Red Thread

Woven through the fabric of our life are many threads, just one thread remains unbroken. Love, destiny, life. The old man in the moon weaving two twin flames together or the scarlet cord in holy words or the red vein pulsing through us, long enough to circle the globe. Sometimes visible and sometimes just below the surface and sometimes never acknowledged at all. Harder than hope and heated as the heart, which burns hotter than the sun.

The Sun is a Road

The sun comes in through slats, soft as a leftover feeling saved from other mornings. Roads that don't lead back but lay side by side by side somewhere in me, strumming.

Brushing the Edge of the Diamond

Sometimes it surprises me like a brush on the shoulder. Sometimes it is weighty and I am struck by its edge. Like a diamond that spins around me, bouncing refracted light off a song, a face, a phrase, a photograph. Sometimes I am blinded by it. Sometimes I catch it, sometimes I don't. Sometimes the sharp edge cuts across my heart. Sometimes it passes me by like a carousel. Sometimes I realize I am curled in its center. 

Facets of our lives angle in so many directions of the past, the present, and the future. Are we all caught in the center of our own diamonds? Are we all like the mythological Argus? Multiple eyes fixed on separate memories, separate questions, separate hopes? And we wonder why our vision is so hard to follow some days. 

And what of those rare moments when we are fully present? When the edges are so sharp, the clarity startles us? When something sends every eye in our soul rolling in its socket to see that one thing, a truth, an epiphany. And for one brief brush, we look, we see. The ruses are shattered, they fall into a thousand pieces at our feet, pool together, and then swallow us back up again in its center.

Poetry Reading at Ghost Ranch, AROHO 2015

Motherlore

Your voices hum in my pen, my throat, my sister's laugh. Your bones bear up my face like perianth, like my desk holds your photographs. 

You know the ardor to push out life. Lay your mottled hands on me while I sleep, overlapping from mother over mother like petals folding in for the night. 

Press motherlore into my soul. When I wake, I will unfurl and make plain the pistil I give to the world.

August 22, 2014 AROHO Radical Brief 

Ophelia

Ophelia is an artist. She paints with acrylics and sometimes with her own blood and the ashes from her cigarettes. I had Hostess Twinkies with her today at a safe house. I had to park my car a few blocks away and come through the back door. I can't tell you where because her john is looking for her. If he finds her, he will starve and sell her again. If he does, she will begin cutting herself because seeing her own blood reminds her she is still alive. Don't judge Ophelia for smoking while she is pregnant with a pedophile's child, she is a recovering addict.

Today, I asked Ophelia if I could take her picture with her paintings. She robotically nodded and mutely waited for me to snap, her eyes downward. I lowered my Nikon, realizing she was used to doing what she was told. Unlike the men who have used her, I did not like that power. It soured in my gut. It was later, after I bought her art and after we shared Twinkies, God thoughts, and a solitary cigarette, that Ophelia pointed at my camera, insisted I pick it up, and came up with her own idea of a photo.

I don't usually eat Twinkies and I don't smoke cigs. But sometimes, we should. Sometimes the alternative falls like a Splenda packet from our mouths. Sometimes we need to leave some things to God. Sometimes we need to taste the burn of her humanity on our own lips, remember her scars with her, and then buy her art.

Not because it's good. Because it's been painted with her blood and her ashes. 

Article released for Hadassah House, 2012. 

Serendipity

Interruptions to my plans that made better ones.

Found Haiku, OnBeing

Migration

  A way of moving through life while it moves through you.

Horizon

It is the line I never stop reading.

All original works belonging to Sun Cooper and not to be reprinted without permission. 2007-2020