death of a koi

all the work was done and now 

she could rest

grabbed a pack and a beer 

sat down by the koi pond

counted the fish

heart stopped. it did not add up

a raccoon took out a beloved one of 

fifty some years and older than her

she cursed at the gods

and the gods they

laughed

#katyamills

some say reckless

leaning into the winds 

they faced the storm with

some say reckless some say 

selfless abandon

by the gods 

they were allotted

the power to save

#katyamills

notes on writing

i no longer wait to be inspired to write. one need not wait for rain, to irrigate the land. i block off time every morning to string the words together in a way that captures how i feel. might be 5 words. might be 500. keep digging, you will ultimately find water.

then i turn to some larger body of work – #wip – occupying my every day mind and heart. focus on the immediate work in progress brings me back in alignment with the gods.

stay

K. June 2017

our gods were different and we broke into hard candy and cell phones chirping to be hacked. China and Germany were already in there, coded in sugar of maples from Canada. the world turned pink and tasted of Pepto Bismol, when all the acid washed away, I asked you and you did, Stay

journal

Journal # 07.20.16

My new blanket, sea green, provides comfort against the squalls of the world. Wrapped in soft waves of blended cotton, I am hard to convince. Maybe it’s the celebrity twitter fiascos and heat waves, the political conventions. Maybe it’s the people who let me down. Maybe it’s the many gods, the guns, exploitation and fear. Maybe it’s my great expectations. Endorsements bought and traded and ringing in the ears, racial tensions expansive in the cities in the nights. How we go about reaching out for our implosives. Some of us are down on our luck.

 I am up on my luck and not scared to get close to someone in need. Outside of car troubles, empty wallets, degradations, and syncope spells… loneliness awaits the life of living on couches in cars on corners. Nobody should ever feel left completely alone. If all I can offer is my company, kind words and home cooking, this is what I shall give. No one oughta feel no one cares.

I pray that you will make it and come back to us like Spring.  For now I fall back to my routine, preservation of sanity, and settle down to read of the exploits of pioneers attempting to cross the Sierra Nevadas two hundred years ago to reach our sacred, sweet valley. Thank god for family and community, and cheap, blended cottons. I had just enough fight in me, in Walmart, to open mom’s palette beyond earth tones.

solar storm strike

Soon it will be as though I never existed. I did the dishes and swept the floors and vacuumed the carpets and dusted the shelves and made the bed and paid the bills and put out the trash and wiped the counters and bleached the tub and sink and soon it will be as though I never was here. Inside the pillow the down is on the rebound, for I have left for work. The kittens are chasing shadows, inattentive to the faraway sound of classical music in the faraway light from the closet. A guitar neck edges up from a dark corner. Silent. The glass is cooling off fingerprints. Spiders are waiting for someone to open the door, will someone ever come open the door? Our houses and possessions, what will they do without us? How will the things inside continue to live? Someone will come. And then the gods of destitution, financial and economic futility. I find myself back in that different life, like a dream now – was it real – helpless and hustling …  mixed in with the street level decay, perhaps unappealing to the eye, a vibrant if desperate life demanding all of one’s innate qualities be brought to forefront without notice! The very same things gone dormant for hours upon hours behind locked doors at home, behind books, behind screens, behind bars. Comfort was comfortable for a moment before it murdered you in a stifling blanket party. I urge myself out of bed, off the couch, urgently I urge away from the television, the movie, the dinner table, the concert, the opportunities to hide and plant myself and vegetate. The clinging vine of pharmaceutical quality anything, uncut mental and emotional, physical and psychic vacation, the headphones, the lottery, eye candy, ear candy, the hailstones get bigger and pummel us down and pound us into the ground, fragments of brain lying in shards of glass and ice. The trees weep for us. I urge myself away, back into the self-generating energies, and always what I left behind me comes back again like a solar storm strike. My glasses have been shattered. I grope across the keyboard how to say it. My heart is frozen in my chest, and I nudge it toward a thaw, urgent for a season, decidedly optimistic in the atheistic static. All the gods slap my face with all their many hands, and I wake up out of blue and into time to thank you. I make myself a solar-powered sail, a foil, a blackness to absorb, a whiteness to reflect, I reshape my fucking attitude into a redemptive puffy cloud heaving water, then I rise above it all floating, singing the screams, vomiting terror, rubbing confusion into my eyes, then looking blind into space. Thank you. I hate you life full of suffering. I love you life come and go. I will not forget or regret you made the most of me. Use me. Abuse me. Love me like you do. For I am you.

This piece was first published on my website…

http://www.katyamills.com/2015/08/solar-storm-strike.html

Neptune. god of sea

Neptune
god of sea
worshipped
at the altar

for years
we knew
the rock
Gibraltar

made of masthead
sheets and sailors
songs

crosses
bones
precious
stones

bankrolled by
imperial loans

prayers carried far
from heavy hearts
ashore

on backs of breathless
gales and whales
the salty groans
the rusty nails

out
beneath  the slender cut of
moon beneath the silent shimmering
waters
eye

beneath it all in
solvent lye

Neptune fills
an invert
sky