ll both be so hot we’ll likely pass out on the sidewalk to be eaten by lingering crows who will drop twenty dollar bills in my grandma’s yard in return for the tasty treat.

(Seriously leave presents for your crows, they’ll return the gifts.)

4.

Perspective is all I’m aiming for. But I did spot green on some hedges a few days ago. I have no idea what I’m doing or where I’m going; I am here now, getting on as ever, in desperate need of a digital detox and a personal assistant. So many tidbits that need updating and paperwork to fill out.

how have you been?

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