Burned at the Stake

A boy broke up with me when I was sophomore in high school because I didn't know Stevie Ray Vaughn, and I certainly hadn't heard that he had died that day.

My father knows a lot of things. He cares about how many points Jackie Longstreet scored in the Hastings High School basketball game and he will tell everyone that his mother graduated summa cum laude from the University of Michigan back when women didn't go to college. He can diagnose things that 99% of physicians miss.

A photographer from National Geographic while in Kenya told me I was a “little girl” who didn't “know anything about life” after I opened a dialogue about colonization in the region.

Before Kenya, I stood in front of the church board for over four hours to answer questions regarding scripture and the biblical mandate to “go and make disciples of all the nations.” By the end, I retreated to the women's bathroom to cry.

Knowledge in the bones of the feminine is overlooked at best and burned at the stake at worst.

At home I am never tested. It's why I won't leave this place carved from a temperate heart. I refuse to follow flames to my death.

The masculine tries to define love but the best it can do is allow love's safe passage.

*

An airplane skips through openings in the tree crown. I know fliers gotta fly but they also have to land.

At 3 a.m. a barred owl's distinct vocals lure attention and awareness westward. These thin hours. This time floating without barriers. I am soothed by his calls and pray he is not simply passing through the remnants of this forest. By sunup he is quiet, giving way to early train moans and morning commuters.

October pending – northern lights with or without mushrooms – this starry conversation.