This is an offering of love. To all of you. To all of us. To our mothers and our sisters and our daughters. To our world.

________

When a woman tells you she’s been violated:

Believe her.

No matter what words she uses to describe the violation.
No matter the drinks or the outfit or the degree to which she knew or didn’t know her violator.
No matter the time of day or night or the spaces in memory.
No matter her age now or her age then or how many years it took to speak it.
No matter how many times it’s happened or what came before or after.

No matter the questions that arise in your own mind, planted by a culture that has taught you that her-story is the one to be met with disbelief.

Believe her.

Hear her story.
Blanket her shame with your love.
Counter her fear with your faith.
Hold the relentless questions running on loops in her mind between your palms, tenderly.

Believe her.

When she says, “It was my fault…”
Tell her no.

When she asks, “Was this okay…?”
Say not now. Not ever.

When she wonders, “Did I bring this on myself…?”
Remind her that she has only ever called in goodness.

When she worries you’ll never look at her the same way…
Do not hesitate or waver.
Tell her that she is wrong.
That she is beautiful.
That you love her.

When she tells you they didn’t believe her before…
Remind her that you are different.

When she cannot look you in the eye…
Hold up the brightest mirror you can find, and show her the vast and unchangeable beauty of her being.

When she shows you her bruises…
Swallow hard and don’t you dare look away.

When she cries…
Let her.

When she reaches out in need of kind arms…
Hold her.

When she cannot find her voice to safely speak. When the words stick like swords in her throat. When the sound of her own voice is too much to bear…
Will your love to transmit across miles of silence.
Hold the space without sound.
Fill it with wildflowers and sunshine and infinite softness.

When she needs to tell her story again and again and again…
Listen. As many times as it takes.

When it takes far longer than you expected for her to heal…
Be infinitely patient.

When that healing looks nothing like they told you it would…
Find every dictionary in your house. Cross out the definition they gave you.
Allow her to write in her own.
Make sure to use pencil so she can change it as often as she needs.

When her body feels unsafe on the street or in the coffee shop or at the grocery store…
Walk closely beside her, ask if she would like to hold your hand.
Shield her energy with your own.
Don’t let go.

When she’s afraid of the dark…
Keep the lights on.

When she’s too terrified to sleep alone…
Plan to stay as many nights as she needs.

When her body feels unsafe in your bed…
Stop. Look her in the eyes. Remind her that in this space, always, she is sovereign.

When she asks you to make love to her…
Trust her. Go slow. Be prepared to stop.

When you’re not sure how to proceed…
Ask her.

When she answers…
Pay close attention.

When the rules change…
Accept them.

When you can’t touch her the same way. When what was beautiful between you is now a reminder of horror. When triggers arise in unexpected and tender spaces…
Don’t you dare take it personally.

When her body, her home, and the world transform into fields littered with landmines…
Walk carefully and gently and with great reverence.

When you trip over one of them — and you will…
Go easy on yourself. You too will need infinite kindness to get through this.

When you get it wrong…
Forgive yourself.

When the weight of what is required begins to feel so very heavy. When you fear your bones might crack. When your own heart is tangled and your soul is weary and longing for rest and a place to lay it all down….
Reserve tenderness for yourself.
Make a religion out of the most exquisite self-care.
Remember that you, too, deserve respite, comfort, and safe arms to hold you as you cry.

When you do not live up to the words in this poem. When you hit your limit and your own being is crying out for respite and you feel you are failing the woman you love…
Remember that you can call in reserves, that no single person can do this alone.

When she wakes up at night, sits straight up in bed, a silent scream caught in her throat, her body echoing memory knit into bones…
Sit up with her.
Light a candle and shine it in all the dark corners.
Breathe with her until her breath returns to her body and her heart stops trying to escape from her rib cage

When she can’t sleep…
Stay awake.
Invite her to nestle her head against your chest.
Play with her hair. Sing her lullabies. Whisper truths in her ear.
Truths about her beauty.
And her power.
And her absolute right to autonomy of spirit and soul and body.
Her ownership of her sacred yes and her holy no.
Her warrior strength and her ability to survive.
Now and for the rest of her life.

When a woman tells you she was violated….

Believe her.

And say so.

Don’t just think it.
Don’t just feel it.
Speak the words to her.
Out loud. Right now.

As many times as it takes.
Over and over and over again.

In words
In writing.
With your body.
In the way you look at her.
In public. On social media.
At the hospital.
At the police station.
In court.
At the bar.
On the street corner.
In your outside voice where other people can hear.
In as many different languages as you can memorize.

Because too many women in this world have been violated.
And too many are met with the violence of disbelief.

So, when a woman tells you she was violated.

You stop what you’re doing.
Look her in the eyes.

And tell her you fucking believe her.

_____

{image credit: Kat J via Unsplash}

The post Believe Her: A poem for survivors (and those who love them) appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

And so the heavy was there,
And I noticed it
Simply observing
Not happy about it
But working not to judge it either
“Okay self
You are heavy today”

But then I noticed
That something felt missing
Absent
A spark
Of something
I have never been able to name
Other than to call
her muse

All I know is that
It is the thing that
Delivers the words
And for the last week
That spark
That muse
That energy
It has been pulsing through me
From waking to sleep
And even in my dreams
Making my pen fly across the page
So quickly
And even then unable to
Keep up with the flood of words
Wanting to be written.

So this spark
It has been
Bringing me to life
And bringing words to world.

Oh, the stories I have told this week,
Of feathers and wine
Of lion tamers and love
Of a week of unfolding
And even more than the ones
I’ve told you
There others
More fantastical
And also more true
That are just between
Me and the page
Or me and the mystery
Because writing doesn’t only happen
when words are recorded,
you see.
When the spark of muse is
Living in me
I am always writing
Even when I am not.

So that on weeks like this
It is not as if I am writing
exactly
But more as if I am being written
Into life
Or at least fully into the living

And so today
On waking
And naming the heavy
And recognizing the absence of this thing
This thing that delivers
The words
Which are – you see
My breath
The source of my aliveness
I felt panic
Immediately
And then grief

Because I had been living in a desert
In a drought
Or maybe on the moon – to mix metaphors
Because I told you it was air
And to live without
The words is to be
Without oxygen
To be cut off
From life giving
Inhale
And exhale
To be floating in an aimless space

Yes – there is a certain
Amount of
Melodrama
That tends to come
With being an artist
Or maybe just a certain
Amount of melodrama that comes from
Being me

And I am
Me
For all my flaws and failings
For all the stumblings
For all the times i confuse selfless with selfish
(and vice versa)
And get it all fucking wrong
I’m me
Kind and patient they say
Good and loving, also.
Perhaps a little prone to martyrdom
With a side of victimhood
And perpetually in chaos
But it’s okay
I’m willing to take the good
With the bad
In order to write a story
That is real.

And the me that I am.
Needs words like air
Needs the ocean in the desert
And when the words have been gone for a long time
And then they return
It is like breathing deeply
Or maybe even like breathing under water
(to bring back in the ocean metaphor)
Because I once was a mermaid,
You know
-Or at least that is what the
Dreams told me-
And I would come up to the shore every
Time the moon was full
And sing my songs
To the sailors
Who would turn them into stories
And tell them to the scholars
Who wrote them into books
That sold by the thousands
And thus made me famous
In a way
Though nobody ever knew
The stories
Were mine.

But I digress
Because this isn’t a poem
About mermaids
It is a poem just about this morning
In my little apartment
And waking up heavy
And thinking I had lost the words
And speaking the panic and grief of that

But you see what has happened here
Don’t you
I sat down to tell you how the words
were gone
And in the telling of that
It seems
That they returned
That they are
Perhaps always waiting
That there is air on the moon
Or maybe even an ocean under the hard
Packed earth
Of this desert.

Not all poems
Teach lessons
Some are just there
To be beautiful
But this one apparently
Had wisdom I needed to remember

The words will return
They always do
All I have to do
Is to sit down
At the page
and remember
To
Breathe

The post remember to breathe appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

I looked down to see a feather
resting on the handle of the door
A little feather
Tiny, really.
Soft gray down
Belonging to a baby bird
I would guess
likely a pigeon
I’m sure.

Entirely, common
in a city like this
in a back alley
Where rows of parking spots hold cars
like mine
Where trash is left
Food discarded
And city birds congregate
To do the things city birds do.

And I immediately wondered,
Who was this bird?
Where she was going?
And what this might mean,
this little feather
From a little bird
Just clinging to the door handle
Of my car

Could it be a sign of freedom
Or of the things that fall away and get left behind
Of going places or
Choices made
What sign was this
For me to make note of
and apply
to my own life?
After all, it was balancing ever so
precariously
Right on the handle of my car
This seemed important – this small detail
in the way that small details
often do.

Or perhaps it is just this
that the bird flew by
and lost a feather
one she’ll never notice
(I’m convinced, you see, that she was a she)
and then the wind blew from the north
heading south – like birds do for winter
and lifted the feather
and carried it until it hit my car
and there it stuck.
no more or less than that.
Perhaps we want so much to
ascribe meaning to things
Because we feel so accidentally assigned
To this life
To this particular set of circumstances
No reason given solid
Enough to explain the random
happenstance of it all.

To make sense of
the good and the bad
The way things happen to people we love
Or to ourselves
And we can’t stop it.
The gains and the losses
The way love ends
The rough gash of it all.
And people leave, even when you believe
with all that holds belief
That of course they will stay.
The works published or ignored
The bank account sliding from full to empty
The lucky pennies thrown in fountains
without any idea if wishes come true.
And the raw pulse of anxiety
Rising from all the unanswered questions

All the misunderstood signs
Call it karma or fate or destiny
or religious preordination
or just that simple yet specific serendipity.
the days and weeks and months
Where they seem in our favor
And they others
when they are not
Signals sent into space and returned
with a resounding yes
Wires crossed. And bodies unwound
Or lovers who collide in space
in a way that makes no sense
in a way that is just as random as
that tiny feather on my car door handle.

And all this went through my mind
in that moment
In that rush of thoughts
as I picked up the feather
And held gently in my hand
up to the light
With fingernails painted red like wine
And then placed it gently in the empty cup holder
In the center console of my car

keeping it for some strange reason
Some desire for it to mean
something
to say that this is not without significance
this small gray feather

and maybe that is what
makes meaning
In the end

Simply this.
Simply our desire
To take notice of
The smallest things
To mark them as important
To wonder about their mystery
And the wisdom they bring
To hold them close
to pay attention.

To say that this
Just this
right now
it
matters.

The post feather ( a poem about the ways we make meaning) appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

Hey you.
You who writes.

You who keeps on writing.

You who pours out your hurt and your joy and your bliss and your ways of being and existing and understanding onto page and screen.

You who hits the submit button again and again. Even though you’ve papered an entire wall in rejection letters, because you know that somewhere there is a home for your words and if you keep trying you will find it.

You who writes in private, in secret, in the darkest back corner of your closet after everyone else has gone to sleep just so you can write the whole of you.

You who writes to follow the trail, to chart the course, to make your own map through the mystery.

You who writes the path to your own redemption, because you know that clawing your way back to forgiveness of self is the only way through.

You who writes in silence, in a whisper, in invisible ink.

You who writes with the risk of being dismissed, dishonored, ignored because the risks of not writing are even greater.

You who writes because nobody else is willing to tell the truth and the truth must be told.

You who writes to bring the perpetrator to justice.

You who writes to fuel the revolution, to feed the fire, to create the necessary unrest.

You who writes to bring the people into the streets.

You who writes so that your children and their children and their children will know.

You who writes until you are bleeding and then uses the words to staunch the flow.

You who writes to lift others even when you are writing through the thick haze of your own tears.

You who writes to shine a harsh and uncompromising light on what is unjust, on the wrong doing, on the abuse occuring in the shadows.

You who writes to unbreak your own heart.

To you who writes to weave the magical stories that lull the babies to sleep at night.

You who writes to make visible the ones who do the hard and lonely and dangerous work and who risk it all just to stay alive.

You who writes in gratitude and thanks that you are able to bring worlds to life on paper.

You who writes to give voice to the things nobody else is willing to say.

You who writes so that the invisible can be seen, the marginalized brought to center, the spotlight moved away from the stars and onto the ones in the background who make the show go on.

You who writes to make a thing real, to recreate the past, to return to yourself, to mark in ink the path of a new beginnings. 

You who writes the body. The heat and salt and sex of it.  The truth of blood and vein and the secrets the bones hold. The soft and wet and want. The body that winds and dances in the shadows. The body that heals trauma by naming and claiming her own pleasure.

You who writes to claim space, to name yourself, to create a new world you can stand to live in.

You who writes to own your history or accept your present or shift your future.

You who keeps writing love letters to the one long gone or the one not yet arrived or to fall in love with the miracle of your own being.

You who writes to make peace with the ghosts, to release the steam, as a substitute for the therapy you cannot afford.

You who writes because the world inside you is so magical and so real and even if nobody else believes you it must exist somehow, represented in concrete form.

You who writes because to not write would be like a form of death, and you’ve died too many times already.

You who writes to bring us all back to life.

You who writes to set the record straight, to hold the story, to alter the dominant narrative.

You who writes to bring hope to the hopeless and give voice the the voiceless, to share the stories of the ones nobody bothers to hear.

You who writes in the face of all that would silence you.

You who writes to craft beauty in the midst of devastation.

You who writes because the force of creation is what gets you out of bed each day.

You who writes to brighten hearts and lift spirits and to make the sun rise in the sky.

You who writes like the ocean, like waves crashing and crashing and crashing again against the shore of what is real.

You who writes the dance, the movement of clouds across the sky, the way the flowers blow in the breeze.

You who writes outside of the lines. Who ignores the rules. Who has no idea about grammar or punctuation or the correct way to spell things, but who writes anyway.

You who writes in an illegible scrawl on purpose to keep the stories safe from eyes unable to see the the beauty of your truth.

You who writes words that rise like smoke and fall like ashes, still alive from the fire.

You who writes to take the swirl of chaos and confusion and, waving pen like magic wand, makes the spinning stop and the truth rise to the surface, clear and true, like a fortune teller conjuring the future from her crystal ball.

You who writes only the necessary, who casts multitudes from scarcity, who takes the story of the entire universe and reduces it to the exact few words that say everything that has ever needed to be said.

You who writes even though they told you that you could not. That should should not. Who writes over the red pen marks and bad grades from teachers who thought writing had to follow the textbook.

You who writes the things that push people up against their own limitations, their prejudice, their hard edged bias, who forces us to see the things we would rather ignore. You who are willing to endure the discomfort of pushback in order to help us all grow.

You who writes the edges and pushes the boundaries and then calls the words back into the center.

You who writes the trauma. Writes the pain. Writes the ugly words that we don’t want to read but can’t turn away from, not because you want to, necessarily, but because you know we all we need to stay present with what is real.

You who writes the worst of the hurricanes and tornadoes of reality and then keeps writing all the way into the eye of the storm where everything is peaceful and beautiful and true.

You who writes the imaginary, the fantasy, the fiction, and in the writing you conjure a world that is deeply real and alive. 

To writes who writes with irrepressible joy bubbling up through your cells, giddy with the knowledge that only you could write this particular story.

You who writes in service to the cause, to the greater good.

You who writes the birth, the death, the honest everyday mundanities of our humanity. The messy and the boring and the deeply human.

You who writes to honor who has come before, to uplift the wisdom of your ancestors and the truth of those who walked the lands long before we were here.

You who writes in the stolen moments, on the grocery store receipts, who scribbles poems on the inside curve of your elbow, inking skin with novels that wash away in the shower but that mark you forever.

You who writes to create a truth that is more true than reality that you are living. 

You who writes under a name not your own in order to write the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

You who writes to understand what you already know and to learn what you need to understand and embrace the unknowing of all that exists beyond comprehension.  

You who writes to remember the details your brain will not hold.

You who writes your way into your own wide open life.

You who writes. Period.

To heal the world. To right the wrongs.  To save a life. 

Because you couldn’t stop, even if you tried.

It is a brave and beautiful thing to create stories in the face of all that would stop you.

You do that. And it is everything.

The post For the ones who write appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

And I thought about saying
In that exact moment
You know – I once fell into a love
With a Cajun snake charmer
She tied bones in her hair and smoke rose from her skirts
when she walked through a room, bewitching all who came near.
And that love, I tell you now
Well, it rocked the whole damn world
So that everyone, the whole earth over
felt the vibrations
Though they named
Them all sorts of
Different things,
Depending on their circumstances
And location
And who is to say if they were right or wrong
Except me,
and I know that that I fell into a love
That rocked the whole damn world

Or maybe it’s more true
To say that that love fell into me.

Not fell in the way that buildings crumble in
The epicenter of the quake
But fell
In some other way
Some more etheric and mysterious way
And I didn’t say that
Not then
But I thought then about how
There are so many damn ways
To fall
And so many different ways
To tell a particular story

It’s just that some of those ways
Are more true

And more true doesn’t mean
Not necessarily
More factual.
No, stories aren’t all
Simple and clean like that.
Can’t be measured
By the same standards
Of veracity
As science or mathematics

In fact
Some of the truest stories
I’ve ever told
I haven’t even lived
Not yet
Or if I have lived them
It’s been a thousand times and
Only when brought together
Do they create
The symphony of words that will
Hit you in the gut
Hard enough
That you’ll name them holy

Just like a story about
The day my heart
Broke
Is not just a story of that one day
But really a story of all the days
And all the hearts
And all the breaking
That there ever has been.
And in order to write of my particular break
I conjured a spell
and the words gathered force
And called in all the stories
Living in the air around me
And in the corners of my heart
And tucked under the roots
Of a willow tree
Halfway around the globe.
That’s where the richness is, you see
It is the collective
In this case
That makes the singular more true.

Did you know that once I traveled
The entire world?
I wore a faded yellow sundress
With soft red roses
And a slightly torn hem.
In those days I woke up every morning
And washed my face
With dewdrops
And tucked flowers in my hair
I sang on street corners
And was hailed for the otherworldly
Beauty of my voice
One night I danced the tango with a sorceress
Under the light of a blood red hunters moon in a town so ancient it didn’t have a name.
She bewitched me and stole my voice and whispered in my ear that in exchange she would gift me an infinite stream of words but that I would only be able to write
If I promised to never abandon my own heart
It wasn’t black magic, she said, just the honest kind.
And that people often got the two confused but that
I could always tell the difference
If I listened with my bones
After that I could no longer sing
So I took handsome lovers in exchange
For a steady supply of ink
With which to write the truth

One day I left my sandals behind
On the hot cobblestones
Of a village square
Because my feet right then,
They needed to feel the ground
With nothing in the way
I left those sandals in a country the language was not mine
where I spoke to nobody and only smiled
And yet there I told more true stories than i’ve ever told you.

For a short while
Back in those days
I joined a traveling circus
Can you imagine?
I became
In just a short time
An expert at the flying trapeze
And every night
After the show
I slept next to the lion tamer.
No, it wasn’t like that
Not like you’d think.
I had enough ink by then
To last a lifetime
But he yearned for home
He hadn’t slept
not a wink
for three long years
Because he missed the sound
Of a mother’s heartbeat.

I only left because I woke up one day
And I had forgotten why i was there
Which is, I believe
The best reason for leaving
So I stole off that night during the tightrope routine
and ran straight
For the ocean
In my bare feet.
And I stripped off my sundress
With its faded red roses and slightly torn hem
And I left it there on the rocks in case
Some mermaid thought to try her luck on land
and I walked into the water naked and
Swam all the way home

And who are you to say if that was true
Or false
Or metaphor
Or prophesy
Any more than you could
Tell my friend
The truths
Her body knew last night
When it stood outside
In the rain while
The earth shook
Beneath her feet

Or to say that the stories
From the epicenter are
More true or important
Than the ones from the margins
That the buildings that crumble
Cry harder than the ones
That just crack

But either way, did you know
That I once fell into a love that rocked the whole damn world
Or maybe, as I said before
It would be more accurate to say
That the whole damn world fell into me
because I loved
And if you believe in the truth of that, and I swear
That it is so.
Then let me tell you my stories
And know in your bones
that I write
The truth

No. I have not flown through the air on a flying trapeze
Or experienced the earth dancing beneath my feet.
But the world is wide open before me
And I might,
I might.

The post {a love that rocked the whole damn world} appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

The name on the bottom of that tube of lipstick tube says Shame.
I just call it Honest.

There were hours of tears that marked my face.
I call those honest too.
I’ve lied before, no doubt.
But never with tears.
if I told you that was true, would you believe me?

And there was the dancing with ghosts,
calling them in on purpose and asking them to stay.
There was the telling of the story that is a reality that is a memory that is a mythology that is eternal inside of me.
The getting lost in the letters on torn pages and napkins from coffee shops, almost illegible words scrawled in black ink.
They are known just the same,
known the way only bones can know

There was the yearning – deep and sudden – for the specific pain of ink against those bones,
the bones that know all the stories.
The bones of my spine, this time, marking skin with poetry the way I envisioned so many years ago.
He told me once, while he settled my own handwriting along my lower left rib and I breathed deep into the pain of that moment –
that moment that was all loss and all grace and the knowing that everything had been changed –
he told me then that the pain was weakness leaving my body.

I wonder now, is there is a word for strength leaving your body? Or love?
What of its arrival?
Or is it only pain that the body names, and then only in it’s leaving?
it is true, I know, that there are some things for which there are no words.
Only the spaces between the words we know to say all that must be said
And I think about how some calls come deep, for years and years before I finally answer.
I wonder why this is so. And I wonder what this tells you about me.

There was the way the heat cloaked my body outside,
even at almost midnight.
And smoke curled upward on the patio and filled my lungs and settled something down deep inside.
I exhaled then.
Sometimes I forget to do that.
Some nights the darkness rolls on forever.
Sometimes what we need is only found inside of something burning.

Like the way I collected the candles from every room to fill the darkness.
And the way the letters all smell like a cigar box that says I love you in a language I’ve never learned to speak.
The way they smell like wood and smoke and foreign shores and the traveling forward and backward all at once.
There was the black silk ribbon that was once tied around those letters
and the way it burned after I tossed it to the side
and it landed, unnoticed, on the flame of a dark red candle that sits atop a rusted gear that sits atop a rock that still holds the salt of my Atlantic home.
The curls of smoke, the way they rose from that silk,
the way the pieces of the ribbon fell away where it had burned, silken ashes against white skin.
I caught the fire and put it out before it became danger.
Instead it was just another honest kind of beautiful.

There was the way I got up suddenly, because suddenly it mattered.
it mattered that I walked to my room and got undressed and raised my arms high and watched my own body in the full length mirror.
Watched the black dress that feels like a second skin
as it flowed downwards, falling soft against the top of my thighs.
And the way I piled my hair on my head and tied it in a knot and stretched my neck long and sprayed on a scent that melds jasmine and rose and amber and the slightest hint of peach.
I always want something sweet to counter the deep earth of me.
i always need something deep to counter the sweet of me.
And it mattered that I cleaned and repainted my tear-stained face.
Strong black liner and high arched brows and that honest lipstick I told you about earlier –
dark burgundy like the wine and the blood and the nights that feel especially true.

And so then I poured another glass of wine.
And painted my nails.
To match my honest lips
To match the candle
To match the fire
that burned the silk
that held the letters
that spoke of the story
that called on the ghosts.
Because it’s what is honest, right now.
The wine and this night.
And all the rest.
Because honest is sometimes the color of old blood and dried tears.
And ashes against skin.

Because sometimes honest isn’t soft and pretty.
Because sometimes I’m not soft and pretty.
I get tired of being soft and pretty.

And because just then the music rose.
And Van Morrison, he rocked me into the mystic
And then, then it moved deeper
I moved deeper
Music like hands
on skin
on purpose.
And I remembered.
Something I had read
That Rumi had said,
“where I am folded, there I am a lie”

So tonight I unfold.
Feet tracing patterns
on hardwood floor
Body long against the boards
Limbs reaching
Skin finding home in the dance
Hungry for something unnamed and holy.
Hips moving the only way my hips know how to move.

Honest.

The post honest appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

listen to the audio recording | listen to the soundtrack on spotify

when she finally leaves, you will not want to let her go.
when she finally leaves, you will not be ready.

no matter that you thought you were fine
no matter that you thought you were moving on
and even healing and shit.

sometimes the heart plays tricks like that

when she leaves you’ll know better.

and no matter how much control you like to wield
over the proper folding of the towels
and the direction the toilet paper goes on the roll.

you won’t get to have a say in this one.

you’ll want to think that you’ll handle it with grace
but you won’t.
you’ll ugly cry.
you’ll drink too many whiskeys and not eat near enough food.
you’ll beg. and plead and send ill-advised texts and show up at her doorstep
unannounced and uninvited
your hopeful heart an earthquake, ready to take the house down to the foundations

you will not drive away happy.
you will drive right over your heart, splayed on the hot august pavement.
you will drive away not knowing if you will see her again.

when you get back to your apartment
make yourself some tea. add honey
you need to learn to give sweetness to yourself now
play all the songs that speak her name
sink into the sad like it’s the only home you’ve ever known
you’ll be living here a while
you might as well make friends with it.

don’t try to convince people you are trying to forget
when you are determined to not to let go.
when you’ve got a box tucked beside your bed
filled with two and a half years of love notes
and a hell of a lot of empty space
it’s okay to hold on for a little while
demons are not exorcized overnight.

but just a warning
what comes next is not going to be easy.

soon you’re going to have to forget her phone number
forget her birthday
forget the way she smiled at you first thing in the morning.
the way she said ‘sleep good’ and you bit your lip every time to keep from correcting her.
the way she poured a whole mug of coffee and barely drank any of it.

your memories will play tricks on you anyways
turning ordinary moments into magic.
and right now is no time for magic.

right now is time for hard truth
and tough love.

it will take a few times of ignoring good advice before the hurt is
deep enough for you to listen

please remember to be kind to yourself

listen
i know you don’t want to hear this
but stop texting her.
everyone will agree with this.
they will say that if you need to – you should get a journal and write your love letters there.
where she will never see them.
better yet. write them on your own skin and let them wash away in the shower
somethings were never meant to stay forever.

listen when they tell you that you are romanticizing things
listen when they tell you that it’s all for a reason
listen when they tell you that it’s for the best.

it doesn’t matter if it’s true right now
it just matters if you can believe it long enough to get through the night.

next:
change the playlist
change your favorite coffee shop
change the sheets
you deserve cloth that doesn’t hold the memory of her skin.

bolt the doors
stop waiting for the sound of her knock
it is not coming
she is not coming.

do you hear me – she is not coming.

walk alone at night and remember how safe you used to feel.
make the food she never liked to eat.
don’t go to the grocery store near her unless you know she’s at work
it’s too early to risk a run in with a ghost.
make new memories.
make new friends.
get a tattoo
get another dog
go dancing. go to the ocean. go to sleep earlier.

god knows, our bones could all use a little more rest.

and listen.
for real this time
stop trying to cram your heart into the hands of girls with clenched fists
stop trying to cram your heart into the hands of girls with open palms

there’s safe space somewhere between holding on too tightly and letting things blow away in the breeze.

someday you’ll learn this.

but or now, don’t even think of trying to give yourself to the next girl you see
she deserves better than your heart in pieces
she deserves better than your mouth still shaped into an echo of the past
and anyway, it’s time to stop being afraid of your own company

and cry as much as you need to
it’s okay to be all the way broken.
that’s the only way to let the grief do its holy work
so go ahead
cry so much that the rivers flood the oceans
and the forecasters announce that the drought is over

and then be done crying.
be done.

steady up girl
you are way better than this

_________

The post steady up girl {you are way better than this} appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

so when you find a poem like this
-and you’ll know by the
chill that rises along your arms and travels
down your spine
the one that pulses truth
the one that says
this poem may one day be the
one thing that stands between you
and the siren song of the shadowlands –
when you find a poem like that
write it by hand on the prettiest paper
careful cursive, just like they taught you in grade school
fold it carefully
edges lined up with precision
make the crease lines just so.
take it out
every so often
even when everything
is perfect
and tomorrow looks like infinity
and you swear you will never
sleep alone again
but just in case
memorize the words
and the words between the words
you may need them again
quite likely, dear one, you will need them again
and again
on blue black nights at 3am
and the days when the sun has baked your bones dry and
still the rains won’t come
and when the ground is too hard for rest
but not steady enough
to rise from
when you call and call and they do not come home.
when those days come
you won’t remember right away
so deep will you be in the sweet mess of grief
but eventually you will remember
and when you do
take the poem out of your back pocket
unfold it carefully
smooth the creases and lay it flat.
brush your hair and your teeth
maybe put on some lipstick
whatever it takes to
remember your beauty and worth
then take a breath
because even though it seems impossible
that a poem could have so much power
it is quite entirely possibly that
this poem will
remind you of truth
when heart and ego are wrecked and ruined
it will sustain you
when food loses it’s lure and the air is so heavy
you stay in bed until noon.
this poem will be talisman and guide
on the journey back home to yourself.
so give it a chance
what is there to lose, anyway?
you have already lost it all, after all
you were holding so tightly and you lost, anyway
so go ahead
read it aloud
through your tears.
give it the cadence
that is the exact opposite
of the love song you don’t think
you’ll ever be able to hear again without crying
speak in in a voice that sounds nothing like the one you used to whisper her name
this is where you get your voice back
roll that poem around in your mouth
suck the letters between your teeth
blow them out like rings of smoke in winter air.
take them into your fists and throw them into the darkness
after all
there is a reason your body quivered
when you read this poem for the first time
there is a reason you listened to me
and took the time to write it out and
that you saved it for today
there is a reason you remembered to do this.
so dammit – read the poem.
put your whole being into that poem
breath and body and blood and guts and tears.
read it again
and again
let the refrain rise
until the truth of it is a light composed of syllables
until the light is a bullet proof vest made of words
until the bullet proof vest is enough to protect you from your own fury
until your fury becomes the vast heat of power
until the power lodges in your belly, red hot and burning true
and then, and only then
howl that poem at the night sky with every ounce
of fire you have ever known
call it back to you as if you own it
and then stop and breathe for a minute.
slow and steady.
and see if you don’t feel differently.

this is what it is
my bravely broken one
to let a poem save you.

The post to let a poem save you appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

It has been one month since the massacre at Pulse Orlando. One month that has seen more death and devastation and violence than I can possible process. One month of communities ripped apart, here and abroad. One month of divisiveness and unimaginable pain and the rumblings of revolution.

Perhaps it is always this way — it is just that it takes events like this — events that hit us hard, and close to home and personally — to fully get our attention.

Still, there are some periods in this world where it all seems to erupt, all at once. And the grieving and the hurting and the righteous anger and the protests and the memorials and the demands for reform eclipse all else. As they should. As they must.

That week, much like this last one. I could not look away. Not from the news stories. Not from my social media feed. Not from the political response. Not from the attempted erasure of the color or sexuality of the victims. Not from the names and faces and stories of those lost and those who survived and those who were there to do the saving.

And most of all, not from the eyes of my fellow queers. My LGBTQ community. My family.

One week after the attack I went to a bar. My bar. My home. A lesbian honky tonk with it’s weathered wood dance floor and the bartenders who are like friends and the people that know me the best. The place where my muscle memory knows the music and my own feet have done their part to wear the floor smooth. The space that had sheltered me from the earliest days of my coming out. Of course we would be there.

Where else would we have gone?

We were afraid. We were hurting. And more than anything, we needed to be together. To be there. To defiantly claim this space. As safe. As our own.

And there, on that Saturday night, there was a time of silence. And in that moment, my friends and I hugged and we held each other and we took very deep breaths and we closed our eyes and opened them and just took it in. This crowded Saturday night gay bar, completely silent in memory of what had been lost just a week before. And then the music began again and we did the one thing that we could do. We danced. We danced and we danced and we danced — just like those 49 souls did that night at Pulse. We danced in safety and we danced in celebration and we danced in defiance and we danced in revolution.

I got home very late that night. Wet with the sweat of a night of spinning around and around and around that floor. Gritty and heavy and light and hurting and healed. And when I woke the next morning — it was with the words of a letter filing my my head and right on the tips of my fingers. And this came out — one of those times that the entirety of a piece has been gifted in the liminal spaces between sleeping and waking, and the only challenge to capture it all it before it is lost into the ether. And so I lay there in bed, and furiously punched out letters on my phone until my thumbs were aching, because to get up and get paper or computer was to risk losing what needed to be put down.

I recorded an emotional audio to send to a friend and later that day recorded a much more composed video version. I intended to share it right away. But I couldn’t. For some reason, I just couldn’t.

It was all too much. Too fresh. Too vulnerable and exposed. My queerness is not a secret, not by any means. As a writer with 15 years of online presence, when I came out, I did it publicly and wide open. My queerness — though often invisible unless I purposely call it out — is personal and political and refuses shame.

But this? This was raw-edged grief right on the surface of my skin. Grief mingled with gratitude and knowing and solidarity and a new awareness of what was possible. This was as wide open and bare as I could get. This letter was everything I was feeling, laid out in audio and video. No filter. No hiding.

And so it sat on my hard drive, and I wondered if I would ever share it. Today I woke up and sat down to work — and immediately saw that a month had passed. I knew it was time.

Two weeks after the Pulse massacre I was in San Francisco for Pride. That morning, I wandered The Castro on my own. I stopped by the Orlando Memorial. The candles, still burning, wax spilled all over the sidewalk. The pictures and the names and the flowers and the scrawled messages of love and support. I had my own moment of silence there, with the giant pink triangle on the hill above, feeling the echoes of Harvey Milk’s footsteps and the history — my history — heavy in the air.

That afternoon, in Delores Park, I melted into the crowd — this mass of jubilant queer bodies — claiming their celebration and their space and their pride. And later, in the company of two women I had only just met, sunburned and glittered, hands and lips sticky from the sickeningly sweet Smirnoff Ice grabbed from the slim options at a convenience store and carried in a ripped paper bag, I joined the Dyke March. And with thousands and thousands of others, we spilled into the streets.

And yes, there must have been hate somewhere in that huge city. There must have been. But there was no room for it that day. And there were people on the sidewalks and leaning out the windows and yelling from the rooftops. There were signs and chants and hugs from strangers. And there were bodies. Queer bodies. Transgender bodies. Bodies of allies and families and friends. All of us pressed together and moving as one.

The post A letter to my queer family // Pulse Orlando appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

Even though everything smells like love and loss and burning.
Start with this.

You are here and it hurts.
It hurts because of all you’ve lost.
Your heart is a 3am siren, driving through that sucker punch bruise of a night sky.
Never a sign of anything good.

Here, nothing feels good.
Now you’ve begun.

You are here and it hurts and the world feels impossibly heavy.
There is not enough air in the room.
The quilt on your bed is eight hundred pounds of weight keeping you from movement.
There is no going back

There is never any going back.
Now you’re getting somewhere.

You are here and it hurts and the world feels impossibly heavy and you are shouting bargains at the moon.
He is listening but does nothing.
There is nothing he can do.

You are on your knees in the grass,
clutching handfuls of earth.
This is progress.

You are here and it hurts and the world feels impossibly heavy and you are shouting bargains at the moon and there is nobody else to hear you
It is the darkest night you’ve ever lived through
You’ve lived through.
You’ve lived.

Do you hear me?
You live.
You make it.
You survive.

There is a faint tinge of light on the horizon and you made it.
Now we’re finally moving forward

You are here and it hurts and the world feels impossibly heavy and you are shouting bargains at the moon and there is nobody else to hear you and there is a grief wail building inside of you.
Through the earth, through your toes,
Your legs, your belly, your chest and lungs,
The reach of your arms, your curled fists.
Your neck
Your jaw
Your face
The top of your head.

Have you ever seen a building implode?
Yes. This is you.
Now you know you have begun the work of healing.

You are here and it hurts and the world feels impossibly heavy and you are shouting bargains at the moon and there is nobody else to hear you and there is a grief wail building inside of you and you crumbling.
The ground shakes as her own broken pieces slide rough against each other.
There is a red earth landslide and everything is tumbling into the sea.
On the ocean, a wall of water rushes toward land.
Disaster cannot be prevented, only survived or not.
The earth knows well the pain of things that cannot be fixed.

Your pain cannot be fixed.
There is no shortcut through this.
This knowledge is the key to everything that will come next.
There is more to come.

Sometimes healing looks like falling apart.
Sometimes falling apart is the path to what can be built.
Sometimes, we go through the darkest nights and there is nobody but the moon to hear.
He always listens.
Now you listen.

There is not enough air in the room but you are breathing.
There is nobody here but you are held.
You have broken and the world is breaking and we will always rebuild.

Do you hear me, love?
We will always rebuild.

The post We will always rebuild (a poem for the grieving) appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.