tracking

butter yellow morning thaws into shadowless afternoon

in grad school, one of my favorite mentors assigned a reading about gathering and tracking, by Kyna Leski. this was maybe six or seven years ago, but i haven’t stopped thinking about it. it has come to guide all of my teaching, all of my making. the long winter was a time for gathering, and here we are now, tracking.

i made a collection of poems in twenty eighteen with the title August: Storing Starch and Sugar. it is part of a larger collection of poems about summer in Iowa. this august, i have been thinking a lot about storing starch and sugar and what it means to be in summer and what it means to be in winter.

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image: June 5, 2024. an orange flower, that looks like some kind of orange poppy (to a non-expert, who is not sure if that even exists), at Hollister House Garden, with my mother and grandmother for mother’s day.