How and when we write is no doubt affected by routine. For writing to exist, it has to work its way into our day-to-day schedule. The alarm clock buzzes and we snooze. Jump in the shower. Feed the cats. Make coffee. Get to work. Even now, as many of us are working from home, that extra commute time we imagined having has somehow gone missing. This is a deception we’ve grown accustomed to. Time is a cheat, but one we’re willing to accept without question. One more shot of espresso jumpstarts the day. Where is poetry in all of this?
Some writers sit down to write. They come to a blank page and have the will or the ability to fill it with words. Writing has never happened this way for me. Instead, I walk. I do the laundry. I wash the dishes. I weed the garden. I water the plants. I drive to the grocery store. I vacuum. Sometimes, as I am scrubbing a pan or pulling a weed, I visualize the effect of a specific line break in a poem, wondering how it will exist on paper. Of course, everything changes once I bring it to the page, but the words have, for the most part, already manifested. I sit down to transcribe, then, and edit again and again. When I get stuck, I move furniture around or from room to room, writing all the while in a space that is not physical, but a room nonetheless. My partner and cats especially love this—like waking up in a new house! The view changes, light shifts—a creek, a forest, a well. Walls expand and contract. Perspective is fluid. Here is somewhere.
A loud limpkin visits my deck every morning. Limpkins are often described as elusive, but there is nothing subtle about this bird. My limpkin is as loud as a Cuban mother in la saguesera. At sunrise I watch her pace along the creek. A squirrel parade often runs across the fence. Jorge the alligator drifts by. The limpkin hollers. When we lived in Miami, our apartment faced a parking lot, and every afternoon a hundred ravens swept in and congregated on the rooftop. Raccoons rummaged through trash bins. A few blocks east, sanderlings raced along the shore. Once, I saw an eastern-screech owl on a light post during an evening walk.
Every creature follows the rhythm of its own routine. But this year has largely disrupted our patterns. Our long-standing routines have been altered. New words have flooded our vocabulary. We are socially-distancing, manically washing our hands, visiting friends and family via zoom, and otherwise adjusting to life in quarantine. At the same time, the pandemic has exposed institutionalized systems of oppression that have been woven into the foundation of our society. And society is largely based on trust. That trust has been broken. Where is poetry in all of this?
I was 9 years old when my father was gunned down inside the hallway of our apartment building in Union City, New Jersey. The next day he died in the hospital with my mother by his side. In the days that followed, we attended his funeral, then we did what people do when confronted with death: we went on with our lives as normally as we could. My mother went to work. My sister and I went to school. We did our homework, cooked rice in the Hitachi, had quiet dinners at the kitchen table, cleaned the apartment, did the laundry, and went to sleep every night wondering if the empty space my father once occupied would ever fill. Anyone who has ever experienced the death of a loved one can certainly relate. It took me 30 years to write about my father’s death. Then I finally did, directly, and realized I had been writing about it all along.
Grief is trudging through swamp water—impossible to navigate until you’ve come up for air. This is where we find ourselves—every one of us, all of us, grieving. Whether or not we are aware that we are grieving is irrelevant. Societal rot has been exposed. Our collective reality has fractured. We are afraid. We are angry. We are mourning. We are frustrated. We are exhausted. We are indifferent. We are grateful. We are hopeful. We are hopeless. We are falling apart at the seams. We are all of these things at once.
And so we write, in whatever space we find words.
A walk.
A load of laundry.
A garden weed.
Poetry is everywhere.
Letisia Cruz is a Cuban-American writer and artist. She is the author of The Lost Girls Book of Divination (Tolsun Books, 2018). Her chapbook Chonga Nation was selected as a finalist in the 2018 Digging Press Chapbook Series and the 2016 Gazing Grain Chapbook Contest. Her writing and artwork have appeared in [PANK], Ninth Letter, The Acentos Review, Gulf Stream, Saw Palm, Third Coast, Duende, Moko Caribbean Arts & Letters, 300 Days of Sun, Ink Brick, and Sakura Review, among others. She is a graduate of Fairleigh Dickinson University’s MFA program and lives in Florida with her partner and their two cats.
You can follow her on Instagram, check out her art on her website, and browse her shop on Redbubble.
