First Post

Meet me in the margins
bring your world-weary fingers;
bring me your smile 12 hours old;
bring your favorite copy of your favorite book
the corners folded down.
Point me to the passages you have edited yourself.


We'll pull up raw full stops.
Make jagged our most precious sentences.
We'll dress down all our paradigms
and exchange naked stares over coffee.


Bring your bluffing nicotine fingers
sling me your coffee stained witticisms
Meet me in the margins and we'll dance down the hierarchies
pressure our light though each textual prism.
We'll make the angled words less comfortable


I've seen those stark glyphs cut with horizontal certainty
I've seen them hold you hostage by your own compassion
And I saw the way you never gave in.


Meet me in the margins.
Find me there,
all sputtering syllables and jellyfish skin
and I will sting you one thousand briny confessions:
    I love the way that it itches & aches
    when I want to look at everything
    But my eyes aren't small enough;
    & I think I want a microscope instead of a mouth;
    I want to listen better;
    I'd like to listen like a hawk in flight;
    I wanna listen like a rainstorm;
    I want to listen the way the Arizona desert
    opens her mouth to monsoon season.


I need a place to try out my mouth,
I have a million little teeth in my brain
that I am just beginning to call ideas.
a thousand plankton sized mobius membranes
all teething with spring loaded electrical charges.
My thoughts are what they mean when they say the words “live wire”.


So please,
open those margins to possibility of soldering circuits.
I know that you're crackling too.


Meet me in the margins
lean your voice against my voice.
I promise to cherish your vulnerability
to hold open a hollow for your wild body of dreams.


So if you can,
please meet me in the margins
and we'll soothe our mutual wounds.
Let's press together the holes in our shoes.
feel the miles seep together
matching our distance with journeys overlapping.
                              -February 3, 2012 (the original is posted here on my poetry blog)


I chose this poem  to kick start my blog because writing it re-inspired me to hold open spaces for my own voice. I want this blog to be a conversation the way I want poetry to be a conversation. And to embody the truth that radical, world-changing spirits can thrive in everyday conversations.

In the spirit of it's inspiration, this blog is all for flavoring the personal with radical, and grounding politics in everyday places. This is how I live my life. This is how I'll write my life.


This blog represents me branching out from my predominantly "poet" identity. My name is Wendy & I am concerned about a lot of things. But mostly things related to compassion and the re-humanizing of those who have been dehumanized or had their expressions censored, marginalized, or otherwise silenced.

I write about education, sci-fi, sexism, gender, sexuality, feminism, and classism/access issues. I also might write about honesty and open relationships. I want this blog to dance away the distance between the personal and the political. some of it might be pulled from personal experience, but some of it will be pulled from the mouths/pages of the news media.I hope to have a short hunk of expository something-or-other every week. Thanks for tuning in.