{"id":5669,"date":"2019-01-14T00:00:42","date_gmt":"2019-01-14T00:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/?p=5669"},"modified":"2019-01-27T21:00:54","modified_gmt":"2019-01-27T21:00:54","slug":"the-problem-with-writing-outside-leslie-beach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/?p=5669","title":{"rendered":"The Trouble With Writing Outside – Leslie Beach"},"content":{"rendered":"

Too many paths. Feet twitch to tread on each river stone.
\nThe lizard’s precise pose congratulates my eye:
\nwell-honed, human, you could nearly believe
\nyou were born to all this
\nlooking, all this absorbing
\n 
\nTalked with Avi about beauty the other night
\nhow maybe he saw it in the mountains in China
\nbecause we’re supposed to see beauty in mountains in China:
\nthe plane ticket, the blisters, the gear demanding
\na response as return for effort and resources put in
\nbut sitting here I find ideas of beauty barely relevant.
\nI am among rocks, striated smooth hunks of sandstone
\narranged and abandoned by long-gone water
\nI’m among the bunched grey-green sagebrush
\nwaxy coyote bush, lemonade berry
\n 
\nand up ahead, mountains, not so sublime perhaps,
\nnothing craggy or granitic or accented
\nwith snow– just scrubby upthrust scrapings
\nfrom a subduction zone, studded with fossils not so different
\nfrom shoreline findings today.
\nI practice being sessile. What if my best bet
\nfor comfort lay in slowly growing
\nin a new direction? As humans go, I think I’m quite gifted
\nat sessility, ready to accept
\ncool grit at lower back, sinking sun on neck,
\nshadow moving across my knees
\nthe passing hum of insect or persistent companion call– I’m here, are you there?– of
\nan unseen bird.
\n 
\nThis feels like boasting, as though my bare toes
\non sun-warmed silica have earned silent superiority
\nover booted counterparts.
\nI’m not comfortable
\nwith this assessment,
\nI’m also not comfortable with Bertha Harris’ assertion
\nthat “literature is not made by good girls.” I’m concerned
\nwith being good I always have been
\nout of grief
\nat this enormous ailing world
\nat the thud
\nof our species into other species
\nand into
\nourselves.
\nI rail at being of the Anthropocene
\nstrove for years for self-effacement
\nas the greatest gift I could give
\nIt’s impossible
\nthough
\nisn’t it
\nto remain alive while fading
\n 
\nAnd not enough, to boot
\nTo barefoot
\nI’m dipping toes in the arroyo, ready to engage
\nin what had been endured. I look to vascular,
\nrooted, photosynthetic mentors. To my left,
\na fuzz-leafed being, lifting dried flowers
\ntwice its general height to unleash its seeds
\nCloser in, a grass I’ve learned to call a weed,
\nalternating blades to ladder out of the shade.
\nI unsettle sagebrush to open its cells on my fingers,
\nbreathe in our mingled scent.
\n 
\nIs being a body among bodies being good?
\n 
\nI’ve been reading Fanon,
\ndancing around Freire, and the poet
\nTongo Eisen-Martin said last week
\nthat anything we write is political
\neven the damn daffodils
\nbecause you can’t write a daffodil without glancing
\nover your shoulder at the rising tide.
\nI believe him, did before he spoke, and I’m always glancing
\nat the greyed old orchards (still producing three years ago)
\nnow barely recognizable with no ground water to tap,
\nat this ample canyon still hosting
\na handful of sycamores, though mostly given over
\nto smaller iterations of chaparral, since its flow
\nwas needed elsewhere by the growers of avocado and citrus.
\nSun on my pale skin stokes freckles
\nand penetrates further than it ought
\nin February, and here I am trying to recommit
\nto my species, to redefine the relationship
\none hormone, one ethic at a time.
\n 
\nI pinch off some fennel, crush its stem
\nbetween incisors, pass the smooth sweet licorice
\nback along my tongue. I trained this body to be sensitive–
\nhow have I forsaken pleasure for so long?
\nI will the fly that’s circling to land on my breast
\nso I have a reason to mention its bareness. Showing blue
\nof vein and sage shadow. I touch the smoky
\ngrey leaves to skin. I’m not sure who
\nI’m seducing anymore, but I suspect
\na local topographic map would shift
\nover my shape, jumping at a heartbeat
\nrenewing vows to biota
\nlingering wild and hungry in the late sun
\nthat brushes spiderwebs, dried inflorescences,
\nthe pale strength of my skin
\nsemipermeable
\njust ask the yucca
\n 
\n 
\n\"\"Leslie Beach inhabits and explores Northern California, where she’s worked as an outdoor educator, greenhouse grunt, organic gardener, bookseller, and graduate teaching associate in English and Creative Writing. She has her M.A. and pursues her M.F.A. at San Francisco State University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Natural Bridge, Birdland Journal, Neutrons\/Protons<\/em>, and quarterlife<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Too many paths. Feet twitch to tread on each river stone. The lizard’s precise pose congratulates my eye: well-honed, human, you could nearly believe you were born to all this looking, all this absorbing   Talked with Avi about beauty the other night how maybe he saw it in the mountains in China because we’re [&hellip<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5879,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[315],"class_list":["post-5669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry","tag-yucca-gloriosa-by-kenpei"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5669"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5669\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5884,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5669\/revisions\/5884"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}