Cecilia Justine

When I close my eyes

I see you

And I see the dream

Of all I hope for you

Our tiny family

Danced

In the doctor’s office

When your nascent bottom

Sat square upon my belly

Showing us

For sure

You were a girl

My dream and my greatest fear

For I was raised by our women

I saw the power and pain

Of our women

We are women

 With wings, yes

And claws and

Talons and passion

And so

Much

Power


Like superhero lore

That power and passion

Comes paired

With layered lessons

Of responsibility.


Innocence ignited and

Ignored

Survival buried

The kindness

Abuse strangled

The hope

Trauma tortured

The tendrils of love


I got no stories from our women

I got name calling

Fear

Judgement


A beautiful 2 year old

Laughing and haloed in the Texas evening sun

“She’s so pretty, we’ll need to get her on birth control before she’s 12”

Stupid statements said without thought

And the trajectory of everything twists, tilts, and spills

Till it is MY turn

And Hell No.

I see you, judgement. Walk away.

I will hold her in my arms and soothe her screams

I lay beside her crib

My face pressed against the bars till I have imprints

For she will take no lovey object other than me

Hell NO is my response to past patterns.


You will own your own body

And find power in your voice alone

And I will amplify whatever you need said

If you even need

My voice


I have your tiny thin arms

That snake around my neck

And in their slithering motion, heal

Every muscle they pass


Your smile is as big as the biggest

Crescent moon

Curling around every part of me

That ever felt small

And lifting it larger than love


Your eyes are open ocean magic

Lit by luminous summer moon moans

Melting fear and pain and trauma

Into chances

And future

And fearlessness

Or courage…depending on the perspective


My dear

My darling

You are tiny pieces of me

Echoes of all

Of our women

And really

You are none of us


While all of us

Stand behind you

Beside your

Around you and within you


We are your ancestors

Living and dead

And you are the most beautiful

Imperfect

Stubborn

Feisty

Magical

Creative manifestation

Of no dream we have ever had


Thank heaven I have you,

May I always be worthy.

For I know very little in life as well as I know

That your love

Is the liquid elixir

That fixes nothing

And yet heal the holes

In every part of my aching

heart

And the hearts

Of all

Our women

The story of the Laurel and White Oak Trees

"Keep your guard up," he implores
He pauses in his lip path across the vastness
 Of the space between my ribs

Keep my guard up...

I hear the goddess wolf howl
Outside  my door
The near silent steps of padded paws
hunting

Can I reconcile my journey
Into the vastness of vulerability
With walls and guards, masks and even well meaning
moments of make believe?

When does the swaying embrace become
Softly sudden dancing?

Can your skin tell when the touch that sets it aflame
is igniting a cleansing slow incense burn
and not
a raging, devouring flame?

How strong are my feet rooted
In the sands and soil of love?
Even if they run tap roots deep as the 200 year old
white oak
With a trunk as wide as it is tall
Is that enough
if he chooses to turn away?

Shall I be like the she wolf goddess warrior
Medeina, refusing a partner
Protecting not hunter but
Forest?
Standing solo yet surrounded by wolves?

I know now I could.  I can.

And this is my story
My myth
I write my own rules
Set up and tear down my own boundaries

So barefoot, naked to my toes
With purple hair flaming
And my heart so hot my chest glows
My eyes close
So I can see clearly

I'll keep my walls up only to my knees
my tears as diamond male
Are all the armor I will ever need
Each cascading cathartic crystal
Cleansing every corner
Of my softly jagged soul

My roots run deep
Deep and wide as the centuries old oak
My heart guarded by the Medeina
But she is not me

I prowl with arms and heart wide open bare
beneath my crystalline armor

The questions are not mine
but his

Will he ask them?
If so, what will he say?

I have held death in my arms
And kissed it's dry, still feet
I have looked into the eyes of everything
and walked away, alone

And I cannot answer his questions for him
I cannot, in truth, even get him to ask them

I will keep my guard up
For my guard is my own tender, loving embrace
And being held thus,
I can see each joy as clear as
every scar that sews me and holds me, body and soul,
together
A golden veined tapestry of wood and blood and
root and fur.

I know what I choose.

Always

Worthy of Wanting

Take  breath
To take a moment
To disentangle the tendrils
Of my yearning, thrumming heart
Sing another song
To silence the ear worm's
Seductive serenade
Tilt my trembling chin skyward
To send the tears sideways
To minimize the look of my
Melting heart as it rains down my face

Take a breath
To take a moment
To adjust the chain mail
I will not remove
The sentimental beast whose ion wings
Buzz electric, banging against the cage
my ribs make
I choose to enter this battle,
And all others, with eyes bleeding
Love bits- a true warrior needs knowledge
of where to find her truest power.

Take a breath
To take a moment
To call the silence
The Morrigan chooses her  own
With haunting clarity and pure power.
I am focusing myself beyond
Myself
Connecting and tying the tatters
together, a weaver of grief wool
Into a tapestry of My Strength
The red cinnamon strands no stronger
than Brigid's whisper quiet creek call

Take a breath
To take a moment
And recognize
Who you really are
Queen goddess warrior child widow mother crone
You are one with every flame that ever danced
With every breeze that set leaves to spinning
You are one with every ocean wave and puddle
With the stones and clay foundations
Beneath all our feet.
You are already chosen
Worthy of wanting
Part of it all

Even when  the words
have not yet been spoken.

Even when they never  will be.

Erotic and Esoteric

We met in an old re-purposed church
with purple walls
and a sea green ceiling

You avoided my eyes
Often
With wild  wind blown hair and wide
Open ears

It was a 2 iced tea night
And you walked me home
Uphill, in the dark and cold

We forget sometimes
What our real faces look like
Believing our  masks are our realest selves

Yet in the secret
Mostly silent of my small, cluttered living room
Our masks tilted, letting us peak beneath, briefly

And each night after
Like sneaky teenagers we looked
Embracing, finally, the bits of us that don't
fit in

So much of all that might  be seen
is far beyond our sight, so looking
away makes sense

Close your eyes and allow yourself to get lost
Within our other senses
Skin on soft smooth skin
And tongues as flames darting
Around each other
Pressing our pieces together till
The ghost of you finds its home
In the deepest part of me
Inhaling how poetically our scents
Mingle and mix to make
an intoxicating new cologne

I cannot,  yet, sleep easy
beside you.  Your body is too loud
And my body too starved for what you feed me

Your mind might falter
But some somatic song
Of your deepest soul seems to hear me

Trust me
Touch me
And there remains the alluring
Erotic power-call
of
   yet.


~For L.S.

Finally the fog

Muscles buzz secrets
Deep into her sorrow bones
Fog curls around her

Bloody feet, dragging
Her body is long and strong
Like an Amazon

Her hair is matted
With sweat?  Blood?  Irrelevant
She's no ornament

Warrior, survivor
Mother, wife, creator
She exhales.  Deeply

A breath of living
Full of tiny hope raindrops
A sigh as large as

Thunder while she drags
her iron Sword beside her
Carving small cold canyons

Into the lush land
Made fertile with her salty
tears, bits of her flesh, the seed

Waiting for the kiss
Of sunlight to awaken
With living writhing desire

The parts which, even
Now lay dormant, curled, ready
To send down the roots

So below, above
Seeing strength from inside
looks a lot like love

The fog begins to clear
There's more than one way
to fight...

The same as you

Who are you?
It's hard to say, for sure...
I know I am

A searcher
Looking for, if not the right path,
A lovely one

A teacher
Pulling laughing hearts under my wings
To fill with courage and curiosity

A mother
Fumbling along with hugs
Hiccups and band-aid kisses
Wondering when the squabbling stops

An American white woman
Attempting to amplify the voices
Of my black, brown, poor(er), differently able,
gender nonconforming, rainbow of sexual
identity brothers and sisters

Who are you?
It's hard to say for sure...

I do, however, know a thing or two...

I am the breeze
I am the dust that blows within it
I am your tears and mine melted, melded
I am the muscles fibers fusing
                                                 As you pump your legs pushing yourself always forward
I am the dreams, both realized and broken
I am the caterpillar AND the butterfly
I am the soil, seed, and pine tree
I am the breeze and the dust that blows within it

I am love
             

Interwoven

When I breathe in

I breathe in you

Particles and pieces of

Dust wrapped in energy

Set fire with passion

Untouched

When I breathe out

I breathe out fear

Releasing the rage of rapes

And brain cells gone rogue,

Turning into an internal zombie

Devouring

When I breathe in

I breathe in you

Stardust recalled shadows and

Silent echoes

Of unseen heartbeats

Silenced

When I breathe out

I breathe out hope

Ribbons of heart screams

Woven tightly

Into decorative ropes

Binding

Me to you 

Us to 

Every other

Us

That ever was

Breathe in

Breathe out

Breathe in

Breathe out

We not only belong to each other

We ARE each other

At least that

We are gathering
    for no solutions
beyond the hearing,
sparkling beauty between each shared
story.

The slightly louder
exhalation
that signals
speech crawling slowly
up the larynx

We gather
At least that

I have invisible
detailed white wings
and I wrap them
around the circle
of us

Without solutions...
At least that.

Words whispered
or clearly articulated
eyes down cast
Stories that hid, crumpled in
chests brought forth
and flattened out
with trembling fingers

We hear you
At least that

I open my heart
and pull the blackness
out of you,
pull as hard as I can
and center it into
my wide open
Till the tears grow heavy
and finally dance for you

In shared unsure motion toward each other

At least that.

I AM

At night
She whispers
Fiercely in my ear
"Remember you are beautiful
Beyond compare. You are strong
And brave and everything you need to be..."

The words are arrow bound and aimed
To fill the wounds
Left gaping
Dripping...no,
Weeping

Weeping unlike willows
Swaying softly, a hundred
Floating dancers spinning
And entwining
Always together
The branches in bunches

My tears are dry
Solitary
Swallowed
Swelling to bursting
Pushing muscles and words
To say things
Do things

Wrong things
Things I watch myself doing
Saying
A fly perched on the wall beside myself
Never loud enough to be heard
Unable to stop the things
I shouldn't be
Completing

And so they happen
And the whisper words I send my way
Are the poison swords
Stabbing
No need to repeat them
Fill in the blanks as you see fit

Which is why I need her
This her that is finally me
This Her who is finally more
On my own side
And the darkness calms things
So that

At night
She/me/I can whisper
Fiercely in my (own) ear
"Remember you are (I am) beautiful
Beyond compare. You are (I am)strong
And brave and everything you (I) need (me) to be..."

I Am.

Not actually alone

What is today,

Is yesterday,

And all the movements we make

Are melted into ones that swayed before

5 years

5 months

5 minutes

Time torn away from what he accidentally

Thought

Might be

Trips directly into

The tardis

And there is no forward or back

Here or there

The girl who waits

Waits forever and never began

The heart that love rent

Is reformed

Remolded

And ripped apart to bleed

Again

And so he breathes

Again

On swollen broken feet

He takes a baby step

And chooses to challenge the idea

That baby steps

Mean moving forward

I can climb a stool to sit upon

Taking baby steps

Upon each rung.

Rest.  Resting is good

Resetting

There is a black and blurry moment

Every now and then

Full of chocolate

Wine

Tears

Too much sleep

Not enough sleep

Snapping and snarling

Hair pulling and refusing to make anything

For dinner

Reset

Until the cord no longer plugs in

Till the metal is bent

A spur upon the bones of your spine

Causing scoliosis

Curving the part of you

Meant to structure you

Strong and straight and tall

There are still baby steps

Through the mud

While winds whistle the rustling rub

Of bending bark

On aging window panes

Not quite

Like fingernails upon the length

Of old blackboards

But close

5 years

5 months

5 minutes

Time torn away from what he accidentally

Thought

Might be

Trips directly into

The time machine

And all that ever was

And all that ever will be

Billows through the blender

Of the soul

Spinning and whirring

Till one thing

Is firmly fused

Into

Every

Other

Thing

That ever was or will be

Our stories

No matter how heavy

Are never

Entirely

new

Our stories spin together

A child died
I'd never met him

A woman far too young
faces a demon called cancer
squirming its bastard way
into her brain

Brave
Strong

I think about these concepts often

When I was 23
my Women's Study/History professor
held a Santaria celebration
to usher in the new year.
I had my first tarot card reading there
as everyone left

a woman older than me sat beside me
we had one card pulled
and two polar opposite reactions
to the image of a solitary woman
in a plowed field
barefoot,
arms down and palms forward
she faced away into the distance.

She saw sorrow
I saw courage, strength

I think, now, I see both

My nails are trimmed short
and still I wake up
with random scratches on my hands

I've been a widow for almost 5 years
I wonder if it's silly to search
for a mostly safe place

I notice how odd it is
that the feelings I feel are simultaneously
tiny
and all of the universe
folded into my melting, mourning mind

For 44 years I have been practicing breathing
I am finally mastering the skill
in fits and starts

Enough so that I am strong enough to choose
curiosity
even when my breath hitches in sobs and stuttering tears

While foundations rumble.

My biggest secret and my deepest fear?

I am
exhausted.

So exhausted

And still
when I close my eyes
remember to breathe
I feel them

The child who died
The woman attacked by cancer
My husband dead five years

there are waves, and birds, breezes and songs
dreams and
things I can't explain

We are connected
we are woven

So I silently sing a secret whisper
and ask the nothing
the vibrates with it all

to hold me up
a little while longer

My story was told wrong

"You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert,

repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your 

body

love what it loves.

~ Mary Oliver

I read almost every night now,
again,
to my kids

I feel like Ursula
rising huge in purple painted laughter
confident
triumphant

Redrawn the way we redid Maleficent

Because I would never take the
fins
or wings
or voice
from anyone

My story was told wrong

Death and grief restructure you
and still, I never would have done that

Your armor, if you embrace it right
moves with you
flexible as pine branches
twirling and whipping in hurricanical winds
bending, unlikely to break
Growing as you grow
bending with the healing of your heart at each stage

We tango with holding what we love, cheek to cheek
passionate, quick, deliberate
doing a deep dip slowly, looking longingly into each other's eyes
and see the beauty of letting go
at last
when the boundary has been slashed

and the gray storm of a Pixar spell
envelops you
swirls around you in a cloud-like stole
and the vapors
cloud your eyes
choke you

My story was told wrong

Life is not a series of struggles
leading to exalted, exaggerations of joy
after perfectly structured
tales of adventure, issues, and ends...

the stages are real
they exist
they swirl and sneak around your spine
and structure everything

but they do not end
not until you do

and if you slow down
like when you were little
laying in the golden majesty of that evergreen grove
sacred in its mist of nothing special
and everything that ever mattered

perhaps your vision might clear so that you can see
that the imperfection of every moment
is where the beauty lives
the dimpled brown dents in pure white striated daisy petals

The evil queen
the bedeviled bitch
the nasty women
the feminazis

Those
    who know what they want
and ask for it
    who know when they feel insulted
and say so
    who refuse to be belittled
and push back
    who live deeply in a way that SINGS that they are loveable
and will never.  Ever. Listen when you say they are not

Maybe we aren't what you painted us to be

And maybe the good men aren't gone.
Maybe we need to stop scaring them away
from holding tight
to their emotions and the pine trees
and clarity and honesty and tears.

Let them have their tears back.

Perhaps the tears will wash clean all our hearts
so the goodness can find a way back.

My story was told wrong.

I always thought I would read to my kids every night
No matter what

At least I'm back at it
again.

Paint over it, around it, and make it your own.
I'm not done living yet.
And I am still saying "yes" to the things
upon my path

"You never know ahead of time what something's really going to be like."

~Katherine Patterson 

Hope, having found him

If nothing else, I’m learning there is hope…still.  I’m learning TO hope.  Again.  There is a man.  He makes me laugh.  Kind of a lot. 

We went too fast, er, are going too fast?  Except, it is right where we are meant to be, and the farther it goes, the more comfortable it gets.  He’s done so many different things in his life, been through so much.  His level of adventurism matches mine quite well. 

Sometimes, I’m a little jealous of his oldest daughter and how much he loves spending time with her…until I realize that that is silly because I pause and apply it to an understanding of John loving Cecilia.  He is a fabulous father.

He is ridiculously sarcastic in a dorky way that I love. 

The way he touches me makes my body burn like coal.  At first when we kissed there was a hardness, nibbling at each other, and it was good. On Valentine’s Day, his lips softened, and now when we kiss, it’s like our mouths briefly melt into each other’s, and it is so much better.

In two short months, we have navigated two issues of mine and one of his.  His issue played out in not answering the phone or responding to my text messages.  I tried to channel John, because running is what I used to do, what I pull to even now to some degree.  And he would not let me run.  So I talked with friends to figure out how to manage my issues and not let go.  And he finally answered the phone.  So we talked, and I learned things about him…about his fear and his processes…and I hope he learned about me. 

Even just typing this, my body lights up with the memory of his touch.  He holds my hand and doesn’t let it go.  Even when it’s awkward to keep holding it.  I like it even though it’s weird.  Maybe because it’s weird. 

He tells me I’m beautiful all the time, and when he holds me, touches me, kisses me…I feel more beautiful than I have in years.  I don’t think about my belly.  I don’t think about being a widow.  I think about laughing and touching and loving.  I think about being loved.

I do not need a man to be happy.  I do not need this man.  But connection is a massive comfort to me.  And I cannot fake connections.  He touches the smallest fibers inside me somehow.  It’s like from the moment we met in person, our souls started to weave themselves together.  With each meal we share, each time we make each other laugh, each kiss planted and pair of entwined fingers, each time we misunderstand each other and face the fear and hurt to talk about it and choose to touch each other again, the weave thickens, becomes more intricate.  I am learning to hope again.  I’m learning to trust in love. 

I know that all of this is just a beginning.  But it is a strong one, full of beauty.  And I’m so happy to have found it.  

dancing when the stars collide

In my mind, I imagine a moment with you:

A wrinkled blue blanket spread on green prickly grass

You are sitting crossed legged and laughing

Your eyes

Actually twinkling

Whose eyes do that?!

You are looking up at me

And I

Am more me

Than I have been in years

I’m barefoot

Laughing, spinning, my chin tilted skyward

That’s all I see

It’s all I need to see

Because it’s like the eyes are new

 

Something about the power of our

Connection

Magnetized

Polarized in the right

Direction

A neural-magical fusion moment

Where neither one of us can pull away

And anger-grief-loss explodes

Into the perfect candle lit chandelier

Spinning dazzling rainbows of

Splintered, real, broken imperfection

Just exactly

Somehow

What each of us needs

laughter unleashed

I bend my body
to tilt my head

just so

so I can breathe in bits
of your breath

I get scared
sometimes

a deer in headlights

and will run, not walk,
in another direction

Your long, soft gaze
followed my form
onto the haze of the dance floor

spinning away from infinity
I felt your stare
from 20 feet away

I would rather dance
with the non-embrace
that lives in the distance
between your eyes
and my body

than with anyone
else

I know how to rattle around
in my own moaning brain
finding ways
to grow, slow, baby steps

so long
they last weeks drawn out to months spread out
to years

and now
the whisper songs inside
my silence
have a sound
that sings
a rhyme quite like
like
your name

the touch of you
lingers
like the cool kiss
of snow-like-fur tingles on the back
of my fingers

Your smell surrounds me
filling my pores and curving
around my jaw, my neck,

a scent so new

like an invisible embrace
that tickles my swollen lips
the way a dorky porn mustache might

It works
even when pictures
don't do it justice

and for the first time
in who knows how long

it's giggles
not tears
that echo

in my halls.