Jesus coming soon!
Deer Lake, dream logic, easter, endo
🪺 Fragments from Deer Lake 🪺
The mountains look beautiful. Yesterday I slept twelve hours. This morning I saw an otter poop right outside my window.
He comes most mornings—slips off the lake like a dress, shuffles to the exact spot, does his business, then disappears again. We often make eye contact.
I’ve been writing my dreams at first light, tryna get closer to their strange logic. As my life gets stranger and stranger, it seems increasingly instructive to listen in. This is how they look in my notebook, little floating orbs:
K, so this month I’m at a residency at Deer Lake with my friend Dani Proteau, a visual artist who primarily does photography and sculpture. Our project is called Imperfect Replicas, a visual-textual exploration of grief and the intensity of the objects that people leave behind when they die.
Here, it’s slow, every day feels like the lake: quiet, shifting, poopy.
A man sings in Italian from a canoe.
Different ducks perform different dramas on the surface of the water.
The mountains watch, snowy and distant.
Beautiful sunsets, watery Mary-Oliver language.
It’s April so I’m doing the poem-a-day challenge, sort of. I write cheesy, unfiltered things that sometimes have a good line or two. I don’t bother editing or sifting.
I’ve been thinking about how writing moves through the body—especially now, coming to terms with my endometriosis diagnosis. Since my cyst rupture, I’ve been slowly shifting my understanding of what it means to live inside a body with its own weird, disordered, inefficient logic. I have to set aside time every day to make appointments, attend them, do research—to find small ways to be more comfortable in this dream-logic body. Also, I went off my SSRI in March which is hilarious timing, but I feel good about it. Lows are definitely lower though.
The other day, I saw a man holding a sign that said Repent, Jesus (is) Coming Soon! And once I enjoyed—then got over—the silliness of it, I had one of those moments where I really felt it: the tremble of some future rupture. Not salvation, exactly, but the intensity of being witnessed—of having your pain accounted for, maybe even sanctified. Resurrection: the gore of it, gross and hot and uneven. My body, betrayed by its own cells, insists on rapture. On leaning in. On attentiveness. Judas-celled mess-of-stitches, sacred and disordered. The promise and aftermath of Easter.
I wonder what it means to be reborn—not as someone new, but as someone who finally believes their body.
I turn my attention to the day: a thread, a walk, a cigarette (which I also have to quit soon/so saddd/I love themmm), this song, a lake surface texture, a wild sentence.
💌 Writing updates 💌
I’m thrilled (and still in shock) to be joining the Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford this fall.
I’ve just finished sending out Girl Tejido, my debut poetry manuscript—now we wait.
And I’m here, at Deer Lake, dreaming and writing and making strange, tender experiments with Dani.
If you’re reading this, I miss you.
Go see a duck for me.
Ánimo guerreras, la lucha es larga!!!
<3 Dora
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