She Who
By Béthany Pozzi-Johnson
lest you one day ask, let me enlighten you as to why I chose to live on an island in the middle of the Pacific with nameless neighbors beyond the bamboo within a studio nestled into the mountain which has received no friends, no one for tea, high or low, nor a jam session unending songs looping riffs and phrases nor sangha sitting time between bells using the bronze bell my mother gave me for my 34th birthday, catching wind that her daughter whose only full time employment had been as a karma yogi in the Guatemalan Highlands, years ago, who now prefers silence, the silence which the refrigerator’s hum is the greatest disturbance to, the daughter who liked small spaces like the one next to the fridge in our apartment growing up the space sealed off by a plank of fake wood, you know the kind, a plank of pressed sawdust, held together by glue, pretend wood blocking out a tiny cubby-hole she willingly dropped herself into from the top of the fridge, armed with a screwdriver, to apply tool to screw, and open up the dusty gap, making way for brooms— that daughter, who in seventh grade hid in a trunk during her book report on Houdini, to then leap forth in a flash of enthusiasm: she-who-loves-small-spaces she-who-loves-silence she-who-loves-privacy she-who-loves the-ocean: turquoise and saturated blues, or covered with storms muted lilacs and radiant gray-green expanding its heart open to the infinite reaches of the planet she loves, so she sequesters herself away to be able to see its subtle shades, hear the delicate tones, the refined voices of the sun-soaked and rustling bamboo, the incandescent peak rising out of the sea, tickled by waters and whale song; she-who-glows-with-love she-who-glows-with-glee she-whose-roof-has-become-the-star-bright-sky whose-floor-is-mountain-close-whose-walls-are salt-rich-breath-she-who-she-who-she-who
Béthany Pozzi-Johnson, winner of the Mark Linenthal Award for Poetry, holds an MA in Songwriting and a BA in Creative Writing, from San Francisco State University and Bath Spa University in the UK. She has worked as an editor, translator and astrologer, and currently lives on an island in the Pacific where she studies Gaelic and sings sean-nós.
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