i am too many parts a lunar creature. i know this because the dark has been creeping into my bones all week, telling me to slow, stretch, cry, and untwist a little, to come closer to the pulse of myself, and listen. the new moon is arriving, and i think of it less as a time and more as a destination; a place we’ve been and are still going to, a place where we churn the red earth with our many hands and mouths and hungers, to bury our long-saved seeds, and dreams, and bodies…

^{Like Real People Do, by Hozier}

i had a thought dear, however scary, about that night, 
the bugs and the dirt. why were you digging? 
what did you bury 
before those hands pulled me from the earth? 

tonight, my mother wound is gaping. many years ago, when i orphaned myself at sixteen and decided that blood price of my relationships was far worse than anything else the world had to offer, i was too doped up on adrenaline to realize that the cut of it would fester for decades, would one day look something like eating takeout hainanese chicken alone on the floor of my shitty shared house apartment, missing the smell of my mother’s hair.

i will not ask you where you came from,
i will not ask and neither should you

for context, my mother is alive. she texted me this morning about calling soon. she just moved to a new city with my sister, where she now lives by herself with two well-fed dogs, and calls me at least once every two weeks. i had a dream the other night that they were playing mahjong in their new house and i was anxious that an obsidian spider the size of my big-toe might bite the dogs, but anyways, my mother wound is not my mother, but her absence, not even in the present, but in the absentness of her presence all throughout my childhood years. for a long time now, i have searched for some piece of her in every room, aching for glimpses of adoration in the eyes of others, the way i imagine doting mothers might look at their young. i know the person i am really looking for no longer exists, but her gaze is my oldest memory, and i am still trying to find my way home.

i knew that look dear, eyes always seeking
was there in someone they dug long ago
so i will not ask you 
why you were creeping
in some sad way i already know 

dear reader, i have reached that point in the night where a song has been looping for hours, and i no longer know what time it is. minutes after midnight blur so easily into 3 ams, and the time in between becomes a silent receptacle for the past to come flooding in. and, why not dip in the past, because the present is terrifying, a few headlines from the past day tolling in the new world order:

^{-the U.S government plans to livestream a military firing squad execution}

^{-nearly two million people in Gaza lack shelter as winter approaches}

^{-in Hungary, people build their own dams to hold onto vanishing water}

and i could keep going, but you know this world as well as i do,

you know what the quiet hours can do to a mind so overstimulated with artificial violences, so i’ll tell you instead of flesh and blood and needle, that i was laid out in a doctor’s office the other day, as a woman i didn’t know stuck acupuncture pins in and around my ailing parts, and that, surprisingly, none of it really hurt, not the one she pushed into my inner thighs, not the spleen or kidney channel or even the few needles she tucked inside my ear, no, but the ones that stung the most, the ones i asked to remove after a few seconds, were two pinpricks on the inner left wrist, Neiguan, the heartsleeve, the chest opener,

and shortly after she removed the needles at my request, i asked,

why did those ones hurt so much, when i barely felt any of the others?

well, it could be a few things—she replied, moving on to my calves—sometimes i put the needle in at a wrong angle, and it strikes too close to a nerve which causes the stinging. sometimes, an area is so tense or blocked that any pressure under the skin feels like an imminent threat.

afterwards, she told me that one of the key points of acupuncture is to release these blocks, so the water in our body can move freely again. i’ve been thinking since then of the simple force of water, as my limbs loosen, as movement opens my chest and shoulders, calling to mind a passage from long ago, of a mother speaking to her child:

“Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water.” 

-Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad 

may all the fleck & grain in our hearts flow like water. 
may the future arrive with the hope and force of a gushing spring. 

and honey just put your sweet lips on my lips,
we should just kiss like real people do 

***

thank you for being a part of the landscape of this newsletter--if anything i shared rustles up something in your body (throat, gut or marrow), do come & let me know.

with gratitude,

angel

***missives from the lemon tree is a free newsletter. if this work feels meaningful to you, consider becoming a paid subscriber, or leaving me a tip on kofi. thank you***

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I wonder when I’ll stop writing about the tulips on my kitchen counter. Or when I’ll learn how to kick with my knees instead of my hips, the correct posture for dancing, or how to kick with my hips instead of my knees, in a form acceptable for swimming. In both spaces, I often feel I’m at risk for drowning, unable to isolate the movements of my body without an instructor’s reflective gaze. She does so much, my body, taking in the stretch & ache of each unfamiliar motion, the sharpness of moving differently through a room, wading through the shock of lake water.

I don’t know why these types of learning feel so difficult in my body—since I was a child, I’ve been boastful about my desire & ability to learn new things, to move quicksilver through bodies of knowing, swallowing verse & page, fielding questions, coalescing answers. But there is so little language in my limbs for this kind of learning. Or, if it exists, it’s dammed somewhere, in my blood or body or somewhere further back, perhaps in the threadbare past of which I know so little.

I heard that my aunt, my dad’s older sister, was, at one time, a dancer. When she was a teenager, she was selected to attend a performance school in the capital city of Thimphu, on a path towards a life of music & movement, at a time when studying art was a luxury not afforded to most people in rural Bhutan, much less to women. I’m unclear on what exactly happened next, but at some point, my grandfather made a decision to bring her back home, at first because he claimed he needed extra help around the house, and in time, to marry her off.

This is a history I recently learned from my sister, who gathers stories about our family, especially about the women who have been disappeared from our lineages, with a fierce devotion I admire & regularly benefit from. Before this, my aunt existed in my gleaned memory as the oldest daughter who died young, before I was born or a short while after—& who was, in my skeletal imagination, a mother to a brood of older cousins, married to a military officer—& a woman who, I was told in hushed tones, drank herself to death before the age of 40. I knew this, & little else, growing up, I never even saw a photo of what she might’ve looked like, & knew only that she had been the one other woman in my family with curls like mine, a fact that was dropped around me like a fallen prayer, whenever an aunt or grandmother set to unknotting & raking oil through my hair.

I’ve thought about her more often these days, having recently become an aunt to my older cousin’s freshly minted baby boy. And sometimes, I wonder what it means to grieve the dead we never knew, the ones whose lives become a game of telephone between the living who still remain, and those who are still trying remember. She was on my mind, again, just the other day, while I was tapping my feet to the strange & playful rhythms of bharatanatyam, thinking of what it might’ve been like to have met her, of what it might’ve been like to have seen her dance.

if you're still here with me, thank you! before i go, i wanted to share a few things i've been reading: 

-The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, an essay on gathering, by Ursula K. Le Guin

-The Cloudspotter's Guide, a delightful volume on all things cloud, by Gavin Pretor-Pinney

-What We Call Weather Is Sometimes a Decision, a look into the realities we create & obfuscate through everyday language, by KYO

thank you for being a part of the landscape of this newsletter--if anything i shared rustles up something in your body (throat, gut or marrow), do come & let me know.

with gratitude,

angel

***missives from the lemon tree is a free newsletter. if this work feels meaningful to you, consider becoming a paid subscriber, or leaving me a tip on kofi. thank you***

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Little Town

Cobble your streets and no whining:

Stones are abundant here,

Stones and weather and air.

-Rita Dove, Playlist for the Apocalypse 

I have been swimming in the blue pools of memory again, and the loneliness I once claimed as solitude has snuck up on me, a yellow-tailed fox with eyes darting sideways, saying:

your ability to survive is not what will save you.

and again, I am visiting the hot dead desert of August, traveling to that same place of confusion and loss and beginning that marked my first steps into this country, and in some ways, into this world.

today I am up before the sun, writing to remember the mornings when, as a child, I would wake to eat the dawn—tyo dinharu junma mero jindagi suruhuna thalei ko thyo, tyo dinharu junma ma byan ki raat na chutaikana khelthei, mitho namitho chutaikana ama ko khana khanthei, sabai din, sabai raat, eutei, sabai din, sabai raat, aafei lai khozdei, haraudei…a time before the flight and the apocalypse, before addiction as adaptation, before guilt became a mother tongue, a time before all the water in my lungs.

this week, in San Francisco, i have been watching the jacaranda trees come to life around me, the city singing in a lush canopy of purple. these are the same trees that clustered the playground of my childhood, the Central Zoo in Kathmandu, where over half the family photos i have from that time were taken. The last time I was there was in May of 2023, and these are some pieces of a recollection held in my notes app from that time:

“…the city has changed drastically in the five years since I’ve been gone, and so much more for my mother and sister, counting the fifteen years they were away. I see it reflected in my sister’s hesitation to cross the crowded walkways of the city, and in my mother’s forgetting of the names of neighborhoods she once knew so well. I see it in my own inability to articulate what has changed—because it feels impossible to describe what you can no longer remember…these gaps in memory, mine and my mother’s, create such fractured versions of Kathmandu,

the Kathmandu of my childhood—climbing the guava trees in our neighborhood, splashing in the red-brown puddles formed in the bricked sidewalks during monsoons, street stalls brimming with snacks of every variety, the man on the corner hawking pirated DVDs of the newest Bollywood releases. and the way the city existed through my mother’s eyes:

shopping for our dinners at carts overflowing with the season’s produce, karela ani amla, aloo bodi ra koirala ko phool…haggling for every rupee and cent, hailing rickshaws to cart around two rambunctious children from place to place.

there are no more fruit trees big enough for me to climb, and for my mother, no little children to carry. The neighborhoods we lived in have been paved over and remade in the image of the West—high rise apartments springing up on every corner of the city, the dusty, unpaved alleys giving way to the shine of cement. This is not to say that those parts of Kathmandu do not remain—there are still places untouched by the jagged and rapid development of the city, but they are far and few in between…

I won’t deny that diasporic communities live in the mist and color of memories, romanticizing a past that was not objectively better. Visiting the zoo earlier, wilting with sweat and the stink of caged leopards, I was struck by the small ordinariness of this place, when I remember the sprawling playground that it was to me. maybe these are illusions of childhood, clinging to me like a second skin…in being here now, I’m having this strange feeling that I want to retreat from the world for a few months, then emerge again with an intact, unblemished memory, forgetting some of this in order to remember…”

-5/5/2023

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i was born knowing that home is the shape of water. with attar on the breath and rivers rising vertical and sideways, astounding the inhabitants who move like exiled atoms from one end of the earth to another.

i’ve heard that in America, home is the shape of certainties. a rosy-fingered dawn over a wide horizon you can map out with your eyes—from birth till the end of time, when death steals you away.

in America, borders crisscross with razor wires across the old lands with names most settlers cannot pronounce—Anishinaabe, Tohono O’odham, Karankawa, Seminole.

in the land that i call home, cloudbursts decimate the landscapes, pounding the earth to silt, slick, and mud. we carry the mud back to our houses, river-red, carry the earth so it will not keep moving under our feet.

i’ve heard that in America, borders cross people & not the other way around.

my father told me a similar story, once, about a border that crossed us on its way to becoming something else. it changed the names of our villages & took over my grandmother’s orchards of oranges and cardamom. as if the land could be rewritten in a different script and translated into indifference. imagine.

in Palestine, which is فلسطين and מְדִינַת יִשְׂרָאֵל depending on which border you ask, oranges grow mercurial. fish, which belong both to river and sea, find themselves held hostage in the politics of exile.

in America, lakes and rivers belong to the government which belongs to the street on which walls grow. they dam up the rivers & pour concrete into the sea to keep at bay the exiled fish & the guarantees of history, but water does not stir according to the laws of little men—paani is uncertainty’s amulet, tyrant’s anathema, all that which moves for and towards the living.

in the land that i call home, the river’s indifference to manmade borders is mimicked by the children, who roam in scattered, giddy packs across the earth. all of them have a song to hold close when the land gives way, again and again.

all are born knowing that home resembles the changing shape of water.

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i watched a dancer crisscross her body across the floor last night, and i wanted to cry. i watched the blue-winged swallows cut through the air in sharp, graceful pairs, and i wanted to cry.

i went to the sea last night, and in her presence, begged myself to cry. staring long and hard at the washed-up bodies of cobalt velellas, and the mesmerizing debris of shell and sand, i felt a space open in my body, like the silence before a song.

and i began singing,

to myself, to the crows, the clouds, and the dancing bodies of sea laver. i sang for the sand in my hair and the salt in my shoes, i sang for wounds of time passed and times still coming, i sang until the wind stopped and settled, at last, into my tired lungs.

i sang for so long, that when i laid down to sleep,

i remembered i’d forgotten to cry.

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i am writing my way out of your heart and into mine. why the turmoil, love, why not let what is gone, go? you cling so tightly but claim to love with open hands. you survive no one, heat becomes you, love eats at you, your eyelids devastate the day with their seeing.

open the curtain of day to someone other than who you love. let thirst guide you to those unruly places between the backwoods and rusted chain. become that which is ashen and undignified. claim your loneliness and your loveliness from the pearl bucket of the moon. pick reason from Saturn’s somber rings, from the benefic shade of the ficus tree. let nothing own you save the desert you must serve.

in the meantime, unveil answers from the typographies of your sister’s eyes. each sunflower speck bursts with the potentiality of a thousand bellies full, just ask the flycatcher and the cardinal. fear nothing, not even the sound your mother makes when she looks in the river. there is nothing in the water you don’t already know in your blood, nothing the sky can leech from the shape your breathing takes.

chokecherries line the riverbed and the fish are all stained ultramarine. the tide rises, chestnuts fall into bulldozers the size of an elephant’s fists, all while the desert heaves, its feathered trees swaying with a red clipped from Mars.

go slow into the wing of morning. let the desert save you, let the void be its own miracle. someday you will read this, having forgotten those dire straits, only remembering your own breath in this writing. give thanks for these hands and the breaking of day. give thanks, and be loved.

thank you for being here with me. sharing the contents of my journal and my heart with people, strangers and friends alike, is an intimidating practice. if anything i wrote rustles up something in your body (throat, gut or marrow), please come & let me know.

with gratitude,

angel

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missives from the lemon tree is a free newsletter. if the work i do feels meaningful to you, consider becoming a paid subscriber, or leaving me a tip on kofi. thank you.

i have been harvesting shadows all summer,

perhaps i am enamored by absence, the way it blooms larger than life in darkness, how it becomes not just an impression, but something entirely of itself,

in her book, Bluets, Maggie Nelson writes “According to Dionysius, the Divine Darkness appears dark only because it is so dazzlingly bright—a paradox I have attempted to understand by looking directly at the sun and noticing the dark spots that flowers at its center.” What can we see in the shadows that cannot, or will not, bloom in full light?

my friend Muskan sent me this painting of the moon by Harald Sohlberg, titled Moonlight, 1907. the frame of the painting speaks in shadows. islands begin to look like sleeping animals, the shape of rocks resemble our mother’s faces. light smudges over the water in pale disruption. specters speak to us from the outlines of shrubs, and the world is still, and blue, and quiet.

i watched the full moon give light to itself last night. clouds gathered in layers of tapered gauze, shades of blue, black, and grey. the night was long and lonely. summer is gone, loved one, and the winter stiffens my bones to save me from rot.

as i waited for you, the moon began her ascent out of the circle of clouds.

the wind blew soft, rustling the hair on my neck. the city blinked silver.

i looked to my shadow. i watched it begin to take on a different shape.

***

friends, it’s scorpio season. i invite you to revisit the sharpest, achiest poems in the arsenal:

-Breaklight by Lucille Clifton

-(you fit into me) by Margaret Atwood

-absence. displacement. by Etel Adnan, translated by Sarah Riggs

-Torso of Air by Ocean Vuong

thank you for being here with me. if anything i wrote rustles up something in your body (throat, gut or marrow), do come & let me know.

with gratitude,

angel

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you’d say, i’m being difficult, the red strange on my cheeks, i’d say, pink is an inventory of wounding, flushed azalea freckled skin to mine, an invention of memory, and, to change the subject, i’d tell you,

i read this morning that the tiny brown spots on leaves are actually wounds—places where insects chewed through or diseases lay waste—but for the most part, these spots remain invisible until fall. it’s only when leaves go from verdant green to yellow-red do we see the full extent of the damage, the freckling, being, everything the leaf has endured up until this point, and,

i’d like to think that for you and me both, for all us four-limbed creatures, fall is also a season of revelation—of all the things we survived from spring, for all that bleeds us into summer—the wound, a stain we are still surviving, in fall,

everywhere, the sound of leaves going, far from the city in which i love you, far from the blistered streets and granite avenues, far from my bad poetry crushed under the sheets like fresh magnolia,

close to the cities of wind and river, collar and bone, debt and vermillion—

But in the city
in which I love you,
no one comes, no one
meets me in the brick clefts;
in the wedged dark(...)

In the excavated places,
I waited for you, and I did not cry out.

Li Young Lee, The City in Which I Love You 

***

photocredits to my dear friend Nawal Rai, @nawal_photography101 on IG

thank you for being here with me. if anything i wrote rustles up something in your body (throat, gut or marrow), do come & let me know.

with gratitude,

angel

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missives from the lemon tree is a free newsletter. if the work i do feels meaningful to you, consider becoming a paid subscriber, or leaving me a tip on kofi. thank you!

weaving through the dark without a map, i was determined, this time, to get to my destination by way of memory alone. my escort on this journey was venus, the morning star, so bright and solitary i thought her to be the moon.

when i got to my destination, i found myself catching the sunrise on the other end of an oldddd camera, the same lens i saw the world through seven years ago, as a student stumbling through the streets of Okayama. that was the first place i learned how to see the world through my own eyes, to understand who i was through the things that reflected back at me.

what are we if not the sum of what we choose to look at, the things we will and won’t bear witness to?

my usual camera, a dusty and beloved Fujifilm, fell into a river last month. fittingly, it happened mid-shoot, during perhaps the most emotional & creative act of collaboration i’ve ever dreamed up with a friend. it was only in the water for a few seconds—and i had hope that this wasn’t the end for us.

but after a long, unfruitful soak in dry rice, i was ready to bid adieu to my old friend. it surprised me how willing i was to say goodbye, how this loss stung, but didn’t devastate me. i’m a girl who has waxed nostalgic about a t-shirt i forgot in a New York City hotel room seventeen years ago—and this camera has been by my side through four moves, eight cities, and countless trips to the ocean.

historically, loss has always made me feel small, impertinent, and angry. first, i lost a home, then another, and another. then i lost friends, lost lovers, and, as i got older, people began to fall through the sieve of my life like sand. losing my father felt like the last straw. at the beginning of mourning him, i lost my patience, and to a large extent, my faith in the inherent goodness of this world. when this personal loss of faith coincided with the ongoing loss of life in Gaza, my grief became something ferocious, brought me out to the streets, bled into my words, and a current of anger began, in many ways, to eat at me.

i have unravelled many of the knots of my rage and frustration at loss, these years and months since then. i am no longer outraged at my losses, no longer outraged at the ongoing genocide in Palestine, no longer capable of calling this feeling anymore than what it is—a deep blue wave of grief, of sorrow, something bone deep and dark, mingling with the guilt of being alive with a beating heart and without the power to bring it to a stop, while also being privileged enough to go on long walks and write about dawn, to write about anything other than what is happening, as has been said long ago, in poetry:

What kind of times are they, when
A talk about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many horrors?

To Those Born Later, by Bertolt Bretch

i have little to contribute in ways of a solution to the grief, frustration, and guilt one might feel, living in dark times. i just know that the anger i felt at the world exhausted me, even if it felt righteous, even if it felt right.

Anger, even against injustice
Makes the voice hoarse. Oh, we
Who wanted to prepare the ground for friendliness
Could not ourselves be friendly.

releasing some of this anger (through crushing walnuts, rage journaling, lighting fires, and even conflict) has made space in my life for a different way of holding myself through loss, of the biggest and littlest kind. so even though i was sad to say goodbye to my camera, i no longer felt victimized by what i’ve lost. it no longer feels like the universe is conspiring against me to snatch what i love out of my hands, as it did with every loss i moved through these last few years. i wonder if i could lend the same grace to the loss of another loved one, because i know not all loss is the same. but the process of losing someone or something activates in me the same chain of emotions—fear, frustration, anger, dejection—

yet all i could think when i looked at my camera was:

“you were so good to me. thank you.”

then, i did what i have been taught by my elders to do with my grief. to lean on rites and rituals. so i laid her out in the sun and held her tenderly. i showered her with crushed marigolds, fresh from my grandparents’ garden. i thought of all that we had shared within these past few years, and smiled. and by the end of this small, intricate ritual taking place on a patch of sunny kitchen floor, i felt something inside me soften.

                                                           ***

when i finally made it to my destination by sunrise, i saw, perched on the bare branch of a tree, a large bird of prey. she was, in a word, majestic. silhouetted against the dawn—otherworldly. i watched her a long while, until the sun began to peek through the trees.

later, after i had walked around the trails, i ran into some birders who confirmed what i had already guessed—she was an eagle, a bald-eagle, part of a pair who have been living in this park together for over a decade. every year, the two hatch and rear offspring together. i don’t know why, but this detail filled me with a kind of wild elation. to imagine the worlds burning, and alongside, another world, with these eagles, every year bringing little eagles into the fold of life. this little detail made me want to cry. with the simplicity of it all. the recklessness of it all. the hope of it all.

as i was walking back to my car, i looked up at the tree, one more time. arriving on another branch was the other eagle, screeching her welcome to her mate. they sang to each other for a while, ear-piercing crackles that had people looking up to the tree, smiling in bewilderment.

i don’t know how this fits into this story without revealing yet another piece of my heart, just to say, this story would not be complete without their presence. perhaps it reminds me that while there is no permanence in this world, no guarantee of safety or happiness, even existence a gamble—there is love, and dear reader, if love will not save us, what will?

and part and parcel of love is the letting go, is saying goodbye to the things and people we have loved, and the things and people who have loved us. i am not the best at goodbyes, but i am here, trying.

to say, at the end of it all, to all the people i have loved & had to let go of, in the khichdi of heartache & anger & grief is one simple, final feeling:

you were so good to me. thank you.

                                                                  ***

missives from the lemon tree is a free newsletter. if the work i do is meaningful to you, consider becoming a paid subscriber, or leaving me a tip on kofi.

with gratitude,

angel

another fall, and another world is upending.

i’m in the middle of planning a move, selling a house and renting an apartment for my mother, job searching, and caretaking for eight living creatures. this is the kind of eldest daughter-of-an-eldest daughter bullshit i wouldn’t have been caught dead taking on at 21, the responsibilities i ran from with my heart between my feet and my father’s voice in my ear, at once reprimanding and withholding, reminding me that my role in the family was one of necessary sacrifice.

though, historically, this role of the sacrificial eldest daughter has never been able to hold water in my family—my eldest aunt was an alcoholic who died young, and another eldest daughter, brilliant at her studies, left school and her family at 16 to begin her own life and family. i think often of where i fall on the spectrum of overburdened and desperate eldest daughter—i’m queer, have spent a quarter of my life overseas or across the country from my family, and have near-daily conversations with my mother about “boundaries”. at the same time, i’m unemployed, dependent on my family, and failing hard and fast in many ways at the myth of the overachieving eldest child who forges ahead of everyone else.

and this past year, i finally got honest about that. i broke down in front of my mother when she told me for the thousandth time to “be strong”, and laid down my limits in tear tracks. i sobbed to my sister about all the ways these past years of accumulating responsibilities had taken me down a path of overwhelm, depression, and burnout. somewhere in this process, i began naming my needs, slowly, quietly, afraid i’d be met with hostility and misunderstanding. and at times, i was. but equally as often, my family could see the damage this default designation of duty had done to me, and tried their best to meet me in the middle.

though, for some things, there is no middle.

you either choose to live 3,000 miles from your family or don’t. and when i made this choice, for the third time in 5 years, this time, there was no angst, resentment, desperation, or ego fueling my choice.

and to be so real, my friends, this has been terrifying. my early-twenties self depended so much on intense emotions to make life-altering decisions—decisions i owe my life to, but still, a way of doing things that often caused rupture in my closest relationships.

but this time, with no intensity beneath my wings, i am terrified of falling. and there are many valid reasons for my fears, including the state of the world, the job market, my bank account, untested questions of my strength, will, health, and direction, and a million other things that make me hesitate, keep me up at night, and make me want to close my eyes and hold my breath until i make it to my thirties.

instead, i go on slow walks and listen to my breath. i call my friends and relay my fears, i spend time in my grandparents’ garden, i journal and write down the textures of my worries, and most surprisingly, i pray.

these things don’t equal serenity in the usual, measurable ways, and nor do they guarantee success in my endeavors. i could practice all the breathwork in the world and still fail miserably at my goals, because these practices aren’t a roadmap to manifestation or productivity. they are, in their tiniest, most potent forms, acts of self-love and beholding. they are a reminder to myself that i deserve ease, even and especially in the midst of uncertainty and failure.

i didn’t know where i was headed when i sat down to write this post today, but i think this is another act of vulnerability, to say, i want to tell you i am scared and i am doing it anyways, that i am terrified because i am doing it differently, and, if anything i wrote tugged at you, reminded you of the spaces in which you’re changing, uncertain, and fearful, i want to say:

i’m here, and i see you.

maybe you don’t know how exactly the changes happening within you, or the exact shape and color of your worries. maybe you’re in the middle of changing decades-old-patterns, or you’re on the first day of a new habit, routine, or maybe both. maybe nothing looks different to those on the outside, but to you, a whole world is changing, upended, destroyed.

our world is remade in the image of our changing actions, patterns, and ideas, and to all those committed to the struggle and process of these changes—amongst the roiling uncertainties of this world—i’m sending ease, heart, and attention.

may you continue.

may the days be honest and fruitful.

may what you love carry you.

***

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missives from the lemon tree is a free newsletter. if the work i do is meaningful to you, consider becoming a paid subscriber, or leaving me a tip on kofi.

with gratitude,

angel

i am three breaths into June. you tell me it’s August, but i don’t believe you. the seasons have run like a comb through my hair again, getting tangled, getting lost. somewhere it is June and i am sitting next to your shadow, picking grass.

Li-Young Lee, The Invention of the Darling 

LOVE'S UNSWERVING GAZE

What was told to me in a whisper
I must now repeat 
under my breath:

The true lover
lives only
to love the beloved.

the roses in this town have no season. even in dead winter i see them, lurking behind signposts, pushing their way out through the snow. they flash in obscene colors, collecting wasps and stink-beetles as they bloom.

What was said to me so softly
I had to lean my ear
closer to her mouth to hear,

I must now lean closer to say:
All bodies, great and small, turn,
changing. But death

without a body, never turns.
Faithful, death
goes about its business

of subtraction, 
and its more mysterious work
of totaling sums, without interruption. 

no one is more concerned with fidelity than translators and heartstruck lovers. one of them is more dishonest than the other. the translators are fixated with the origins of things. the lovers care only about the present, which is unfaithful to them in every sense. neither one is capable of honesty.

What was given to me in secret,
you too must now keep secret:

True love looks out
through death's unswerving gaze.

And the true lover lives
only to love the beloved. 

the secret shared between the lover and the beloved has its origins in the thorn. pricked once, invites ecstasy. pricked twice, the cure for grief. three times, and the answer is death. the beloved is clueless. the lover knows and never counts her kisses. the thorn smiles and drops a secret in the grass.

*italicized excerpts from Love’s Unswerving Gaze, by Li-Young Lee

                                                                ***

thank you for being here with me. if anything i wrote rustles up something in your body (throat, gut or marrow), do come & let me know.

with gratitude,

angel

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missives from the lemon tree is a free newsletter. if the work i do feels meaningful to you, consider becoming a paid subscriber, or leaving me a tip on kofi. thank you!

to say i have been devastated, this month, and also this entire year,

a year i returned to the city, and lost myself to it also, to the ceaseless din, and the tenacious blessing of its flowers, guerrilla suns exploding through chains of rusted wire,

a year i picked blueberries from the landscape of a friend’s childhood, witnessing in the soft of his gaze, the silhouette of his grandmother being carried down the hill on his grandfather’s back, and the icy blueberries we ate, rendered sweeter by way of memory,

a year of learning by the sea, that pelicans dipping into formations at dusk will leave me breathless, that fresh seaweed tastes like fruit leather slicked in brine,

a year of moving through this world uncoupled, tending to the garden of myself with trembling hands, carving my own perches out of solitude,

a year of tasting daises under my feet, and a year of poetry,

a year of falling away from certainties, 

and a year of falling, headfirst, 

into the sun: 

                                                                     ***

thank you for being here with me, and for being part of the landscape of this newsletter. if anything i shared rustles up something in your body (throat, gut or marrow), do come & let me know.

with gratitude,

angel

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in the yard, in relationship to myself & others, and in the house, too, the smell of cedar leaf & lavender smoke wafting through corridors and out of my windows. of all the elements, i’ve always been awed by the principle of fire, that promise of instant transformation—from wood to ash, metal to molten, raw to delectable.

the blaze is a point beyond which, for certain things, there is no return. ash cannot be molded back into wood, & your 3-egg morning omelet (for more reasons than one) cannot be revived into cheeping baby chicks. there is an irreversibility of certain things, certain doors through which we must walk, knowing that in crossing the threshold, we are altered, as in,

changed or caused to change in character or composition, in a comparatively small but significant way.

fire sustains all human life. evolutionarily & mythically, it is counted among our oldest relationships. it is through fire that we learn the principle of impermanence and destruction. a child holds a piece of paper to the blaze and gasps as it curls into ash. another holds a smore a second too long and watches, in awe and disappointment, as the sweet skin blisters irreversibly to charcoal.

thousands of years ago, we huddled around bonfires & hearths & candles, eating, singing, praying, being, whole, human, alive.

fire reminds us we are alive, and it does so through reciprocity. we tend to fire, and the flames, in turn, tend to us. there is so much care and reciprocity in every warm blaze:

hands gathering, stacking and triangulating the wood just so, breath from lungs displacing embers, leaves and kindling catching each other in a dance of heat and light—until fire.

i think of creative life as a similar dance, one that needs many hands and many breaths to inspire and sustain. sometimes we are spark-full of new ideas and projects, other times, everything we’ve ever made or written feels dull, dead, ashen. it is in between these beginnings and endings that we most need witnessing—for someone to show curiosity at a project we’re half-tempted to abandon, or a new idea that needs the excitement and attention of others to move off the ground.

i’ve been lucky enough so far to have found spaces and people that keep fueling my desire to bring new and beautiful things into this world. my work now often feels like a prayer of gratitude towards all the love and inspiration i’ve ever received, every small note of encouragement, every breath gifted to the pyre and hearth that is a life, my life.

if you’re here with me, thank you for being a part of this mosiac. whether you’re full of sparks, all ashes, tending a hearth or blazing like a wildfire these days, i hope you’ll join me in welcoming this new moon in Leo, and a new season of fixed fire:

the link to sign up:

creative unravelling: new moon in leo

and in place of a poem, here’s two wildly different songs that were in my head while i was writing this post:

Arsonist’s Lullaby, Hozier

We Didn’t Start the Fire, Billy Joel

thanks for being here, & if this sparked anything(hah) in your body,

come, and let me know.

with breath,

angel

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it loops in and out of frame, between dreams, between books, between conversations with old ghosts and new arrivals. i have the type of memory that remembers the shape of someone’s lips but not the words they might have once whispered in confidence, the type of memory that holds grief like water, and needs to be reminded by the bees and wind of lighter things,

like warmth, friendship, and laughter, like connection, gathering, and ease—

i forget myself easily, and often, blurring at the edges of others, lost in the whirlwind of ancestral wounds and future disasters,

art-making, for me, is an attempt to remember:

when creating, i forget myself, sister, daughter, lover, friend,

and remember myself in the colors i choose for the canvas, and the small stitches i make across the aida cloth

as i make, i unmake the burdens of caregiver, colleague, control-freak, release myself to be needle, thread and song

as i gather words for a poem, i unravel truths from untruths, permutations from power, and forgetting from memory,

and this remembering, this recollecting, is a power, a salve, a solution—to personal and collective upheavals, violence, and amnesia.

this quote is the preface to Rana Ayyub’s book, Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover Up, in which she writes to remember and rebel against the amnesia of state-sanctioned violence carried out against Muslims in 2002, Gujarat.

In Memory as Rebellion, Jamila Bradley writes:

“Capitalism depends on your forgetfulness. On the disconnection between yesterday and tomorrow. It relies on being able to tell you the same story they after day, while knowing you're too tired to contest it. On the idea that now is all there is, and nothing else has ever been. On the inevitability of this world, made in this way.”

but remembering often asks us to walk down treacherous, exhausting, and lonely roads. often, when i write, or collect images to collage on the memory of my father, who passed away two years ago, my heart stills, my breathing staggers, and my fingers tremble.

and whenever i write about carnage—personal, ancestral, geopolitical, something in my stomach clenches, and my shoulders tighten. of the terrible things, i feel myself constricting as i remember. sometimes, it’s hours or days until my breath returns, or until that breath feels buoyant and plentiful.

and i do this still because all this remembering is important to me, because what is left unearthed and unsaid will not let me sleep.

and, as much as i believe in the importance of art-making, remembering, and rebelling against political cults of silence, repression, and decay,

i am starting to, or perhaps desperately need to, believe less in the myth of the lonesome artist. i need to believe that while much of the work i do is on my own, i don’t have to do any of this alone. and that belief has been begging me for action, perhaps even a leap of faith—that other worlds are possible, that we are creating them with every choice we now make.

and here is that leap:

on June 25th, a new moon in cancer darkens the summer skies. speaking in the language of archetypes, cancer is the sign of the home, moon-ruled, and the realm of water. the water signs encompass the landscape of emotion, connection, intuition, and feeling. cancer is an emotional, tidal memory—the kind that flows through our bodies, changing shape and focus with each passing hour and day, that current which has no name or form—that is, until it arrives in the sharp turn of a poem, or the giddy colors of a new painting.

on this new moon night in cancer, i’ll be holding space for a virtual gathering for artists, writers, and creatives who identify as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). in the volatile, lush dark of summer, we’ll introduce ourselves and connect with each other, then tend to our individual practices and projects—whether it’s an essay you’ve been putting off writing, or a baking project you want to begin to nourish your loved ones, we’ll have a 45-minute quiet container to remember ourselves, and to cultivate the work that sustains us. i’m naming this space “creative unravelling”, because so much of my creative process feels like untangling the invisible knots in my body and memory—and being perceived and witnessed in this process is both vulnerable and affirming.

i hope this container of creative unravelling, which i’ll be facilitating every new moon night this year, can serve as a monthly space for fellow BIPOC artists, writers, and creative folks to connect with each other, and to be witnessed in the act of centering our passions & regenerating our lives.

whether it’s 2 or 10 of us, i’ll be tending to creative unravelling with joy, gratitude, and excitement, because it grounds me to orient towards beauty, connection and creativity, in the face of repression and amnesia.

so bring your abandoned word drafts, crochet projects, manifestos, and miscellaneous crafts. bring that poem that makes you shake, that half-remembered melody, and see if you can’t just put it down, softly, slowly, and patiently, in the company of others.

the link to sign up: https://bit.ly/4jQgzdw

what this event is:

-a free gathering space for BIPOC artists, writers, & creatives--at any and all levels of practice

-time to tend to your practices & projects--writing, sketching, dancing, crafting, baking, whatever it might be

-an opportunity to meet, connect and create with others in community

*if you've never been in a creative co-working space before(hi, welcome!) here's a bit of what we'll be up to:

-15 mins opening time to drop in, introduce ourselves, & share intentions for this time/what brought you here
-45 mins tending to our own practices--you're welcome to go off-camera & disappear into the ether for this part -15 mins or so to come back as a group, close out, and share your experience/& or process, if you'd like to :)

more event FAQs @: https://bit.ly/4jQgzdw

thank you for being here with me, & i hope to see you around, this new moon.

if anything i shared rustles up something in your body (throat, gut or marrow), and you’d like to help me sustain this work, consider leaving a tip or lending your support through a paid subscription. thank you.

and as always, i’ll leave you with a poem. Memory, by Agha Shahid Ali:

5. Memory 

from Faiz Ahmed Faiz 

Desolation's desert. I'm here with shadows
of your voice, your lips as mirage, now trembling.
Grass and dust of distance have let this desert
bloom with your roses. 

Near me breathes the air that's your kiss. It smoulders,
slowly-slowly, musk of itself. And farther,
drop by drop, beyond the horizon, shines the
dew of your lit face. 

Memory's placed its hand so on Time's face, touched it
so caressingly that although it's still our
parting's morning, it's as if night's come, bringing 
you to my bare arms. 

with gratitude,

angel

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and do you remember the clench in your throat as blood swirled in the water, and the salt of it all as the sea entered your blood, alive and stinging?

there are songs enough to warn of desire,

of the things that happen when we leap into the dark earth of the future with only the faint notes in our dreams to guide us. sometimes we are able to say what we want in the moment that we want it, and then, those very words become a roadmap. but other times, perhaps most of the time, our feet are the first to know. at times, it feels as though there’s a thread looped onto the toe of my left foot—red and persistent, hooked with a delicate grip that, if not followed diligently, is liable to fray and snap. i know it’s happening for me when i begin to get restless in my dreams, and stew in stillness during the day. something itches between my toes and refuses to let me sleep. i pace, restless, and swell with agitation, spiked with a fever towards what i can only call, a moving to, an aching, a crimson direction.

except, what does it mean to move when you cannot name what you are moving towards?

when i was younger, it meant tagging on to anything that promised adventure. it meant learning to love the leap, to make loud splashes in the mud of my life, seasonably reckless and defiant. but now, closer to a rounder decade of my life,

(there is something sharp about the teenage years, isn’t there? do you remember, the edges you walked along at nineteen? i do. )

and after the swirl of my early-twenties, i feel my knees buckling at the tide-pool. there is many a blue moth and red pen to this feeling, years of purple grief and pulsing illness, the responsibilities of time and geometry all crushing my body into something folded, something atrophied. my feet itch, while my lungs burn. my throat swells like the organ sitting abandoned in the rafters of a rusting church. my hips stretch like dried sunflowers, bursting and brittle with seed. i am in the endless middle of a long, howling season. a season that hands out despair and fear and uncertainty like snowflakes, each a different kind of terror shaped by cold, the kind that makes you think, what right does someone like me have to wanting, anything?

a book i have loved a long time, nearly as long as the spiral years of this decade and the sharp ones of the last, has this to say, on legacies of despair:

“He didn’t know that in some places, like the country Rahel came from, various kinds of despair competed for primacy. And that personal despair could never be desperate enough. That something happened when personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation. The Big God howled like a hot wind and demanded obeisance. The Small God (cozy and contained, private and limitied) came away cauterized, laughing numbly at his own temerity. Inured by the confirmation of his own inconsequence, he became resilient and truly indifferent. Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening.

So Small God laughed a hollow laugh, and skipped away cheerfully. Like a rich boy in shorts. He whistled, kicked stones. The source of his brittle elation was the relative smallness of his misfortune. He climbed into people’s eyes and became an exasperating expression.”

-Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

despair, it seems, is a weather. certain climates where the inhabitants have no choice but to surrender to the whims of a fickle wind, which uproots grown trees without remorse, and, in the same night, quiets against the cheek of a newborn, whispering of a time before everything, when dawn walked on fours and greeted the green with a smile,

only for the newborn to wake a grown child, in a world that knows only dusk,

only the crush of eggs falling, blue and warm, into the throat of a koel.

and so, with every egg of a future possibility in the belly of a sharper animal than i, i have begun distrusting the tug at my feet. to all who will listen, i denounce the foolishness that is following the muscles in your fascia, even when the weather says otherwise. and when my toes itch, i bury them in the sand a few cautious yards before the water, and dare to go no further. still, in dreams, the tide pool beckons. it says to me, do you remember? what was in the water, back, before the weather made itself evident, before the cruelties of color revealed themselves to us, do you remember the things we paddled out into the sea for?

and, in my bones, i feel i know this answer, even if i cannot name it yet. and sometimes, in the dark hours between night and day, my feet begin to stir, erratically,

a little like faith in the lungs of the despondent, a breath,

just small enough to be mistaken for air, and,

a little twitch in the toes, just pointed enough to count as direction.

thank you for reading. and, if you’ve been with me a while (some of you, a few years now, thank you, thank you), you might’ve noticed that i’m on my third Substack name change(don’t @ me and my three-planet-stellium in Gemini), my voice finally finding home in missives from the lemon tree.

it’s been a long process of asking myself what i want from presence in your mailboxes and on this platform, and as a writer and artist living in inclement, volatile weather. i’ve come to the conclusion that i want to perform less, and gather more. i am hungry to gather and write, and gather and weave, and gather and learn, together. in this space, i’m currently dreaming of cultivating monthly virtual sessions, on rotation, like creative coworking flow sessions on a weeknight (bring the feral lists in your notes app, your crochet project, the novel you wrote & abandoned in 10th grade, a letter to a friend, a sticky-note collage—anything that’s creative and flows), expanding down the line to one-off workshops on the immediate particulate matter of my dreams (fires, haibuns, violets, speculative lesbian fiction), and, maybe closest to my heart, gathering spaces for BIPOC writers and artists to rage, weep, spark and delight in the bonfire of creative life on the margins.

it’s an ambitious harvest, for this little lemon tree, one that i need many resources to initiate and sustain. in this eager season of spring, the tree is really just a seedling, peeking a few inches above the ground, slowly and unsteadily unfurling towards the sun. i will be tending to it patiently, and lovingly, and invite you all to help me, if you are able and wanting. you can do this in many ways—by replying to this email or commenting to tell me what kind of gatherings make your heart pulse and steady, through paid subscriptions, which i recently enabled (see radiant orange button below)

paid subscriptions

and through sharing this out with the ones who keep you in inspiring company. i’m planning to host the first creative flow session on a weeknight in June, and will plan for more further down the line depending on interest, energy, and weather.

thank you for being here with me, and i hope to see you somewhere in the landscape of this newsletter—if anything i shared rustles up something in your body (throat, gut or marrow), do come & let me know.

with gratitude,

angel

last, last thing (it’s been so long since i wrote to you, and now, look, i can’t help myself writing) before we say goodbye, i want to leave you with some of what i’ve been reading, lately:

God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy

King’s Valley, by Gladis DePree

and, this poem, Amor Fati, by Jane Hirshfield

Little soul,
you have wandered
lost a long time.

The woods all dark now,
birded and eyed.

Then a light, a cabin, a fire, a door standing open.

The fairy tales warn you:
Do not go in,
you who would eat will be eaten.

You go in. You quicken.

You want to have feet.
You want to have eyes.
You want to have fears. 

i watch my hunger. i notice she is changing shape.

where there was more, she wants less.

less clutter, less worry, less scent in the laundry detergent.

where there was less, she wants more.

more rest. more easy breathing. more early mornings spent writing, before the bright spectacle of dawn. her tastes too, have changed. she wants eggs boiled, not fried. wants burgundy to orange, wants wife in place of honeyed-milk, and some other hungers i cannot yet feed but keep, aware of

i used to be annoyed at her,

my hunger—the incessant tug of her on my sleeve, like a kid begging for chips and orange soda, all while i had things to do, places to go, people to please with my efficiency and charmless wit, accolades to secure in saying yes when meaning no, taking on too many things i didn’t want and calling it ambition—when, she wanted long lunches, three hours in the kitchen simmering meat from bone, letting the fat render, and spices swirl,

slow down,

she is always saying. linger over the stove as steam rises, and watch how the eggs dance, underwater. slip through a carrot skin with your paring knife and remark on how you’ve never seen a shade of red-coral like it before, then take a little pride in how skillful you’ve gotten at cutting away the things that no longer serve you, at separating juice from the marrow.

i am learning again the necessity of my own hunger, the truths embedded in the at-times bizarre and frivolous cravings (the other day, i learned pickles have, among other things, electrolytes, explaining a life-long thirst for pickle juice when i’m feeling under the weather) of new foods, habits, and company.

these compulsions are one of the few ways our bodies have left to communicate our own authentic needs against the tide of capitalistic noise—that blogger on TikTok telling you how you simply need to get that strawberry teapot set on Amazon, a billboard claiming you need the newest iteration of the Apple Watch, your co-worker saying you need a membership at the new Pilates studio across from the office, your friend texting with how you need to see this movie or read this book, and

without understanding the ever-shifting landscape of our own desires, in this sea of projected “needs” meant to keep us tethered to cycles of automated earning and spending (money, time, attention)

we are lost.

it may not seem like much in any given moment to lean in to an impulse to buy an advertised gadget or volunteer our time and energy for something we are only half-heartedly sold on, but we can and do lose months and years of our lives trying to acquire, possess and consume these projections that are not our own, at cost to the things that may actually fulfill us.

if, in reading this, you are feeling a little curious, and maybe a little brave, i dare you to take some time today, or even right now, to jot down three things you’re truly craving. it can be an addition or subtraction, something you’re craving to add or take away…

a food? a color? a job?

a walk after dinner?

time with or without someone or something?

as small or big as you’d like.

if nothing grabs at you immediately, start with

i want less of…

i want more of…

and let me know what it is you find yourself craving, these days.

                                                             
                                                               ***

and as a little treat,,,

a love-filled, lovely love poem for the loving by Donika Kelley