This is how we live in the frontlines of love and peace

Below is a collaboration between CAW and many wonderful folks who share their beautiful ideas in a mashup created by us — a weaving of fragments that responds to our question: How do you love, how do we live?  

With the words given to us, we formed a poem, written in multiple voices, followed by a litany, a prayer for these times. Poetry knows more than we know, and in between the lines and voices, we hope you find somewhere to live and love.

By many unnamed writers, and in no particular order: Billy, Sarah, Shuli, Eleanor, chris, Jams, Luca, Mg. Homospace, carla joy, Olivia, V. Ambrose, Esme, Jon, and Dean

This is how we live in the frontlines of love and peace

Let us livelove and make new worlds with a lovelife that is fierce 

A tenderness rooted in mutuality

Through barbs ripping our skin,

Through the terror by evil minds,

Beyond language,

Beyond time.

these are cosmic junctions where our collective passions and desires are composed

We live in different timelines I’m trying to braid them together

When scarcity and violence assumed their final form, it was no longer possible to live in this world. It was no longer possible to love in this world. When the horrors began to roil and churn, I was swept away.

I became distrust; I became fear.

I weave a spell, and when my heart is ready, when I am in place, time and body, I release the tethers; I offer myself closing, so I may open.

sudden manifestations,

through worry and peace. 

I cannot see you. I cannot hear you. Too far away from me, I cannot touch you. But I can feel you

I gather erosion-exposed clay: grey, fine and cold. Shaped, marked and cast in fire, runes emerge. Called forward with shared prayer: burn empire, release fear, share joy, heal.

I carry fragments: teeth, stone, bone and spiral formations. Tethers to memories and places, through time and times. I take them out to consult; to hold and draw. Cactus bone for uncertainty. Bison tooth and root for process. Moon snail operculum for protection. Agate for the irrevocability of change. Deer tooth for what the tide reveals. Tobacco from a dear poet’s split cigarette.

I'm grass - eat me.

I love sparsely and sparingly

I'm one person, a finite resource. I can't do all the things and I can't love all the people.

Be alone, even as you recognize being alone takes as much generative forgetting as any superpower, as magic. You forget you're the kink of earth touching itself

But in those moments when I do love, there is a spark. When love is reciprocated there is a flame that pushes back the darkness and the cold, a wave of heat that washes over everything and brings the thaw, and the possibility of spring.

I’m letting loving in: honouring my protective boundaries and opening my porous bones, to be discerning in the moment

Us two transistors slung deep in the wormhole wombs of hammocks hung under a manmade canopy. The atomic watchmaker could count this moment in fractions of a second

we continue to identify the different birds on the pond together.

You found me in the bathroom at the back end of the earth

My leg was broken, the mirror was shattered, and my radial artery's bloodflow had been diverted out into the open air, waterfalling down upon a backed up drain.

“Two drowning people can’t save each other,” I snapped.

“Then we’ll call for help together.”

I'm walking backwards down the stairs to heaven when I find you kicking up rocks in someplace else.

if we allow ourselves to be heartbroken together, if we allow ourselves to be wildly imperfect and fucked up, I think these are the bricks and the beams with which we can build bridges not only between each other, but perhaps I would hope to the future….

Litany:

I am trying to become capable of connecting with people in different states, capable of feeling grounded and connecting with people even if they’re really different from me or we disagree or they’re in a state of crisis

trying to be able to tolerate more kinds of people going through more kinds of things and still feel myself and still remember what my values are and what I want to do

trying not to bring as much of my reactivity to any given moment and seeing if I can practice more generosity with people especially when everyones going through so much and there is prickliness and flakiness and all kinds of bossiness all kinds of challenging things that can come from living in such hard times together with so much oppression and stress

—Featured photo by Sarah Comyn; one of stones by carla joy