Thinking about dedication, dedications. To places, pages, possibility and impossibility. With huge loss, comes significant reconfiguring. I love the squeeze my collective keeps offering as I grieve- a counterstrike to the scratchy, bludgeoned state of my heart.
These words found me rewilding. I shared them widely. Felt them crawl over and beyond any one person. The aromantic in me (folx high on urgency, pedestals, and adrenaline of the heart cast your nets elsewhere, I love multitudes!) sees the textless-ness in Willyce’s poem. This writing relationship’s anarchy. The “I want to show you everything” an escalator ride with thousands. She speaks of “stalling in your shoulder” and I scale mountain ranges. Willyce’s words are anti-hierarchical, remembered, de-constituted ways of loving- togetherness. Her dedication a nod to dykes, dirt, dreams, undressing the daylight.
About this Poem
“I write for my tribe: my Lesbian nation, women of all cultural backgrounds and collectives who will recognize the articulation of a narrative that they can hold and call their own. This poem was written during a week of rainstorms. The poem embodies the drift of romance as it moves from the shadows to the light.”
—Willyce Kim
Places
I dreamed you.
I waited 45 years for you
to find me.
I have nothing to give you
But these places
I have been.
I own no home.
I carry my life with me
In boxes
on my back.
Sometimes when you look
at me
I want to show you
Everything.
How the stars turn in the
night sky over Santa Fe.
How snow falls like filigree
through a blue moon.
How a slice
of sweet Hawaiian
Mountain apple
between your lips
calls forth the
forest
it was plucked from.
I want to take you places
You have never been.
With anyone.
I want to tell you everything.
How once when I was 26
I drove around and around
searching for other Lesbians.
I want to show you every scar.
I want to tell you about
Anita and Parker.
How death came for them
In the name of cancer
claiming parts of me
you can never have.
I want to whisper
Everything.
As you stall into my
shoulder
Incense rising,
dusky room.