(a letter to my students from the basement of the NY Public Library)

Dangerous texts remind us to see what we

want to ignore.

They are records of who we are, could be, the worst of us,

maybe the aspirational, unfulfilled best of us.

Poetry is how we flesh out the future we

want to explore.

(sounds nice, but so what, can a poem do anything?

Can it breathe for me?)

In the archives,

I read a collection of poems in matchbooks

and I think of all the fires we can set.

Then I turn the pages of a pincushion text,

scraps of paper collected from across a day,

secreted away,

stabbed together into a book,

the straight pins pricking the fingers

of those not careful enough.

And I think about the woman who wasn’t allowed paper,

so she crafted pages from what she has, what she finds.

Her quilted booklet

makes me bleed when I pick it up.

The straight pins,

and also her words, peirce my skin.

I think about the blood inside our bodies

and the blood

on the old leather cover of the famous writer’s journal.

The archivist carefully notes, this is blood

and then I think about the books on witchcraft,

bound in mottled skin,

Is that blood too? someone whispered as we thumbed maroon stains.

Other pages in that manual on dangerous women

describe what to notice, who to look out for,

and they make us all wonder:

Why are women witches while men get to be priests? Leaders?

Charismatic, “harmless”?

Dangerous texts remind us who we are,

who we could be, where we’ve been

and where might want to go but

What can we spell with the texts of our bodies?

What books are bound in our skin?

Children

and poetry

is how we flesh out the future we

want to explore; our children are poetry.

Write something dangerous, read it to a friend,

be something dangerous, a friend.

Be a matchbook poem, a pincushion memoir,

a lead-laced journal, a spell book, a cookbook, a book of names

and ideas.

Be a poem of skin and bone.