Quick dance

The Future Is Like Pie #21

Lisa Maria Marquis
December 31, 2020

Happy New Year’s Eve, friends. Cheers to you for getting here, and know that I’m holding space in my heart for your loved ones who didn’t. It’s been hard, and it will continue to be hard.

I have only three things to share with you here at year’s end.

1: For some levity, please look upon this kitchen in confounding horror.

2: For some relief, please donate to the TGNC Medical Relief Fund and RIP Medical Debt.

3: For some quiet, please read a poem.

Burning the Old Year
Naomi Shihab Nye

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.