I like categories. I like to split things into groups, split the groups into groups. I spent the last semester taking most of my notes on a computer. When I looked back at them, I noticed the amount of space on the page wasted to indentations, to margins before bullets, roman numerals, capitalized and lower-cased letters. Here, I should offer a disclaimer: Typically when we think of someone who likes this sort of systematizing, we think of a “type-a” human being—someone who, in at least an organizational sense, really has their shit together. This is not me, and this is certainly not my poetry. My shit, on the contrary, is all over the place, and I think my brain uses categorization as a sort of desperate, manic attempt at making sense of things that, actually, one might be better off not trying to make sense of. All this is to say, when I think about from where I source my writing, I think of three main things, each of which can be broken down into subcategories which don’t really have rhyme or reason and would likely make a true organizer cringe.

Family [1] (usually associated with guilt)

my little sister

the freckles no one ever notices on her cheeks
the way she continues to grow although I beg her not to

my mother

her hands and lavender veins that come up all too often

everyone else

their bodies, the parts of them that anyone can see but everyone sees differently

Music (“the jar of gold glitter” effect [2])

songs I can sing along to because they operate within my vocal range
songs I can’t sing along to but try to anyway because they make my stomach drop into my butt (the best way I can describe that really good song feeling)
scores to movies I haven’t ever seen

What lacks (physical and intangible gaps)

I can’t…

communicate
relate
understand

We can’t…

communicate
relate
understand

Sidewalks make us trip…

because grass is growing through the cracks, filling the gaps and teaching us something about absence and/ or if there is always a something to occupy a nothing

[2] stare into a jar of gold glitter and tell me if there are words to explain the way that makes you feel. similarly, you know those fountain fireworks? the gold ones that explode and trickle liquid gold against the blackness of a summer sky for what also seems like way too short a time? that feeling, if applied to what we hear rather than what we see, is what I am looking for (or sometimes just finding without looking at all) when turning to music

[1] “family,” here meaning blood relatives, but also those closest to me, most influential in my life