Joy Triggers, and other Conduits of Pandemic Reflection by Amanda Lindamood
In between sheets of sad
triggers make sense.
Doors into feelings
below feelings
before feelings
between
memories and
wishes for futures real enough and
pretend enough.
Grounded
was a word I defined today,
and it’s in that spirit that I type this from the floor.
Juxtaposed with two hundred and three hundred as significant markers,
significance is the word I’m caught by
more than
comparisons of amount.
I’ve written in other moments of the unlanguagability of trauma,
and that disconnection between words and experiences draws me towards images.
Mirrors.
Reflections.
Light catching substance,
air trailing words
compressed by
fingers on
lips;
breath
blown out,
out, out
away from me.
Unlike culture
air is free to filter from
environment to
environment
routinely.
Culture holds notions that once were distilled;
making once
numerous.
Again,
and again,
and again
culture says.
Rape culture as
particles of
words
unspoken and
yet spread
everywhere,
deep,
deep within,
and around us.
Racism as lessons that
reached
those same insides,
before learning from culture
how to pass
between areas
like hugs might have
two hundred days sooner.
Stories of harm aren’t learned before they were lived.
Stories of harm
aren’t
learned
before they were
lived.
Stories of harm were lived.
Harm lives,
spreads,
passes,
creates substances
before environments,
though never separately.
reparations
racial justice
reproductive justice
restorative justice — –
how do you reflect harm as large and as numerous?
How do you individualize
what is collective?
Bodies don’t seek permission to be large or numerous,
and maybe they’ll never forgive
stories they carry.
Ironic to speak of
permission
by
something so
easily
violated.
so regularly,
largely,
numerously
violated.
Ironic to feel
joy
between sad
with sad
rage
no
no
stop
wait
through naming.
placed on the table
where God is invoked;
where maybe
God’s work
happens.
Can
one
feel
embodied
safe
restored
in a place where
so much harm lives?
Can reflections
change with culture
instead of
separately?
Where
air blows
and
lips part
safe
is a
prayer
in
places
where
harm
lives;
not separate
future
past
now.
Stories we
already carry,
or could
soon.
