Month: January 2026

jan 31/RUNGETOUTICE

4.7 miles
river road, north/south
17 degrees
20% snow-covered

More sun, warmer temperatures. Heard lots of honking and chanting on the lake street bridge — people protesting the occupation, I’m guessing. The river looked like a patchwork quilt with squares of white and gray and brown. Heard more birds, wondered if they were singing or calling out a frantic warning. Saw another “Make Good Trouble” snowman by the trestle. Encountered at least a dozen different walkers or runners or bikers. Tried to wave to everyone.

It is such a strange time — so sad and scary and beautiful. The government is actively trying to destroy democracy and the president is more ghoulish and vile than the villain in an sci-fi movie, and yet, all around Minneapolis people are creating the world they want to live in. Practicing love, believing in dignity and rights and the law, caring for their neighbors.

Get Out Ice

The pubic statements against what is happening here continue to grow. Here’s one from Jessie Diggins, the Olympic gold medalist in cross-country skiing from Afton, Minnesota. She posted it on Facebook this morning:

I want to make sure you know who I’m racing for when I get to the start line at the Olympics. I’m racing for an American people who stand for love, for acceptance, for compassion, honesty and respect for others. I do not stand for hate or violence or discrimination.

I get to decide who I’m racing for every single day, and how I want to live up to my values. For everyone out there caring for others, protecting their neighbors and meeting people with love – every single step is for you. YOU are the ones who make me proud.

jan 30/RUNGETOUTICE

4 miles
river road, south / lena smith blvd, north
8 degrees

Ran south above the river and to the 44th street parking lot. Crossed over to Lena Smith Boulevard, then north to 33rd. Did 3 loops of up the small hill, which takes about 1 minute, then down it, then rest until the start of the next minute. This is a good hill to start on — not too steep, not too long, but enough to feel like I’m working a little harder. I felt strong on the hills; everything before it was sometimes okay and sometimes hard. Maybe it was because of the wind and the cold and the hard asphalt. Every surface that wasn’t covered in ice or snow was stained a dull white.

10 Things

  1. the voices of kids on the school playground, at recess
  2. a cerulean sky — empty of clouds, but not helicopters
  3. birds! chirping and twittering and chatting with each other
  4. empty benches
  5. the river’s surface: a pattern of white and gray and light brown
  6. the parkway was thick with cars, some going too fast, at least one too slow
  7. an empty parking lot
  8. running by Dowling Elementary, it seemed deserted — were they participating in the General Strike day?
  9. some of the path was bare asphalt, some was soft snow, some was slick snow, and some was slippery ice
  10. my shadow joined me today — hello friend!

Get Out Ice

Scrolling through Facebook, I found this example of non-violent resistance, love, and support of local businesses:

So proud of my community showing up for Central Ave this week. This is Lunch Club. We started with 15 people at Hodan three weeks ago (highly recommend the Jay Crack fries). Just a way to recognize the hurt that a part of our community is experiencing in Trump’s war of terror.

30 people joined us at Chulla Vida the next week (llapingachos!). And we brought more than 60 lunchers to Holy Land last week (Chicken Lovers Combo every time).

Tomorrow we’re supporting La Colonia. Gather at noon and stay as long as it takes! A different restaurant every Saturday.

Every business on Central Ave is hurting. Our customers and staff (legal residents) are afraid to leave the house. Many have been harassed by ICE. Several have been detained even with legal documentation. A few have even been shipped to Texas or who knows where. These are people of color.

Trump is waging a race war. This is retaliation for Minneapolis protection of vulnerable people in defiance of the MAGA cult. And it ends when this administration is gone. It ends when we engage with our neighbors and come to see each other as human beings. We need more community and less polarization.

Until then (and ever after) we will be here.

Join us. Join the nonviolent resistance. Be a part of something that makes a difference.

Recovery Bike Shop

My favorite bookstore, Moon Palace is in Lithub! Everything We do Matters: Minneapolis’ Moon Palace Books is a Hub for Anti-ICE Resistance

29 jan/RUNGETOUTICE

3.5 miles
trestle turn around
7 degrees
40% snow-covered

Another run outside! Yesterday, I ran south, today I ran north. RJP had told me that someone had made a snowman then put a sign on that read, “Make Good Trouble” next to the trestle. Of course I needed to go see and document it!

Make Good Trouble
Shadows and Snowman / Make Good Trouble

I love the shadows of the tree and the snowman and the message of making good trouble. 15 years ago, I would have posted this in my TROUBLE blog. Now, I’ll post it here. Could Sara from 2011 have even imagined we’d be living through the occupation of a fascist government?

It was a nice run. Slow and relaxed. At first, I was alone out there, but soon I encountered some other walkers, 2 runners. The river surface was cracked white, the sky was blue. I started by running through the neighborhood. Running by a house that was being worked on: empty outside. Had they stopped because of the cold, or was it ICE? Then I heard a drill from inside.

A favorite moment: as I neared the trestle, I heard a loud whooshing sound. Difficult for me to see, but I think it was a train traveling across the trestle! That doesn’t happen very often.

Get Out Ice

Lithub is featuring several Minnesota writers in the series, “Letter from Minnesota”. Here are some bits in a letter from the Minneapolis poet Michael Kleber-Diggs:

1

I am aware of a neighbor who will come to your house, take your trash and recycling to the curb, then, after they’re emptied, return and bring them right up to your door or put them back in your garage.

In times like these I write so I won’t forget. So I’ll keep hold of details that might otherwise slip away. I want to keep hold of exactly what it was like back in 2026.

Normalcy is Impossible Here. Normalcy is Violence

I was not aware of this until I read this letter, but I’m not surprised. On my local Signal group, some neighbors reported an ICE vehicle in our alley one day. When I bring out the trash, I make sure my ID/passport is in my pocket. I tell the kids that even though they hate wearing their coats, they must whenever they go out right now because it is possible that they could encounter ICE and be forced out in the cold for a long time. I read about the internal memo giving ICE permission to violate the 4th amendment and break down doors without a warrant; I see the picture of Hmong elder wrongly dragged out of his home in the 20 degree weather in his underwear. I’ve stopped wearing my pajamas in the morning while I drink my coffee; I put on warm clothes right away.

2

History is rhyming, not repeating; 2026 isn’t exactly like 2020. The violence is more specifically designed to advance authoritarianism. It’s conspicuously race-based. It’s more xenophobic; our Somali siblings are really going through it. The government’s violence and hate is intentional. It’s a feature not a bug, and all of it is out in the open.

Within the broader terror campaign, the administration is focused on the most vulnerable. They’re harming the elderly; they’re going after children. They grab up kids in front of other kids at the end of the school day on purpose: theft plus trauma, violence amplified.

Normalcy is Impossible Here. Normalcy is Violence

Talking with neighbors during the candlelight vigil, one of them mentioned how someone was taken at their church. He explained: ICE waits for people to come for food donations, then they grab them before they can make it inside.

Love #10 / 29 january 2026

Our message to all:
Violence & Intimidation
have no place here. 
100% of this space
is reserved for love.

Words taken from the social media statements by the following local businesses: Parkway Pizza / Norseman Distillery / Olio Vintage / Red Balloon Bookstore / Reverie Cafe + Bar

jan 28/RUN

3.5 miles
under ford bridge and back
7 degrees
50% snow-covered

A run outside! Cold, but not even close to some of my coldest runs in past years (I’ve run in a feels like temp of -20). I haven’t run outside much this month, so I forgot how to dress for it. Today, too many layer. Hand warmers and foot warmers and 3 shirts under my jacket.

Hardly anyone else on the river road path. A few walkers, a few bikers, any other runners? I can’t remember, but I don’t think so. Heard some cars honking in the distance. ICE must be nearby.

The river was white and looked cold. The parts of the path that weren’t covered in snow were stained white from salt — was it salt or something else? I know Minneapolis Parks is committed to not putting down salt because it ends up in the river. Most of the walking trail was buried in snow. Only one stretch, just north of 38th had some bare asphalt. I walked on it, then got stuck when it was covered in snow again. The snow looked brittle and made a sharp crack as I stepped on it. Mostly it wasn’t deep, but when it was, it was uneven and awkward to walk through. Empty benches, sharp shadows, blue sky. A strange feeling all around: unsettled.

Alice Oswald Interview, part 3

[on the idea of a Homeric formula] That seemed entirely wrong to me, this habit of draining the meaning out of the poems, of seeing orality as a machinelike way of composing. I was enraged by being given statistics about how many times a certain word or simile is used. To me, it felt clear that it was a more entranced way of composing, thta the poets would get into a kind of intoxicated state where they could incredibly, almost magically, find exactly the right adjective, the right meaning for the right place in the right melody.

 an interview with Alice Oswald

Get Out Ice

1

a fragment from Facebook: Not deescalate but:

abolish
withdraw

prosecute
witness

2

Love #9: After

We are still here.
We are still loving our neighbors, 
still supporting our community, 
still caring about the constitution.

We are staying warm, 
staying strong, 
staying impossible to ignore. 

Read this poem this morning and remembered when my mom died, how a colleague took me out for coffee and told me that grief is a continued connection to the person you lost. I’ve often thought about her words, and I use them to embrace my grief.

Sisyphus / Sharon Lessley

As if weightlessness were aspirational―
what nonsense―

                                  your death,

        a stone 

I can only hope to shoulder forever. Imagine
it gets better―

                                  what nothing

        am I left with

then? Even despair carries a particular
charge: that fantastic

                                  last whiff of lavender

      detergent

imprinted on the collar of a holiday sweater―

                                    mama,

the mourners are assembling. March me 
up that hill …

Your death a stone I can only hope to shoulder forever.

jan 26/BIKERUNGETOUTICE

bike: 35 minutes
run: 1.35 miles
outside: 13 degrees

Read a few pages of the Alice Oswald interview in the Paris Review then watched the Las Culturistas podcast with Amy Poehler while I biked. I love Alice Oswald and I love Amy Poehler. So good! I don’t have time right now, but when I do, I want to post some quotes from the podcast episode.

Listened to the first 3 songs on TS’s “Reputation” while I ran. It felt good, and I felt more relaxed than I have in many days. I think it’s the combination of almost being done with my 2-week cold, and news that some Republicans are taking back some of their more extreme statements in support of ICE. But, I know that we’re not close to being done with this nightmare.

1

I think there are places you build in the imagination that become stable. I love the metrical forms, the sonnet and the ballad, but to me the real thing is what I call patience, the idea of creating your own stability within a length of time. I responded to that when I discovered Homer. There was something in that poetry, because it was orally composed—I could feel Homer making forms of patience within the poem, lines coming back and coming back and then coming back. It makes habits. There’s something steady and reliable about its way of moving, while at the same time, it loops wherever it wants to go, and remakes itself.

 an interview with Alice Oswald

2

I could feel straightaway that Homer was quite different from the other types of poetry I’d read. I can remember, when I was told that he was blind, having this dizzy feeling of what a poem would be if you were hearing it and speaking it rather than reading it.

 an interview with Alice Oswald

This year, I want to keep pushing at this question of what a poem would/could be if you’re hearing it and speaking it instead of reading it? I want to do more poetry that does just that.

Get Out Ice

A slightly more helpful, less terrifying day than Saturday. Some Republicans are speaking out against the shooting of Alex Pretti, Walz talked to Trump and he agreed to send Greg Bovino somewhere else; Rand Paul is asking for ICE to testify at the hearing next month. Only very small successes that are possibly only offered to get Democrats to pass the budget and give ICE even more funding by the end of this week. Don’t do it Democrats!

I surrounded myself with the loving words of other Minnesotans again this morning, and created 2 more love poems. Here’s one, both are posted here.

Love #6: How to Be a Better Person

Hold space for pain, anger, confusion.
Make hope happen for others.
Open the door for love, close it in hate’s face.
Wear boots, a lot of wool, scarves, and mittens. Bring extras to share.
Believe in small acts: they matter.
Demand the exit of ICE from our beautiful cities.

jan 25/BIKERUNGETOUTICE

bike: 35 minutes
run: 1.5 miles
outside: 0 degrees

Still too cold and too icy (and ICE-y?) outside, so more time in the basement. Watched the men’s 2024 Kona Ironman while I biked and tried to focus on my posture and my knee lift. As always, I’m wondering why my left knee often gets stiff after biking for a while. Listened to Lawrence, Acoustic-ish while I ran. I tried to empty my mind, but bad thoughts crept in: how far will the federal government go to keep power? I’m always thinking of Heather Cox Richardson’s refrain: it’s going to get worse before it gets better and her prediction that it will go one way (the people win) or the other (democracy in the U.S. dies) by March — or did she say May? Ugh.

Get Out Ice

Still reeling from the terrible murder yesterday, but going to my block’s vigil and witnessing how Minnesotans stayed peaceful and people around the country/world expressing outrage, is helping a little.

I read a post on facebook about how hundreds of Target employees have signed a letter pushing the CEO to do more against ICE. In the post, it was mentioned how people are going to Target at the same time, buying salt, the immediately returning it, as a way to disrupt business. This action is modeled after an earlier one at Home Depot: buying ice scrapers then immediately returning them. Is this effective? Looked it up and found this Guardian article which describes many different actions against Target, including the salt:

On Martin Luther King Day, SURJ-TC said it had gathered 70 people at a Minnesota Target to “interrupt business as usual”. Participants repeatedly lined up to purchase salt, return it and repeat the process as a way to hold up lines, representing a desire “to melt ICE”, the organization wrote online. The organization plans to repeat this tactic at five Twin Cities Target stores until the company speaks out against ICE.

sit-ins and salt purchases: activism takes many forms

Alice Oswald

Started an interview with Alice Oswald in the Paris Review (thanks to my library, which makes it possible to check out current issues of some journals online!). So far, she’s talking about teaching Palestinian kids via Zoom and then getting arrested for protesting against the UK’s designation of Palestine Action as a terrorist group. When she’s asked if she planned on being arrested when she joined the protest, she said she did and:

One direct consequence of allowing genocide, though, is that, in order to excuse it, you have to pass all kinds of laws that destroy democracy from the inside. I’d been angry for a while, and confused about what to do, and as soon as I was decided, I felt a relief.

Paris Review

This is how she describe the arrest:

They read me my rights and asked whether I knew I was breaking the law, and did I want to come easily or did I want to be an obstruction. And I said, ‘I’m happy to be arrested, because I don’t believe it’s an offense,’ and that I didn’t want to come easily, and so I lay down and imagined my heaviest self. I was imagining I was made of gold or lead, just enjoying the difficulty the police were having picking me up.

Paris Review

I love this idea of imagining herself as her heaviest self, as gold or lead. Sometimes I like imagining myself as a boulder — I turned into some poetry lines: be a boulder/too big to/lift too much/trouble to/move.

When asked if she’s always considered herself an activist, she says:

Gilgamesh, the Illiad, the Bible, Paradise Lost — all the poems that profoundly shake me are really about how we manage kings. The texture of a life devoted to poetry is activist, in the deep sense. Quite often it’s not activist in the superficial sense. You come at poetry with the momentum of having failed. It’s only when other communication is absolutely impossible that a poems has to exist.

Paris Review

Yes! I feel that with my poetry about vision loss and the new ways I’m learning to see and be now.

Wow, there is so much in this interview that I love, so much about Oswald that I love, including her discussion of insects as speaking with wings instead of mouths. And then there’s this bit about an old woman, “an angry old battle-ax,” who had only ever been one village over:

I used to go up the road just to talk to her, and during one of these conversations she broke off because she’d heard a bumblebee go into a foxglove and change the tone of its buzz. She said, ‘Did you hear that? I love that sound.’ I remember thinking, If you don’t move away from a village, that’s the sort of thing you notice. I made a determination at the point that I wanted to be that sort of person.

Me too! Oh, thank you Alice Oswald for saying such beautiful and interesting things and making me imagine the current world otherwise for a few minutes!

jan 24/BIKERUNGETOUTICE

Yesterday was a beautiful day in Minneapolis, filled with fierce love as thousands of Minnesotans (I heard 50,000, but I’m not sure if that’s accurate), marched downtown. Today was terrible; another Minneapolis resident was executed by ICE. I’m struggling to write any words right now, but I wanted to at least write that.

bike: 30 minutes
run: 1 mile
-5 degrees

I hoped that working out might help me feel a little less overwhelmed and it did but not much. Guess I’ll have to try more deep breathing.

jan 22/BIKERUNGETOUTICE

bike: 33 minutes
run: 1.5 miles
basement
outside: -4 / feels like -22

Brrrr! And that wind! I was outside this morning, shoveling, but otherwise I’ve been inside. Devoted much of the day to surrounding myself with other Minnesotans words of love and solidarity, then turning them into a cento.

At the start of my bike, I watched the first episode of “Pluribus.” So good! Then I got to the lab scene with the rat and I realized it was too much for me right now. I found an old, “from the vault” 2018 triathlon on youtube and watched that instead. By the end of the bike, my left knee was feeling stiff, like it sometimes does. Hopped on the treadmill and listened to “Mood: Energy” while I ran. The first song was, “Harder Faster Stronger” and somehow it made me feel more anxious instead of less. But, Ok Go’s “Here it goes Again” helped.

Get Out Ice

Here’s what I posted on my new page, Love, Minnesota-style:

After Consulting with our Team, We Are Choosing Love / Sara Lynne Puotinen

This is a call to everyone. This is a call to anyone. 

Here, now, in Minneapolis, our hearts are open.
Here, now, in St. Paul, our hearts beat strong.
Here, now, in Minnesota, we are choosing to take the day
and fill it with resistance, solidarity, reflection, love.

Let us be clear: we are not powerless. 

We are not hopeless. 

Of course we have hope!
And we will find each other.
We will gather,
we will keep moving.

We must raise our voices 
to acknowledge, 
now is not okay.
ICE’s ongoing occupation is fascism.
We are afraid, we are angry, we are exhausted.
And we will continue to show up
and to fill the streets with love.

This is not about choosing sides,
this is about choosing love.

On Friday, January 23, 2026, there is a call for a general strike against ICE: ICE OUT MN. No work, no class, no shopping. As of 22 jan 2026, more than 500 local businesses are participating. 

Many of them have declared their show of solidarity through social media posts. For the past few days, I’ve been gathering their words and turning them into new poems. 

In today’s (1/22) practice, I typed up 3 pages of the words, printed them out, then sat at my desk and read and reread them. I wrote down words and phrases that I noticed on another blank sheet of paper with a jumbo pencil. Then I shifted those around and turned them into new lines. I don’t think it is finished, but I’ll post it here anyway.

jan 21/RUNGETOUTICE

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
22 degrees / light snow
100% snow-covered

Today I ran outside. I decided that even though it is true I can’t always effectively assess the situation because of my vision, it is also true that it is unlikely I will encounter any incidents beside the river. And it was true, and I was fine. That doesn’t mean ICE isn’t around. Just before I went out running, a black SUV drove down the cross street with 7 or 8 cars following and HONKING their horns.

I also went out because I’m finally, after a week of a low-grade cold, starting to feel better. Hooray! The river was so beautiful — open and covered in snow — and it felt so good to be moving outside. It’s much easier to be running outside by the river, than downstairs in a dark basement.

There were a few people on the trail, mostly walkers, a biker, at least one other runner.

10 Things Heard

  1. kids playing on the Dowling Elementary and Minnehaha Academy playgrounds — screaming, laughing, having fun
  2. the falls barely falling over the ledge because the creek was frozen
  3. sirens
  4. the train bells as the light rail train passed through the station
  5. hammering and pounding coming from the construction site at a house on Lena Smith Boulevard
  6. honking geese
  7. from my favorite viewing spot at the falls: voices below or across the gap
  8. more voices below, somewhere on the winchell trail — some adults and kids
  9. the soft sizzle of snow flakes hitting my jacket
  10. an electric singing as it slowly travelled past on the road

Not too long after I got back from my run, Scott and I went to Costco to stock up on stuff before Friday’s strike of no work / no shop / no school. It was surprisingly normal in the store. Later, on the freeway, driving home, we passed by the Whipple Building and thought about all the people suffering in there right now. From the outside, just a tall building with lots of windows, a place that I have never noticed before, only seeing it as another generic office building. And inside, it’s filled with terror and hate and injustice and a bunch of under-trained goons.

Get Out Ice

This morning, hours before my run, I gathered together statements from local businesses, announcing their intent to be closed on Friday in solidarity with the no work / no shop / no class strike. I pulled out some words and phrases which are starting to take shape. Then I went running and talked with RJP and had to go shopping. so I haven’t returned to them yet.

While I continue to work on this poem, here’s a bit from one of the restaurants, Nicos Tacos:

On this day we are choosing to stand with our community, to stand for dignity and for humanity. No one should live in fear for simply seeking a better life. Strong communities are built when immigrants feel safe, seen, and supported. Let Nico’s be a home to all, and a reminder that we all belong here.

Nicos Taco Bar

And, here’s a running list of the businesses participating. As of 5:00 pm today, there are 382 businesses on it!

jan 20/BIKERUNGETOUTICE

bike: 33 minutes
run: 1.5 miles
basement
outside: 11 degrees

Cold outside, ice on the paths, ICE on the streets. Even if the conditions were better, is it safe for me to go out for a run on my own? Since I am white, probably, but my vision is bad. It’s good enough to navigate the trail — cracks, bumps, curves — but not to get a sense of when I’m in danger. I can’t read signs — words, gestures, signals — and I can’t see faces or identify people well. Out by the river, if someone stopped me, would I be able to tell if they were ICE? If they were threatening me. I don’t know.

Am I being too cautious? Unsure. For now, I’ll go to the Y or the basement. I miss winter running.

Watched Jennifer Lawrence on Good Hang with Amy Poehler while I biked. It’s sponsored by Spotify, which I wish wasn’t the case. I thought it was funny when Amy asked Jennifer what her favorite song was and Jennifer said, ever since the radio went away, I can’t find new music. Where do you find it? I was expected Amy to answer with the obvious: I listen to Spotify. But she didn’t; she said she finds stuff on tik tok then buys it.

I listened to Mood: Energy again while I ran. Pressure / Billy Joel | No Sleep ‘Til Brooklyn / Beastie Boys | Final Countdown / Europe | Iron Man / Black Sabbath. When I wasn’t thinking about ICE instead of iron, I heard a line about boots of lead and thought of Emily Dickinson and “I Felt a Funeral in my Brain” — And then I heard them lift a Box/ And creaked across my Soul/ With those same boots of Lead again / Then Space begin to Toll. Love that poem!

Get Out Ice

Earlier today, writing about my bike and run yesterday, I was feeling a bit extremely overwhelmed by the headlines I encountered on Facebook. I sat with those feelings for several hours. Then, I saw this video from the Minneapolis Art Sled Rally this past weekend, and I snapped out of the deepest fear:

Minneapolis Art Sled Rally / 17 January 2026

Such love, as joy, as whimsy, as defiance! I had an idea: I should post an expression and example of Minneapolis / Twin Cities / Minnesota love every day. These examples are not suggesting that things aren’t bad (they are), but are claiming space for a powerful counter-narrative to fear and defeat and Minneapolis-as-lawless-hellscape: Love! solidarity, care, joy. I’m going to try and post something on facebook every day, something I haven’t ever done. I used to be much more comfortable with social media, and tweeted all the time. Then my vision declined a lot and I lost interest. Then I became too intimidated by it, afraid that I’d do something wrong — this is not an unfounded fear; there are many buttons/directions posted that are very clear to others, but are invisible to me and my cone-starved eyes. But, I have decided to try again, to be brave and share these examples with others.

I have also decided to archive all these examples on a page in my “How to Be” project on UN || DISCIPLINED: Love, Minnesota-style

jan 19/BIKERUNGETOUTICE

bike: 10 minutes
run: 10 minutes
basement
4 degrees / feels like -5

note: I’m writing this first section the next morning because I exercised too late to write it then. I’m writing it after reading several headlines/accounts, watching a tiktok that describes how ICE agents are driving around looking for people who look black, brown, or asian to take. Without any cause, they pull these people out of their cars and take them away, leaving the car abandoned, sometimes still running, in the street. Or they break down their doors, pull them out of their houses, half-dressed (in below zero weather), and take them. I read a headline, posted by Senator Amy Klochubar,”St Paul mayor Kaohly Her “livid” after ICE wrongly targets family friend, escorts him undressed into cold and one from the city of St. Paul putting a temporary ban on towing abandoned vehicles. Unreal. Oh, and this was also after reading the message Trump sent to Norway explaining why he wanted Greenland (he didn’t get the Nobel Peace Prize) and Heather Cox Richardson’s discussion of the significance of this — could this be the final straw? the one that removes him from office?

A quick bike and run in the early evening. Too late and too cold to be outside, and probably too dangerous. Being sick has also made me not want to go outside. Because I’m inside, I haven’t witnessed a lot of ICE activity. Although, even if I was outside, there’s a good chance I wouldn’t see it with my bad vision. I know it’s out there. They target schools, taking parents/kids who look black or brown or Asian, and we live less than 2 blocks from two of them. Just yesterday they were spotted driving through the alley near the end of school.

I watched a running youtuber’s latest video while I biked, listened to a Mood: Energy playlist while I ran. Didn’t think about much. I don’t remembering noticing much either. One thing: after getting off the bike, before putting in my headphones and firing up the treadmill, I could hear the music Scott was playing upstairs while he made popovers. I asked him later what it was, something by Debussy. That’s his comfort music, I think.

Get Out Ice

note: I wrote this on 19 jan, in the morning

Yesterday, I had a great idea: gather together statements by local businesses on social media about what’s happening here, then turn it into a cento poem. And that’s what I did this morning! So wonderful to spend time with words of solidarity and love (and not hate).

What is happening in Minneapolis is terrifying; what is happening in Minneapolis is full of hope. Earlier today, or was it yesterday?, someone posted on facebook about how NBC needs to work on its sloppy reporting, then gave an example: a reporter suggesting Minnesotans are reeling from the protests. Reeling? Not from the protests. The non-violent and fierce ways so many people in Minneapolis and St. Paul are bearing witness and standing together against ICE is inspiring and beautiful and powerful embodiments of love. Here’s my poem:

Love

Love is not
business as
usual.
Love is not
a business.
Love is
a warm place
to land.
Generous
open
big enough
to hold
all who sit
who stand
who show up
for each other
even in fear
and in grief.

Love is a
space where
our hearts our
mouths our feet
our hands
our eyes
activate
love making
love living
love resisting.

In this heavy
moment, we
want to be
clear: we
no longer
accept hate.

And with
these words, we
affirm
what we know
always
to be true:
We love, we love, we love.

The statements I used come from the following businesses: Lynette, Hai Hai, Dogwood Coffee, Fireroast Coffee, Arbeiter Brewing, Venn Brewing, Mother Earth Gardens, Bull’s Horn, Black Coffee and Waffle Bar, Wrecktangle Pizza, Carbone’s, Longfellow Grill, Merlins Rest.

I’d like to do more of these. I’d also like to use this practice as a way to: develop a rich, messy understanding of love, to counter the narratives that suggest Minneapolis is violent and dangerous and needs/deserves to be occupied and punished.

jan 18/BIKERUNGETOUTICE

bike: 30 minutes
run: 1.5 miles
basement
outside: 100% snow-covered / 12 degrees

I’m inside partly because I’m congested, partly because it’s cold, and partly because I’m a little more nervous to be out there alone these days. I miss the gorge. If I’m feeling better tomorrow, maybe I’ll go out for a short run. At the start of the bike, I struggled to stick with something to watch. I started with The Terminator — too dystopian — then switched to the first season of “The Traitors,” which I’ve been meaning to check out (for some reason I can’t quite remember). It was too much about manipulation and tricking people and not trusting anyone. Finally I landed on the first season of Schmigadoon. Will I return to on my next bike? I’m not sure. I love the show, I watched it when it came out, but I’m not sure I want to watch it again.

For the run, I put in a Mood: Energy playlist. It started with Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs,” then “Hip to be Square,” then a song I can’t remember, then ended with “Bust a Move.” A strange mix. The run wasn’t too hard, but it wasn’t easy, and I sweat a lot.

Even though I was in the dark, windowless basement, and it was boring on the bike and the treadmill, it felt good to move. The crud in my throat cleared up some, and I felt less tired. Ah, I love moving!

Get Out Ice (written earlier)

Still a little sick — crud in my throat, creaky voice, sinus headache — but feeling much better. I’m so proud of my city and my neighbors and the mayors of Minneapolis (Jacob Frey) and St. Paul (Kaohey Her — the first Hmong American mayor!) and my governor and senators and the attorney general and the congressional representative for my district (Ihlan Omar) and so many of the businesses nearby. All standing up with a fierce love for the people of Minnesota. Such beautiful and powerful expressions of resistance and love!

Keeping the Receipts

Speaking of neighborhood businesses, I’ve been struck by how powerful expressions of love and solidarity are in this moment, and how damning silence is. At the very least, I think a restaurant/business should express a concern for their own workers and acknowledge a need for the safety. This is not a political statement; it is a statement of concern and care for their workers and the community. Scott, FWA, and I were talking about it, and Scott mentioned examples around the city that he has encountered/read about, like, “No ICE” or “We love our immigrant neighbors.” I wrote about Lynette’s instagram statement two days ago and here are some other statements by nearby businesses:

1

At Merlins, hospitality isn’t just what’s on the table. It’s how we show up for the people around us. We stand with our immigrant community. We stand with those feeling shaken, overwhelmed, or unsure. And we stand for the innocent people who deserve to feel safe, seen, and welcome.

If you need a warm place to land, a moment of normalcy, or just to sit among neighbors who care—our doors are open. Always.

Community first. People first. Humanity first.

Merlins Rest Facebook post / 15 jan

2

Closing Early Wednesday January 7th

Out of an abundance of caution we will be closing early today to help protect our neighbors, guests, and staff as we stand with our community.

We truly appreciate your understanding and look forward to serving you again soon.

Hi-Lo Diner / Facebook post, 7th January

3

Everything going on in our city is horrific, that is true. It is also true that we are resilient and adaptable and fueled by our love and care for one another. We will continue to show up, stay alert, and support the growing needs of our community.

Mother Earth Gardens / 14 january

4

You know where we stand. We are stronger together! We know how familiar this feels. We know how to activate our hearts and stand with our community. 

We will always create space to support our neighbors who have been participating in the “good trouble, necessary trouble”, to gather and be together. 

Join us on Saturday, bring your ICE Whistle in solidarity for one free beer with the community. Thank you Southside for taking care of each other and showing up!

Arbeiter Brewing / Instagram Post / 10 January

5

Our posture & sentiment as we stand alongside & amidst our hometown:

May our collective hearts be moved by loss & injustice,
our eyes see past the vain theatre of division.

May our hands open widely in generosity towards all others,
our feet move us in the direction of restorative peace.

May our minds construct new pathways for welcome & belonging,
our mouths speak with empathy & devotion.

May we not forget,
We are all bound to each other – siblings across this earth.

Dogwood Coffee / Instagram post / 10 January

The nearby pub that we’ve been haunting for the past few years — literally haunting; we go there at least once a week — has made no statement, is only using social media to advertise their specials. Scott has reached out to them several times asking why they haven’t said anything about what’s going on. So far, no response. It’s (long past) time to only haunt places that are here for our community.

And, here’s another example of love and support for the community. Hai Hai is not in my neighborhood, but it’s a restaurant I’ve been wanting to go to for almost a year. Now is the time — just not next Friday, when it’s closed for the protest!

Hola Arepa & Hai Hai will be closed on Friday, January 23 in support of the general strike to remove ICE from our cities and get justice for Renee Good. It is important to us to stand with our community in fighting against these injustices and to allow our teams the opportunity to protest or to take a day off for much needed rest and reflection. 

Choosing to close on a Friday night in January is not an easy decision for a small business during a notoriously slow time of the year, but we feel it’s important to take a stand and acknowledge that as long as ICE is occupying our city, it’s not business as usual.

Hai Hai / Fadebook post / 27 January

This is not business as usual. Yes! They continue with some useful ways for supporting them:

If you want to support us and your other favorite restaurants, please choose a different night this week as your Friday. Taco Wednesday date night? Sunday family brunch hang? Or buy a gift card for a future visit. It’s a difficult time for Mpls & St Paul small businesses everywhere, so every bit counts and your support means the world to all of us and our teams.

an idea! Tomorrow, gather a range of statements from local businesses and turn them into a cento poem about love.

Silence Will Not Protect You

As I think about the importance of publicly acknowledging what is happening, I keep thinking about Audre Lorde and her powerful essay, “The Transformation of Silence Into Language” from Sister Outsider. I studied this essay/book 25 years ago in grad school and taught in 15 or so years ago.

My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.

What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?

We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.

Beast Mode Mary

I continue to be shocked/delightfully surprised by the relevance of Little House on the Prairie to life in the US these days. Last night, Scott and I watched “The Bully Boys” (season 3, episode 9). Three brothers — 2 adults, 1 teenager — move into Walnut Grove and begin conning, intimidating, assaulting Walnut Grove. They buy stuff from the Olesons on credit, but never pay; they “buy” lumber from Mr. Hanson, then sell it to another of his customers; they “assault” Ma (in the scene they harass her, make her drop her eggs, restrain her, but there seems to be a suggestion of even worse things happening); they beat the shit out of Pa when he confronts them, breaking 3! of his ribs; and the youngest brother punches Mary and gives her a black eye. Reverend Alden counsels his congregation to turn the other cheek and to welcome the men. Mary tries to cover up what happened and to avoid Bubba — that’s the kid-bully’s name. But near the end, during recess, he steals her school tablet, and that, along with learning what has happened to Ma and Pa at the hands of the older brothers, is a bridge too far for Mary. She goes Beast Mode on Bubba — tackling and punching him. When he fends her off, another girl tackles him, then another. Finally, all the girls — maybe a dozen — jump on him and whoop his ass. Silent, weakened by fear and separation, they suffered alone at the hands of the bully. Together, they were strong and defiant and powerful. Inspired by the girls, Reverend Alden calls out the men at church as doing the devil’s work, pins one of them against the wall (Beast Mode Reverend!), and rallies the men of Walnut Grove to run the bullies out of town — Take only what you brought with you! As they march out in disgrace, the women sing, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory. No, I don’t agree with everything in this episode, but wow, was it wonderful to watch it and recognize what Minneapolis is doing right now (just one example for yesterday)

One more thing: I love this woman.

jan 16/RUNGETOUTICE

3.1 miles
ywca track

Ran at the y today. In the locker room, after the run, as I was pulling out my flip-flops which my sister gave me almost 10 years ago, someone else in my row of lockers called out: I love your flip-flops. They’re fucking awesome or their metal or something like that. I responded, thank you! I feel like a badass when I’m wearing them! I needed this exchange today, to connect with a stranger in this way.

my flipflops

an image remembered: running at a corner, I saw my shadow to the side, then felt another one behind me but no one there: a double shadow! Me and my shadows. It was funny because I was listening to my shadow playlist as I saw this, including the song, “Me and My Shadow.”

Get Out ICE

A march organized by a right-wing influencer is planned for Saturday, Jan. 17 in Minneapolis, according to the Minnesota Star Tribune. The event “is organized by conservative influencer Jake Lang, who has been advertising the march on X. In a post, he called for ‘crusaders’ to ‘take back’ Minnesota from Democrats. … Minneapolis Police Inspector Bill Peterson reassured residents at Tuesday’s meeting in Minneapolis that they have prepared for the event. He also noted the city is ‘hyper aware’ that the Cedar Riverside neighborhood could be a target.”

All around, confusion and mis-information. Many people are imploring others to not take the bait, and to avoid this march, which seems to designed to incite violence and lead to justification for further intervention by the Trump Administration. Others encouraging direct action in order to protect the Cedar Riverside neighborhood. It seems like a no-win situation.

jan 15/SICKICEGETOUT

I feel really knocked out today. My resting heart rate, which is usually around 55 bpm is 90 today. We’re renewing our passports online and have to take pictures of each other for the application. Yikes. Between feeling wiped out from the flu (or a cold, I’m not sure), and wiped out from the ICE occupation here in Minneapolis, I’m sure our pictures look awful. My hopeful take: a few years from now, when we’ve made it through this terrible time, we can look back and joke about how awful we looked and felt in these pictures.

ICE GET OUT

Erica Chenoweth

Scrolling through Facebook earlier today, then instagram, seeing who is posting something about ICE, who is not. Thinking about what silence means in this moment, and what a difference (at least to me) it makes to see posts acknowledging that what is happening is not okay. Also thinking about supporting businesses that are not only speaking out but actively helping, like Lynette:

We’ve gone back and forth about how transparent to be on this app. But you’re our people and we’d like you to know that one of our beloved staff members was taken this weekend. This person has legal US status, she’s a mother to a young child, works hard, came here to live the American dream and again has done everything right.

We have many ways to support. The number one being to show up for us. At Lynette we employ 40 incredible individuals, and every time you show up to services, you’re supporting them directly.

We need you now more than ever to keep us going. Please be patient with us, as we are navigating a lot of change and stress of a kind we’ve never dealt with as a community.

We’ve added some additional direct support. You can bring in bagged donations, show up to make signs, show up for conversations, bring your neighbor out for pizza and a smile.

As always, your support means the world to us and we will continue to do our best to support community as well as our family here at Lynette.

instagram post

jan 14/SICKGETOUTICE

note: I’m writing this the next day, when I feel even crappier than yesterday, both from sickness and the news that Trump might invoke the insurrection act and bring in troops to Minneapolis.

Woke up with a cold or the flu or something that made me too tired or run-down to exercise. I must really be sick; I rarely don’t run just because I have a cold.

The following was written yesterday morning, before the sickness really hit and before an ICE agent shot a person in the leg in North Minneapolis and things got even more tense.

a bridge / some steps

bridge 1

The idea of a bridge has been appearing a lot lately. First, in some favorite lines from a poem gathered this past year:

It’s not accurate to say we know
what we see. Truth is, few understand

the physics of color.

Vision

tends to end up being an imposition
more than a recognition of how the fog

consumes much of the bridge, as if nothing
is able to fully connect one side

of the Thames to the other.
(A Lexicon of Light/ George Looney)

I re-wrote these lines and turned them into a poem that offered a bridge between inner and outer color. It’s unpublished, so I’ll only post part of it:

And Vision 
can’t help us describe 
how a bridge can be 
consumed by gray fog 
yet still link two shores — 
the inner and
the outer.

It’s delightful to go back to this poem and re-read the entire thing. My version is based only the favorite lines I gathered; I didn’t remember that it was about a painting by Monet and an actual bridge over the Thames River!

Here is how Looney describes the bridge at the end of the poem:

The bridge
is more than a construction passed over

by trains and imbued with shifting colors
with the time of day. It becomes, for the artist,

a lexicon of light and all that light does
to this world.

A lexicon of light — a dictionary, a set of meanings in a language

And for me, the bridge is the link between my inner and outer world of color, where the outer world is mostly gone, replaced with the rich language (created through gathering poetic lines about color) of the inner.

bridge 2

I’d return to three thoughts:
you; the “world
we wanted to go out into,
to come to ourselves into”;
& the right form
to bridge two subjects apart
(Tall Flatsedge Notebook/ Brian Teare)

Am I reading this bit right? Does he want the bridge to separate the two thoughts/things, the you and the world we wanted to go out into? Yes, I think so. Just before these lines, he writes:

At its smallest
: matter has no ideals” : taking off my socks, I find
several flatsedge seeds hooked : no split of self
from self

So, a bridge as delivering us somewhere else, creating space and a distinction

Bridge 3

Far from something to fear, I’d say that poetry is an art form that allows us to redefine our relationship to fear by stepping in close to the facets of the world that we don’t like, or don’t understand. Often enough, these are the same things. Often enough, it is the illusion of extraordinary distance, blurring out details and shrouding motives in shadow, that makes us fearsome to one another. Not always, of course, but often enough. It’s not always possible to test out such a theory in life, but poems are built to bridge distances of all kinds: between people and events separated from one another by time, geography, temperament, and belief. A poem can even bridge the distance between the living and the dead.

Fear less / Tracy K. Smith

I read this bit about the bridge — bridge as linking, lessening distance — last night. It’s in the first chapter, “Fear Less A poem is a Tool for Careful Listening,”

steps

As I think about the bridge — literally and figuratively — I also think about how it gives us a good vantage point from above where we can see farther, but it also keeps us at a distance from what’s below us. Running on the lake street or the franklin or the ford bridge, crossing from one side to the other, I feel removed from the gorge. It becomes less of a place that I feel/hear/smell/touch and more of a landscape, only seen and admired and assessed like a work of art. To get deep in the gorge, I need steps. My favorite are the old stone steps, 112 of them, that lead down to a floodplain forest and then Longfellow Flats. Steps are less horizontal and more vertical — they lead us down — within, beside, among — into the muck (what Lasky might call, the muck of making). Of course, steps can also lead us out, but I’m more interested in how they bring us in.

jan 13/RUNGETOUTICE

4.2 miles
lena smith – river road, north / river road – lena smith, south
42 degrees / wind: 15 mph
75% puddles, sloppy ice

Yuck! Not as fun running today, dodging puddles and slick strips of snow/ice on the trail. Warmer, but windier too. Parts of the run were great — I felt strong and efficient and sturdy. Other parts of it were not as great — a few times the path was covered either in a deep puddle or uneven, slippery ice. I am glad I went, and grateful to get to see the river — which was completely open, not frozen at all — but all of it was covered in a thin fog of fear. I heard sirens a few times and wondered if someone was being taken. Just before I went out for my run, Scott told me that someone had been taken just around the corner from us sometime in the last week.

10 Things

  1. city workers trimming trees, blocking the street
  2. a thick sheet of dirty ice covering almost half of a street — from curb, to the middle
  3. black chickadees singing, cheese burger cheese burger
  4. one biker, mostly biking in the road but on the path for a brief stretch
  5. the sound of sirens across the road, lasting less than a minute
  6. the wind, howling in my ears
  7. a dog barking off in the distance
  8. the sound of water splashing up as cars drove through puddles
  9. a gray sky with no sun, then blue with sun, then gray again
  10. city workers gone, a big pile of freshly trimmed branches — narrow ones — near the curb, 3 slender orange cones near the sidewalk

Get Out ICE

There are too many terrible headlines today about what’s happening with ICE in Minnesota, and it’s one of those days when I feel too tired to talk about them. I’m tired because of the headlines, because of the gray, sloppy weather, and because I tried (unsuccessfully, for now) to use a big ice breaker to break up the slippery ice on our small driveway. I chipped away at it for 30 or 40 minutes and had some success with a small patch, but I didn’t want to injure myself (because: 51 year-old bones and joints), so I stopped. I’m sure there’s a better (as in, more effective, less hard on my body) way to deal with this ice. — there’s a metaphor in there, I think. Anyway, I can’t force myself to post details from Trump and his cronies’ terribleness today, so instead, here are two videos that I’d like to watch repeatedly of the mississippi where the ice has mostly broken up and is floating, along with foam, downstream: here, the ice is getting out.

foam and ice, getting out / 5 jan 2024
ice on the mississippi / 5 jan 2024

Fear less / Tracy K. Smith

Thank goodness for the poets! Last week, I checked out the e-book version of Tracy K. Smith’s memoir and reflection on the value of poetry, Fear less, and just now I read some of the first chapter. Hopefully tomorrow I will post some quotations and respond to her powerful words, but for now, I’ll just mention that I’m reading it.

jan 12/RUNICEGETOUT

4.25 miles
lena smith boulevard
34 degrees
path: 100% ice / road: 5% ice*

*there are so many reasons why ICE is terrible and needs to get out and should be abolished. Here’s a small one: I like thinking and writing about winter ice — how it covers the trails, what it sounds feels looks like, the different forms it takes. But now that word overwhelming means: Immigration and Customs Enforcement and hate and evil. I want my ice back! Well, maybe not the thick, jagged ice that is currently cover the entire river road and made it impossible to run on today.

Today begins the 10th year of this log. I’m so grateful that I was able to run outside to celebrate it. It has been a whole week since I’ve been able to run outside above the gorge: too slippery on the trails and sidewalks. Today the roads were mostly clear, but the paths were not. So, I ran north on Lena Smith Boulevard until it ends at Minnehaha Academy on 32nd, then turned around and ran south until I hit 38th, then back north to 32nd, then south up the hill. Halfway up, I decided to do the hill again — hill repeats! So when I got to the top (it’s a small hill, so it only took 1 minute to climb it), I turned around and ran back down it. At the bottom, I took a 45 second break then ran up it again. I did that 5 times. It felt good!

During one of my breaks, I noticed a woman across the road, on the trail, holding up a big white sign. I couldn’t read what she had written on it, but I imagine it was Abolish ICE or something about Minnesotans standing up for each other because all the cars were honking. It was wonderful, hearing all the honks, and her loud, Thank You! after they did it. I started imagining different ways I could do something like her during my daily running practice. I decided a sign or banner would be too awkward. Next I thought about pinning a sign to my jacket. Then, the idea: work with RJP to design a shirt or something I could wear that offered some sort of resistance to ICE and/or expressed my love for my city. Should it just say LOVE? Whatever it is, I want it be big and brightly colored and easy to see/read. RJP stopped by and I talked to her about it. She’s excited!

Ice Get Out, Know Your Rights

Know Your Rights

Another more accessible version:

KNOW YOUR RIGHTS:
WHAT TO DO IF YOU’RE STOPPED BY POLICE, THE FBI OR IMMIGRATION
Police are supposed to keep us safe and treat us all fairly, regardless of race, ethnicity, national origin or religion. This card provides tips for interacting with police and understanding your rights. Note: Some state laws may vary. Separate rules apply at checkpoints and when entering the U.S. (including at airports).

IF YOU ARE STOPPED FOR QUESTIONING
Upon request, show police your driver’s license, registration and proof of insurance. If an officer or immigration agent asks to look inside your car, you can refuse to consent to the search. But if police believe your car contains evidence of a crime, your car can be searched without your consent. Both drivers and passengers have the right to remain silent. If you are a passenger, you can ask if you are free to leave. If the officer says yes, sit silently or calmly leave. Even if the officer says no, you have the right to remain silent.
YOUR RIGHTS
▪ You have the right to remain silent. If you wish to exercise that right, say so out loud.
▪ You have the right to refuse to consent to a search of yourself, your car or your home.
▪ Regardless of your citizenship status, you have constitutional rights.
▪ You have the right to a lawyer if you are arrested. Ask for one immediately.
▪ You have the right to record police actions as long as you do not interfere with their activities and are not breaking any other law. Stay calm. Don’t run. Don’t argue, resist or obstruct the police, even when you are innocent or police are violating your rights. Keep your hands where police can see them. Ask if you are free to leave. If the officer says yes, calmly and silently walk away. If you are under arrest, you have a right to know why.
You have the right to remain silent and cannot be punished for refusing to answer questions. If you wish to remain silent, tell the officer out loud. In some states, you must give your name if asked to identify yourself. You do not have to consent to a search of yourself or your
belongings, but police may “pat down” your clothing if they suspect a weapon. You should not physically resist, but you have the right to refuse consent for any search. If you do consent, it can affect you later in court.

ACLU Minnesota

jan 11/RUNICEGETOUT

3 miles
ywca track

Still too slippery out on the sidewalk, so back to the y for another track workout. I don’t like running at the track as much as outside, but it’s better than the treadmill in the basement or nothing. Today it was crowded with lots of maneuvering around clueless walkers. I wasn’t angered by it, but it still took energy to speed up and shift and make sure I wasn’t running into anyone. I listened to my moment playlist and tried to stay relaxed. This year, running on the track feels strange — I struggle in the beginning to find my rhythm and my legs are sore when I’m done. But even though it was awkward and not nearly as fun as being by the gorge, it felt so good to be moving and getting my heart rate up.

Before offering so more context for future Sara, here’s a post from a former student that offers a beautiful description of the love here in Minneapolis:

LONG LIVE MINNEAPOLIS…

“…And the restaurateurs refusing ICE service;
The elected officials demanding access to detention facilities;
Long live the mutual aid runners organizing food caravans;
The hospital staff working to keep ICE away from patients and attorneys working to keep ICE out of our courts;
Long live our students pelting ICE with snowballs when they invade school grounds;
The teachers & school admins offering our youth hybrid & e-learning;
The noise makers keeping ICE awake in their hotels all night;
The generous folks handing out samosas, whistles, legal aid, hand warmers, & coffee at rallies;
Long live the immigrant rights orgs, working overtime for weeks to conduct ICE watches, coordinate legal service & comms among separated families, & prevent evictions under occupation;
The Signal coordinators fielding thousands of requests for rapid response alerts;
The artists opening their studios for poster-painting & sharing free downloads & screenprints of their images;
The city council leaders joining the frontlines despite utter exhaustion and risks to their own safety and wellbeing;
The veterans showing up at Whipple to denounce ICE’s abhorrent conduct;
The small business owners speaking out, at risk to their livelihoods;
The journalists upholding truth in the face of massive, state-sanctioned media repression & rubber bullets;
Ordinary folks braving single digit wind chills to lift their voices & march for hours;
Long live every immigrant to Minneapolis, & every child of immigrants.

Despite the truly unfathomable terror and violence unleashed by Trump and his supporters:

There are too many resistors to count. Too many resistors to thank.

We have The Many.”

More context for ICE in Minnesota

In my effort to educate myself about what’s happening in Minneapolis right now, I decided to look for more information about the latest ICE push by the US government here.

(6 January) The Trump administration has launched what officials describe as the largest federal immigration enforcement operation ever carried out, preparing to deploy as many as 2,000 federal agents and officers to the Minneapolis area for a sweeping crackdown tied in part to allegations of fraud involving Somali residents.

2,000 federal agents sent to Minneapolis area to carry out ‘largest immigration operation ever,’ ICE says

The fraud allegations have been simmering here for at least the last month, becoming very nasty, and getting so bad that it has led to violence against Somali residents:

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and its Minnesota chapter (CAIR-MN) today called on law enforcement authorities and public officials to take concrete actions to protect Somali-American day care centers and businesses that have been targeted with threats and harassment as children return to these centers in the wake of the holiday season ending.

A controversial and largely-debunked social media video of a conservative influencer showing up outside of day care centers in Minnesota has sparked a wave of copycat incidents in which white supremacists and social media influencers show up at similar institutions and demand access to children.

CAIR, CAIR-MN Call for Protection of Somali-American Day Care Centers Facing Copycat Harassment

It has also put so much pressure on Governor Walz that even though he is not directly connected to the fraud claims, he is not running for office again next year. The general sense among many Minnesotans is that the state, and Minneapolis and St. Paul, are being punished because Walz was the vice presidential candidate.

Along with the increased presence of ICE here,

The Trump administration has escalated its campaign against alleged benefits fraud, freezing social services funding for five Democratic-led states and announcing a new fraud-focused position in the Justice Department that will report directly to the White House. Officials also point, without evidence, to immigrants as the primary drivers of the fraud.

Influencer, White House welfare fraud claims are distorted, but the system has risks

added an hour or two later: Just read Heather Cox Richardson’s update on Facebook and this part was particularly pertinent:

Trump and his allies have singled out Minnesota in large part because of its large Somali-American population, represented in Congress by Omar, a lawmaker Trump has repeatedly attacked, from a population Trump has called “garbage.” As Chabeli Carrazana explained in 19th News, shortly after Christmas, right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley posted a video that he claimed showed day care centers run by Somali Americans were taking money from the government without providing services.

The video has been widely debunked. In 2019, a state investigation found fraud taking place in the child care system and charged a number of people for defrauding the state. After that, the state tightened oversight, and state investigators have conducted unannounced visits to the day cares Shirley hit in his videos, where they found normal operations. Shirley claimed fraud when the centers would not let him in, but child care centers lock their doors and obscure the windows for the safety of the children, and would not let a strange man inside the facility to videotape.

But Trump used the frenzy to justify cutting $10 billion in antipoverty funding to five states led by Democrats—California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York—only to have a federal judge block his order yesterday. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins promptly announced she was withholding $129 billion in federal funding from Minnesota, alleging fraud.

Jane Hirshfield

Revisiting Jane Hirshfield’s wonderful poem, “Interruption: An Assay” that I posted on this day in 2024 and thinking about her definitions of interruption in relation to non-interruption, then disruption, then a break — break as a pause, a momentary stopping / break as a rupture, a split, a gap — a break in the trees, a break in the limestone.

What is the difference between interruption and disruption? Looking to Hirshfield for an answer, or as Mary Oliver puts it, a suggestion, I found a discussion of the periphery vs. the center. Wow!

INTERVIEWER

Your line “less to solve than to speak of what needs solving” reminds me of Chekhov’s statement, “Art does not provide answers, it can only formulate questions correctly.” What does this mean for an artist in our specific moment? One of your earlier poems, “In Praise of Coldness,” begins with another quote from Chekhov, “If you wish to move your reader, you must write more coldly.” It is a beautiful poem. “In sorrow, pretend to be fearless,” you say. “In happiness, tremble.” How do you relate to this statement from Chekhov now, after having written equally beautiful—but not at all cold—poems in Ledger that do, I think, provide answers, despite what you’ve said. I’m thinking of poems such as “Let them Not Say,” for instance, or “On the Fifth Day.”

HIRSHFIELD

Perhaps an answer in the realm of the arts is different from the right or wrong solution we bring to a problem in chemistry or mathematics. Arts “answers,” but in that word’s other sense of response, of reply. Both the poems you’ve named are bells rung hard. They summon attention. When you see a fire, you can’t stay silent.

I, though, do feel in them Chekhov’s coldness. A poem’s meaning requires an engineered, structural soundness, not so different from that of a building or bridge. Language, syntax, verb tense, soundscape, the placing of ink and ink’s absence on a page, are material things, just as steel is. Words experienced as comprehensible, consequential, do follow rules, though they are rules that a writer, like an architect, can test, press toward their outer limits. New materials bring new shapes of meaning and feeling. Those two poems feel strongly, but they are not an uncontrolled weeping. They argue, in the old-fashioned, rhetorical sense of that word, for something that matters, and make their argument in the ways art mostly does—from the side. I think it’s a good thing that poets work far from the center of our celebrity- and economics-driven culture. From the periphery, you can see more of the whole. From the center, any view will be partial. A poem is not a frontal assault, it is the root tendrils of ivy making their way into the heart’s walls’ mortar.

A Poem is Not a Frontal Assault: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield / The Paris Review

From the periphery, you can see more of the whole. From the center, any view will be partial.

A poem is not a frontal assault, it is the root tendrils of ivy making their way into the heart ‘s walls’ mortar. Yes! Hirshfield has another poem, In Praise of Being Peripheral, that I am reminded of here. Now I want to give more attention the peripheral, but later.

jan 10/GETOUTICE

Today Minnesotans spreading love, expressing grief and anger and a message, Get the Fuck Out Ice. Refusing to turn away. Not forgetting, remembering the larger context in which these acts of terror are being done by ICE and the Trump Administration. Here’s one example of that context:

Fort Snelling

Yesterday, RJP told me that ICE had taken control of a part of Fort Snelling. My immediate reaction: that’s terrible! It was a concentration camp in the 1800s! This article bolsters my initial response:

Wednesday, the FBI took control of the H.B. Whipple Federal Building at Fort Snelling, a federal complex adjoining Minneapolis and St. Paul. The news broke at 2 p.m. when an immigration judge announced that she had to stop a hearing because the FBI was taking the building over and everyone needed to be out by 3 p.m.

Fort Snelling: The Advance Guard of Federal Invasion Since 1805

Today, Fort Snelling is doing what it was designed to do: acting as a site from which Washington can project violent power over anyone who gets in its way. Dakota people saw this in the US-Dakota War of 1862, when the U.S. deployed soldiers from Fort Snelling to do battle on the Dakota. When it forced Dakota women, children, and elders into a concentration camp down the bluff from the fort. When it expelled the Dakota from their homelands and oversaw the largest mass execution in U.S. history. 

And we are seeing it today as federal agents fan out from Fort Snelling into neighborhoods, seizing peaceable people, and reserving the right to shoot anyone, like Renee Nicole Good, who gets in their way.

Fort Snelling: The Advance Guard of Federal Invasion Since 1805

Fort Snelling. Land stolen through a fake treaty. Land once used for a concentration camp, now as a detention center. Today, three members of the house, U.S. rep. Omar, Craig, and Morrison were initially granted then denied access to the facility:

“What happened today is a blatant attempt to obstruct members of Congress from doing their oversight duties,” Omar said. “When we appropriate funds as members of Congress, we are expected by the public to do oversight, because the public requires their money be used with transparency and accountability, and what happened today is ICE agents deciding that we were no longer allowed to fulfill our constitutional duties.” 

U.S. Reps. Omar, Morrison and Craig denied access to immigration detention facility at Fort Snelling (Sahan Journal)

jan 9/RUNGETOUTICE

3.1 miles
track
ywca

I would have liked to run outside. It was sunny, not too windy, and almost above freezing, but the sidewalks were way too icy. I tried to go out for a recon walk earlier today and only made it to the end of our sidewalk before realizing the surface conditions were terrible. I had to turn around and come home. Bummer. Fresh air might have relieved some of the anxiety I’m carrying in my body from what’s happening. At least I was able to go to the y and run on the track. Moving and working up a sweat helped some, I think.

Since I was looping around a track, I decided to listen to my “Wheeling Life” playlist.

10 Track Things

  1. an orange bucket was out on the track in its yearly spot, catching drips from a pipe
  2. a short man with white hair was walking backwards in the inner lane
  3. the gym below was empty
  4. not too many people on the track, all of them quiet
  5. in the quiet, I could hear my feet striking the track surface — I think my striking feet were the loudest thing on the track — thwack thwack thwack
  6. a woman walking fast, wearing a shirt that reminded me of scrubs — had she just gotten off a shift at a hospital?
  7. some people follow the written rules and walk in the innermost lane, some ignore them and walk in the middle (which is for runners) or in the far left lane (which is for passing)
  8. just remembered: just before entering the track, passed the woman in a scrubs shirt putting air pods in her ears
  9. very few runners — while I was running, only me and Scott — after, while walking, one other runner
  10. inside it was warm (good) and very dry (bad)

Working on a tiny (24 word) poem tentatively titled bio-regionalism, and I was thinking about something I recalled hearing from Stanley Tucci in his series on regions in Italy and their food: he said that a region/neighborhood was/is defined by anyone who was in earshot of that neighborhood’s church bells. I looked it up and found this helpful definition and video from Rick Steves. The term is campanilismo:

During Tuscany’s medieval and Renaissance prime, this region was a collection of feuding city-states dominated by rich families. To this day, Tuscans remain fiercely loyal to their home community, and are keenly aware of subtle differences between people from different cities, towns, and villages. (Italians have a wonderful word for this: campanilismo, meaning that a community consists of the people within earshot of its bell tower — campanile.)

source

I love this idea of defining a community, your home-place, by its bells. My bells are the bells of St. Thomas, just across the river.

jan 8/BIKERUNGETOUTICE

minneapolis update: peaceful protests last night, more protests today, Noem/Trump are attempting to escalate it, Walz calls for peaceful protests and “good trouble”, FBI takes investigation away from Minnesota, public school is cancelled for rest of the week after ICE enters campus and threatens staff/students at Roosevelt High School (the threatening was yesterday, the cancellation begins today).

And, just discovered this: Renee Nicole Good was a poet who won an award for this poem: On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs

bike: 30 minutes
basement
run: 2 miles

Icy outside, so inside on the bike and the treadmill. Important to get in some exercise for stress relief. Watched clips from the US figure skating championships while I biked, listened to Mood: Energy” while I ran. Songs: Panama/ Van Halen; We Got the Beat/ Go Gos; I did Something Bad/ Taylor Swift; My Sharona/ The Knack — an at least one other song I can’t remember now. It felt good to move, especially for the second mile of my run. A few times, I felt like I was floating. The thing I remember most: my bobbing shadow off to the side, in the shadows, near the old coal shoot — yes, my house is old enough to have a coal shoot in the basement.

Wow, this poem:

[from the time we were talking]/ Henri Meschonnic

Translated from the French by Gabriella Bedetti & Don Boes

from the time we were talking
to stones
we took on their
meaning their time and now
their memory is in us it
walks in our footsteps it moves
in our warmth we no
longer distinguish
between what they say and us
the time of the stones is us and
we are full of cries that we
leave in our wake like
stones
holding on to each other
to find among them our
path

This morning, barely one day after a woman was shot and killed by ICE here in Minneapolis, this poem speaks to me in a different way than it would have the day before. Before I would have thought about the time of stones as living in geologic time or talking to/with/as stones as echoes or Kafka’s parable of Prometheus in which Prometheus becomes part of the rock (“According to the second, Prometheus, goaded by the pain of the tearing beaks, pressed himself deeper and deeper into the rock until he became one with it.”) but now I’m thinking of the stones — like Emily Dickinson’s granite lip — as tombs and the dead talking (or trying to) talk to us:

If I couldn’t thank you,
Being fast asleep,
You will know I’m trying
With my Granite lip!  

jan 6/SHOVELSWIM

shovel: 20 minutes
slushy, icy, thick snow
33 degrees

Yuck! It’s an awful mess out there on the sidewalk, the roads. After he got back from his walk I asked FWA if it was, a. doable and b. worth it to go out and shovel. He said yes to both, so I did, but now I’m wiped out and sore and not sure if it was either of those things. Looking out my window right now at the street, I am disheartened. One big soupy, slushy mess. Will more of it melt and be cleared out before it freezes again? I hope so.

A quick note about my ankle: crisis averted! The RICEing (both resting icing compressing and elevating AND playing around with acronym) must have helped. My ankle feels fine today!

Sara from 4 jan 2026 asked me to let her know if anything big and terrible happened today. Not yet (as of 4:49 pm), but there’s a lot of talk about invading Greenland and I keep seeing the headline, The Danish PM says a US invasion of Greenland will mean the end of NATO.

In other shitty news: I noticed, while clearing trying to clear the deck that a wide stretch of snow under our crab apple tree has been turned into a port-a-potty by the two rabbits who visit every night to feast on fallen apples. Very gross! Some scat here, some scat there, scat scat everywhere. The snow is glowing brown — I’ll have to try and get a picture of it, because my words can’t quite convey the color or the grossness — a picture probably can’t either.

update: I pointed out the tree/rabbit/shit situation to Scott and we agreed it wasn’t all rabbit scat and it wasn’t glowing brown. A lot of it was discarded apple bits from birds or squirrels or the bunnies and the snow beneath the tree’s wide canopy was glowing a faint orange, not brown.

swim: 1.75 loops
123 laps / 55 minutes
ywca pool

Decided to swim without stopping until Scott showed up at the end of my lane. I was hoping to go longer — distance and time. Maybe that can be next week’s goal: to get to 140 laps, which is 2 miles. I’d like to do it in 1 hour. It felt great to be swimming again.

shadows: the afternoon light coming in the window created lots of shadows on the pool floor. Today I decided that it looked less like the floor was dancing and more like it was crawling. As I swam, I suddenly thought of the line from Raiders of the Lost Ark: why does the floor move? Other memorable shadows: the lane lines on the shallow floor, then the lane lines casting a shadow at the far end, all the way up the wall, from the deep bottom to the top. Such a cool image. I liked admiring it every time I neared the far wall.

10 Pool Friends

  1. the yellow! grout between the bright blue tiles on the pool floor in the middle of each lane — I never noticed it was yellow and not white — is it, or was it just dirty?
  2. the bright blue tiles marking a cross at the end of each lane — usually I read them as black or dark navy
  3. some crud on a tile beneath me
  4. a small red chunk of something that started on the pool floor a lane over, near the spot where it slopes down, then slowly shifted down each lap — tile after tile — until it made it to the bottom and then under me in my lane — I was fascinated by this red thing and enjoyed tracking it — I prefer not knowing what it is/was
  5. a guy in black swim trunks 2 lanes over that I raced (in my head) and beat
  6. someone in fins one lane over
  7. the silver trail of bubbles that the swimmers’ fins made as they kicked
  8. a lifeguard in a BRIGHT yellow jacket
  9. a swimmer in green swimming on their back, doing some sort of reverse breaststroke
  10. a swimmer in red doing freestyle then sidestroke then walking then kicking with a kickboard

Halfway through, I swam breathing every 5 strokes and tried to think one word each time I surfaced to breathe: 1 2 3 4 5 light 1 2 3 4 5 tile 1 2 3 4 5 window 1 2 3 4 5 door 1 2 3 4 5 tree — Nothing that interesting . . . yet . . . I’ll have to keep working at it, see if I can open myself up to more words. The bigger challenge: can I remember them? Nearing the end of the swim I was getting into a groove and thinking about how swimming for almost an hour without stopping is good practice for longer runs/marathon training. I was also thinking — okay, now the fun starts — as in, I’ve swum enough today to get into a flow state, what could happen if I kept going? What doors might open for me? What wonderfully strange ideas could I have? What delightfully tiny poems could I craft? I didn’t get to find out because Scott arrived and my swim was over, which was fine for today. I’d like to experiment with this longer swim this winter, see what I can do with it.

Little House Update

A few days ago, we made it to season 3 of Little House on the Prairie. We both knew something had shifted in the wrong direction when we heard the opening theme song: season 2’s funky 70s bass line had been replaced with a cheesy swing.

The first episode guest-starred Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash. It was enjoyable, but had lost some of the dark edge of realism that we enjoyed in seasons 1 and 2. Episode 2 was the beginning of evil Nellie, which is camp-tastically awesome, but lacks a grounding in a real time and place. It was exaggerated and over-dramatic, shifting the story away from the lives of people trying to not die in the unforgiving frontier of the 1870s, to an epic battle between the flawed and feisty goodness of Laura and the pure, irredeemable evil of Nellie Oleson. Nellie and her twisted, unhinged glare. Nellie silent and still, lurking at the window. Nellie and her old-fashioned temper tantrums, one on the bed, wailing and squealing and pounding her fists into her pillow; another pacing the room, shrieking and breaking porcelain dolls on the wall, smashing an expensive dollhouse with a hammer on the floor. I do find Nellie’s antics to be entertaining, and get some pleasure in loathing Mrs. Oleson, but I miss the quieter, darker depictions of the difficult frontier life that we witnessed in seasons 1 and 2.

After Little House we’ve been watching an episode of Love Boat from season 1. We’re enjoying it. Such a contrast to Little House. It makes me want to watch the whole line-up from a 70s evening.* I’ll have to ask Scott what that would be; as a kid he memorized the tv guide and probably remembers exactly what was on and when. That would be a fun and enlightening project, to revisit the 70s values/perspectives/preoccupations represented in prime-time tv that we were both raised on.

*perhaps the more accurate recreating of our early kid viewing experience of these shows would be to figure out the reruns that ran back-to-back on TBS.

Wow, this entry went on a ramble! Before ending it, I’ll just add that I have been shocked by how relevant the themes in Little House are right now. Yes, I have problems with the show — too much God-talk and not enough discussion of what it means to live on stolen land less than 2 decades after the civil war — but the hope and resistance and the desire for social justice of the 70s shapes these stories in ways that I had forgotten ever existed (because: Reagan). I am resisting the urge to devote an hour or more to offering specific examples of what I mean here. I don’t have time today.

jan 5/RUN

4 miles
river road, north/south
30 degrees
100% loose snow

Loose snow. Difficult to move through. For almost all of the run, it was fine. I was careful, deliberate, light on my feet. On the last stretch, running up that a hill, I ran faster to pass a woman with 2 dogs. She was walking fast and I was irritated? Was she doing something worthy of irritation? She and her dogs were walking in such a way that took over most of the path and forced me into the uneven snow. And, she seemed to speed up as I neared her, like she was racing me. Not long after passing her, it happened. I rolled my ankle in the loose snow. oh shit, I exclaimed. It was fine for the rest of the run, and it seems fine an hour later. I’m RICEing (rest ice compression elevate) to be safe. To increase the odds that all will continue to be fine, it’s time for some fun with medical terms: RICE

R I C E

  • routinely, I crave eggplant
  • rust is corroding energy
  • rapt, I consider everything
  • rippled ice concerns Edgar
  • reciting Issa causes enlightenment
  • rabbits implore, cancel Easter!
  • rooted in creative excess
  • restive, impatient, contrary, edgy
  • rude individuals can’t empathize
  • ribald, irritating, caterwauling, egomaniacs
  • Rosie is counting elements
  • Rankled, I cry, Enough!
  • river island causeway eddy


Other memories from the run: the bells of St. Thomas playing a Christmas song, but which one?; crows cawing steadily, and syncing my steps to their song; several cars swinging wide to avoid splashing me with the melted snow; waving twice at a guy in a red jacket — once on my way north, then again on my way south; stopping several times to walk when the snow became too soft and uneven; small splashes of yellow dotting the snow, some bright, some faded; the road was bare and wet, the trail was not; feeling strong as I lengthened my torso, stretched out of my hips, opened my chest, and increased my cadence.

On This Day: January 5, 2025

Found these beautiful lines from the wonderful Carl Phillips while revisiting 2025’s January 5th entry:

Moving With: Carl Phillips

What if, bet-
ween this one
and the one

we hoped for,
there’s a third
life, taking

its own slow,
dreamlike hold,
even now —

blooming in
spite of us?
(from “Sky Coming Forward”)

Moving with Li-Young Lee:

for those three
primary
colors: staying,
leaving, and
returning.
(Big Clock/Li-Young Lee)

Found this delightful poem this morning. I thought about the contrary crows when I heard the crows by the gorge.

Birds on Statues/ Cole Swensen

On one side of the pond, a woman heads west in stone, while on the other, it’s a man heading east, but with the same extravagant gestures of headlong flight—one leg thrown back and both hands launched forward. And sometimes it’s on the tip of one of the lifted heels that a pigeon sits, and sometimes it’s on a thumb, but usually it’s on a head, often one on each, making a mockery of the phrase “in headlong flight.”

Though now they’re rebuilding the pond, so they’ve drained it, with the odd result that the pigeons have gone and have been replaced by crows. They too particularly like to perch on the statues’ heads, but, determined to assert their alterity, they make sure that they’re always facing backward.

jan 4/BIKE

30 minutes
basement

A bike in the basement to get my legs moving and to have the chance to watch something. Started with the next episode of Wednesday but, when she encountered another man with his eyes pecked out, then peered into his gaping mouth and was assaulted by a stream of crows emerging from said mouth, I didn’t know if I wanted to keep watching. Then she quipped, he was murdered by a murder of crows, and I did know, I didn’t. Next up: the new, 2025 version of Frankenstein. I got as far as the scene where the “monster” begins attacking the crew of a ship heading for the North Pole, but it was too violent for me. Then, I tried Train Dreams and made it to the part when the main character (who is white) is working for a railroad and his sawing partner — a Chinese immigrant — is dragged away from his work by 4 white men and thrown off of a high trestle. Too much for me today, I guess. I remembered that I was in the middle of watching a documentary about the poet, Charles Olson. So I found that, and managed to stick with it for the last 10 or so minutes of my bike. Sometimes I can find something to watch right away, and sometimes I can’t stick with anything. I should make a list of videos to watch before my next bike ride.

wrapping up the old year as I start the new one

Began working on my end of the year review. Realized that I’ve created a lot of new poetic forms. I should document that on my writing portfolio site. Decided I want to have a separate page titled, a year in pictures, since I posted pictures several times. After finishing this entry, I’ll get back to my 2025 cento. I’m not sure I like what I wrote yesterday.

Speaking about the new year, it started with a bang. Trump invaded Venezuela without congressional approval early Saturday morning. Heather Cox Richardson’s latest video does an excellent job of clearly describing why this is such a big deal. According to her, Trump and his administration are in a desperate position and are going to try a lot of bad shit (my words, not hers) to solidify their power. In the next 3+ months (she imagines we will know by May) either his Putin-esque totalitarian regime will take firm hold OR the American people will reclaim democracy and laws will be enforced. It’s going to get bad — much worse — before it gets better, if it gets better.

HCR on 3 jan 2025

All of this sounds bad, and it is, but HCR presents it in a way that is not sensationalized and is informed, informative, and offers hope and a chance for doable action.

note for future Sara: near the beginning of the video she mentions that some people are speculating Trump will do something big for the 5th anniversary of January 6th. Sara from 6 jan 2026, let us know what happens. Hopefully nothing.

update, 3 feb 2026: It’s bad, worse than you might have imagined.

jan 3/RUN

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls
20 degrees
100% snow-covered

Not a single bare spot on the trail or the road. Hard on the ankles, calves, and the eyes — so bright and white and endlessly nothing. Difficult to see where the snow was loose and where it wasn’t. It didn’t bother me; I’m just happy to be outside moving, connected to this place. Tried to greet everyone I saw — runners, walkers, at least one biker — with a wave or a hello.

10 Things

  1. the smell of chimney smoke lingering near a neighbor’s house
  2. soft ridges of sand-colored* snow covering the street — tricky to run over and through
  3. empty benches
  4. (almost) empty parking lots
  5. a hybrid/electric car singing as it slowly rounded a curve near locks and dam no. 1
  6. the sound of the falls falling over the ledge: almost gushing
  7. scattered voices echoing around the park — at least one of them was from an excited kid
  8. stopping to tighten my laces, a woman in a long coat nearby, standing and admiring the falls
  9. splashes of yellow on the snow
  10. bird song then a burst of birds briefly filling the sky

*sand-colored: using these words, I immediately thought of a favorite poem that I’ve memorized, I Remember/ Anne Sexton: the grass was as tough as hemp and was no color — no more than sand was a color

I listened to the quiet — barely any wind — for the first half of the run, then put in my “Sight Songs” playlist on the way back. Memorable songs: Sheena Easton’s nasally high notes in “For Your Eyes Only,” and the lyrics in the refrain —

The passions that collide in me
The wild abandoned side of me
Only for you, for your eyes only

Yikes. Also, these lines from The Who’s “Behind Blue Eyes”:

And if I swallow anything evil
Put your finger down my throat

And if I shiver please give me a blanket
Keep me warm, let me wear your coat

And these, from Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” which I don’t recall ever hearing:

Every now and then I know you’ll never be the boy you always wanted to be. . .

. . .Every now and then I know there’s no one in the universe as magical and wondrous as you

(Almost) 9 Years!

Typically each year, I mark the anniversary of this log as the first of January, with a new year beginning on that day. But, that’s not the real anniversary of this log. It’s January 12th, 2017. Why the 12th and not the 1st? I’m not quite sure; I’ll have to look through my journal from that year. It seems fitting, with my affinity (see D. Seuss below) for the approximate, the almost, to not start on the first day of the year!

On This Day: January 3, 2022

Reading this past entry today, I re-discovered this beautiful poem by a favorite poet, Diane Seuss, Love Letter. Rereading it, so many words, phrases, ideas tapped me on the shoulder, invited me it! Here’s the second half of the poem:

I’m much too sturdy now to invest
in the ephemeral. No, I do not own lace
curtains. It’s clear we die a hundred times
before we die. The selves
that were gauzy, soft, sweet, capable
of throwing themselves away
on love, died young. They sacrificed
themselves to the long haul.
Picture girls in white nighties jumping
off a cliff into the sea. I want to say
don’t mistake this for cynicism
but of course, it is cynicism.
Cynicism is a go-to I no longer have
the energy to resist. It’s like living
with a vampire. Finally, just get it
over with, bite me. I find it almost
offensive to use the word love
in relation to people I actually love.
The word has jumped off
so many cliffs into so many seas.
What can it now signify?
Shall I use the word affinity
like J.D. Salinger, not a good
man, put into the mouths
of his child genius characters? I have
an affinity for my parents. An affinity
for you. I will make sure you are fed
and clothed. I will listen to you
endlessly. I will protect your privacy
even if it means removing myself
from the equation. Do those sound
like wedding vows? Are they indiscriminate?
Well then, I am indiscriminate.
I am married to the world.
I have worked it all out in front of you.
Isn’t that a kind of nakedness?
You have called for a love letter.
This is a love letter.

sturdy! I love this word — the sound and the feeling of it: I like being sturdy. My Girl (in my Girl Ghost Gorge poem, the preferred version of me — Sara, age 8).

the “gauzy, soft, sweet selves” — these gothic girls, jumping off cliffs into the sea — a very different version/vision of a girl than mine

Linking these lines to others from Seuss, I imagine one version of her girl to be the one that died when her father did — she writes about him in Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl. That girl’s father became sick when she was 2 and died when she was 7.

Of course, this is only one version of her girl. How many different versions of girls do I have? Do I write about?

Affinity?! Yes, I need to put that beside my list of “love?” words, accustomed, familiar, acquainted, known. Affinity = kinship, attraction, liking/affection, causal relationship, attractive force, “a relation between biological groups involving resemblance in structural plan and indicating a common origin”

Right now, I’m reading “You” as the poem and poetry.

Indiscriminate = not marked by careful distinction — ambiguous, sloppy? a (too) rough approximation?

love letter world . . . suddenly, I’m thinking of Emily Dickinson: This is my letter to the world that never wrote to me

That was fun, giving some time to these words! I am drawn — do I have an affinity? — to Diane Seuss’s words. Is it because my introduction to her was her fabulous poem about vision that begins with the line, the world, italicized? Or her ekphrastic poems, in Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl?

a return to the ekphrastic! I am reminded of my past reading and writing about still life, especially with Diane Seuss. I’m imagining my “how to see” series of ekphrastic poems with a section on still life paintings and one on pastoral poems! Also, a section on artists with vision conditions or that particularly resonate for my vision: Magritte, Monet, Vincent Van Gogh. Ideally, a series of poems. But first, taking the time to gather all of the resources together, then to stay open to what could happen! I’m also imagining a section on cut-outs/silhouettes, which I studied during my shadow month.

Colette Love Hilliard and the erasure poem

Last night I bought CLH’s  a wonderful catastrophe. Wow! I love it. This one reminded me of my blind spot/mood ring visual poetry:

from A Wonderful Catastrophe / Colette Love Hilliard

jan 2/SWIM

1.75 loops
1 hour / 127 laps
ywca pool

The first swim of the year! I started it out of sorts — leaky, fogged-up goggles; leaky nose plug; a stiff neck. But I kept going, lap after lap, and somewhere in the middle it got a little easier. Hovered around 1:40 pace for the whole swim, which didn’t feel hard, but also didn’t feel too easy or slow. Shared a lane with an older man in a red speedo. When I asked him if I could share a lane with him he said (jokingly, I think) as long as you behave!

vision note: As usual, I tried very hard to check the lane for another swimmer. I looked 3 or 4 times — I stared. I thought it was clear, so I got in. Nope, a swimmer. Luckily, I act as if there’s a swimmer there that I can’t see, so it’s not a problem that I couldn’t see him.

Pool friends: another older man in a speedo who was a good swimmer — he liked to do dolphin kick on his back, deep under the water; a woman in a green and black suit, also good, doing a steady freestyle; 4 or 5 other swimmers with bright pink, open water swim caps; 1 or 2 bits of fuzz; shimmering shadows on the pool floor; 2 lifeguards in bright red swim shorts.

locker room encounter:

An older woman sitting on the bench, wiping down her wet snow boots. Another women arriving, Shirley wears her boots when she does yoga, so you can, too. (I’m assuming that the first woman forgot her shoes for yoga class and was trying to figure out if she could wear her boots in class — did she?)

jan 1/RUN

4.6 miles
minnehaha falls and back
11 degrees
100% snow-covered

A wonderful way to start the new year: a run outside, in the snow, above the gorge! There were moments when it felt easy, but mostly it was hard because of the uneven, loose slow. I think my calves are going to be sore all day from the effort! Not injured, just tired from being used to push through and keep balance in the snow. Ever since we got the 5.8 inches of snow last weekend, it has been snowing a inch of two every night. It’s beautiful, but not fun to drive in — I’ve heard; I haven’t driven in at least 5 years because of my vision. It’s not always fun to run in (and on), either. But I’m not complaining, I loved being out there today.

I encountered runners, walkers, at least one fat tire. No cross country skiers or regulars. I heard some people sledding at the park, and the light rail leaving the station — oh, and a woman saying to someone she was walking with, I just need to get the shoes and I’ll be fine. What shoes? Fine for what?

10 Things

  1. a bright while, almost blinding — I’m glad I had some dark tree trunks to look at
  2. snow on the side of a tree making a pleasing pattern on the textured trunk
  3. the falls were falling and making noise — more trickle than gush
  4. the dark gray water of the creek was moving through shelves of ice and snow
  5. the sounds of my yak trax in the snow: crunching and clopping and clicking
  6. the smell of a chimney smoke hovering in the air
  7. a small dome of snow on top of a wooden fence post
  8. empty benches
  9. a crunching noise behind me: crusty ice in my braid hitting the collar of my jacket
  10. overheard: an adult to a kid playing in the backyard, are you having fun?

Running up and out of the park, I had a moment of freedom and happiness — ah, to be outside moving in this fresh air and all of this snow! I thought about my wonderful, low-key New Year’s Eve with Scott and our kids, both of whom are doing so much better at the end of the year than they were at the beginning, both excited and hopeful about the next year.

Today I’m submitting my book manuscript to another press, Yes Yes Books. Before I went out for my run, I drafted a pithy description of my collection, Echolocate | | Echolocated:

“Echolocate, echolocated: to locate using echoes instead of sight, to be located by the echoes you offer. In this collection, a girl and her ghosts visit a gorge daily to locate and be located by the rocks, a river, and the open air and all who are held by it.”

Here’s a beautiful poem I discovered the other day about (not) naming.

Against Specificity / Virginia Kane

Hanif says never put a bird in a poem
without saying what kind of bird.

I want to agree. I like my blues
cerulean, my clouds cumulonimbus.

I prefer my mountains baptized
and my rivers carved with names.

Your reader will find you 
in the details, everyone says,

but when I write about memory
I am just writing about loss.

Here, I forget to tell
the flowers you brought me

they are irises. I decide
the dogwoods we laid under

are just those trees. The months
I knew you, crisp and labeled,

all become that year.
When you leave,

I christen nothing.
I call it what it wasn’t.