Month: February 2026

feb 28/RUNGETOUTICE

3.95 miles
wabun hill loop*
20 degrees

*wabun loop = river road, south/ go down locks and dam road / go up the steep hill that leads to wabun / through the park and back down to the river road / river road, north

future Sara might want to remember this, present Sara hopes it’s more like Venezuela, less like starting WW3: Trump, without approval from Congress, and Israel bombed the hell out of Iran last night or early this morning.

Colder today, but hardly any wind or sun. Last night the temperature dropped so quickly that there was a very wide ring around the moon. Showed it to Scott and he said it was a moon dog. I don’t recall ever seeing one of these before. Yesterday meteorologists were predicting snow today/tonight, but the forecast has shifted again. No snow, just cold.

My legs felt awkward for the first 5 minutes of the run, but then I warmed up and they felt better. By the third mile, they felt strong and efficient. It feels like I have more energy and power in my legs. Are the iron pills I’m taking to raise my ferritin working, or is it just a placebo effect?

When I got to the lock and dam no. 1, I decided — just seconds before I did it — to turn and run up the steep hill that leads to Wabun Park. It was mostly covered in ice, but also dead leaves, so it didn’t seem too slippery. As I neared the top, I walked for a stretch. At the top, I stopped to admire the view through the chainlink fence of the river and the island and the St. Paul side, then I walked until the ice had stopped. In the park, there were several small ice rinks where melted water had refroze.

10 Things

  1. someone was on the frisbee golf course at Wabun park — I couldn’t quite see, but I’m assuming they were playing
  2. at the top of the bluff, a big stretch of the paved path was covered in a thick sheet of ice
  3. also at the top of the bluff, on the other side neared to the park, there was a small clearing with a decomposing trunk and thick logs — do people come here to sit at night and watch the lights on the bridge?
  4. the hill leading up to wabun was mostly thin layers of ice mixed with thick, jagged layers of ice, butat least part of the trail was coated with dry leaves
  5. although there were walls of snow or thick chunks of ice at some of the entrances and exits, the walking paths were mostly clear
  6. empty benches, empty parking lots
  7. running, looking down at the winchell trail and seeing a person walking — they looked so far down, I felt so high up
  8. stopping to walk on the double bridge, hearing the loud shuffling of a runner’s feet approaching from behind
  9. do I remember any color, or was it all just pale gray and white today?
  10. the low rumble of a LOUD truck driving too fast on the river road

Like yesterday, I don’t remember what I listened to when I wasn’t listening to headphones and my “Bunnies and Rabbits” playlist. Traffic? The shuffling of my own feet? No birds or bells or fragments of conversation from other runners or walkers. A memorable song on my playlist: The Young Rabbits / the Jazz Crusaders

Rabbit Eyes: how they se, what they see

Rabbits have 3 eyelids, 3 tear glands, one tear duct. They rarely blink — only 12 times an hour — and can sleep with their eyes open which helps keep them safer. How? It

allows their light receptors to remain active. If a predator nears, their brain receives signals faster, enabling a quicker response than if their eyes were closed.

Rabbit Eye: a Complete Guide

To see without actively seeing. Two immediate thoughts: 1. I’m fascinated by passive seeing and how it works in the human brain (especially mine) and 2. how exhausting to sleep with your eyes open! I’d like to learn more about how this works.

How to tell when a rabbit is sleeping? Their nose stops twitching.

Here’s something I have in common with rabbits: they can’t see red and have a lot less cone cells than a normally sighted human. I can see red, but not that often. Also, they rely more on rod cells (and they have more of them than humans) and see better (best?) in low light. Peripheral vision!

rabbit eyes were built to excel in low light situations. Rabbits are usually the most active in the hours around dawn and dusk, when it’s not too bright out but also not pure darkness. This is a time of day when rabbits have the advantage over both predators that are nocturnal and see best in the dark, and predators that are diurnal and see best when there is bright light. 

7 fun facts about rabbit eyes / the bunny lady

Crepuscular!

360 degree view: “the rabbit visual system is designed–not for foraging and locomotion–but to quickly and effectively detect approaching predators from almost any direction. The eyes are placed high and to the sides of the skull, allowing the rabbit to see nearly 360 degrees, as well as far above her head” (What Do Rabbits See?)

Rabbits have a blind spot in front of their face.1 Like me! I wonder how the sizes of our blind spots compare? “The central blind spot in the rabbit’s field of view precludes a three-dimensional view of nearby objects. When your bunny cocks her head and seems to be looking at you “sideways,” she is actually looking as straight at you as is possible for a bunny” (What Do Rabbits See?). Sideways! Periphery! Me too. To really see something straight on, like where eyes are on a face, I need to look off to the side, at a shoulder. Sometimes when I watch tv, I look off to the edge of the screen to see what’s happening in the center.

And this!: “The image formed by the area centralis is relatively “grainy” compared to the one formed by your (normally sighted human with all cone cells intact) fovea, but it serves the rabbit well. Using this image, your voice, body movements and scent as cues, your rabbit can recognize you (his favorite human)–as long as you’re not carrying a scary box that completely changes your familiar shape!” (What Do Rabbits See?). Yes! Sometimes, like when I’m in a store and have separated from whoever I’m with, I use a combination of voice, body movement, overall silhouette, known distinctive features — like glasses or haircut or unusual dress — to identify them. My sense of smell is not good enough to identify by scent, though.

lack of depth perception and parallax motion: “rabbits have evolved in creative ways to overcome this limitation, enhancing their ability to spot predators and make a quick escape. Rabbits employ a method known as “parallaxing”, moving their heads back and forth to gauge the distance and size of distant objects” (Rabbit Eye: A Complete Guide). Sometimes I have trouble with depth perception. Could I use parallaxing to help me navigate better? I googled, “Can visually impaired humans use parallax motion to detect depth.” Yes! I should practice this parallaxing when I’m out running above the gorge! I found this answer on a Reddit thread that was started with this question, if we need both eyes in order to see depth (depth perception), why is it also possible to see said depth when you close one eye? What a useful thread about how our brains fill in gaps and determine depth based on patterns and a library of known depths. And even better than this thread, here’s an article about a scientific study that was designed to explore and answer the question, “Can people with different forms of low vision use motion parallax to improve depth judgments?” The answer? Yes! And many people with low vision use it without realizing. And it should be introduced to people with low vision as a tool early on in their vision loss. And not enough research has been done on it. This study is from 1997. Has more research been done since then? Has it been adapted by low vision educators?

Here’s something I found from Duke Health in 2013. It’s specifically about low vision as having vision only in one eye, but it’s still helpful:

Adults who lose vision in one eye also have more collisions when walking, especially on the side where they lost the vision. That’s where sessions with an orientation and mobility specialist can help.

“The emphasis is on helping people to judge distances by using monocular clues, such as something called motion parallax. If you’ve ever seen a cat moving its head or eyes side to side before it jumps, that’s motion parallax,” Dr. Whitaker said.

Duke Health

Returning to the parallaxing quote: “This behavior is less common in familiar environments (such as their home), as rabbits memorize their surroundings. However, introducing a rabbit to a new home or a new furniture layout often prompts this scanning technique during initial explorations.” Yes! I’ve memorized my surroundings, which has made it easier to navigate both my physical environment and my new reality of living with a lot less vision — inside my familiar world, I am far less aware of a loss. New environments can be scary, unsettling, upsetting. I need to be brave2 and build up skills and explore new environments.

This last sentence, and footnote 2 below, highlights something that I am doing with my poetry/attention/moving practice. Not only am I working on my craft (writing poetry) and increasing my capacity for care and attention and my commitment to where I live and the many creatures I live with, I’m also acquiring tools and learning how to see in new ways. For example, today I’m studying rabbits in a wide range of ways because it’s fascinating and delightful and because how they see shares some similarities with how I see. Like the bat (and echolocation), rabbits offer strategies for seeing with less (or without) central vision.3

hinged skulls/big feet: “When they do smell, see or hear a predator, rabbits have to be able to make quick escapes. To help with this bunnies have very large back feet, and hinged skulls to absorb shock. Their cranial hingeallows rabbits to run at speeds above which the impact of their feet would rattle their brain around” (Rabbits have hinged skulls).

family:  Leporidae / order: lagomorpha / backyard rabbits: eastern cottontail, sylvilagus floridanus

Looking through the wikipedia entry for eastern cottontails, I found this about habitat:

The eastern cottontail is a territorial species that relies on speed and agility to evade predators. When chased, it typically escapes in a zigzag pattern and can reach speeds of up to 18 mph (29 km/h). Cottontails favor habitats where they can feed in the open but quickly retreat to cover when threatened. Preferred environments include forest edges, swamps, brushy thickets, hedgerows, and open fields with nearby shelter. Instead of digging burrows, eastern cottontails rest in a form—a shallow, scratched-out depression in grass or beneath dense vegetation. . . .

The rabbit eye in A Young Hare

There was a moment in the year 1502, so the story goes, that the eye of a dead rabbit reflected the real window of Albrecht Dürer, who, with his watercolors and genius and passion for detail, painted that eye with the window in it. It then became art, and, then, art again: the painted eye with the painted window in Diane Seuss’s “Young Hare” that connects the artist to the poem’s speaker. “Why does the window feel so intimate in the hare’s unreadable eye?” the speaker asks, and the answer is that the window in the eye represents a straddling between worlds, between then and now, between artist and viewer, between life and art.

Diane Seuss

I’ve tried looking at the painting online and my eyes cannot offer enough detail to see the hare’s eye and the window in it. I have read Diane Seuss’ poem about it, The Young Hare, and believe I don’t need to see the eye myself to understand its significance or its beauty.

The Young Hare / Diane Seuss

Oh my love, Albrecht Dürer, your hare

is not a spectacle, it is not an exploding hare,

it is not a projection of the young hare

within you, the gentleness in you, or a disassembled hare,

nor a subliminal or concealed hare,

nor is it the imagination as hare

nor the soul as a long-eared, soft-eared hare,

Dürer, you painted this hare,

some say you killed a field hare

and brought it into your studio, or bagged a live hare

and caged it so you could look hard at a wild hare

without it running off into thorn bushes as hares

will do, and you sketched the hare

and laid down a watercolor wash over the hare

and then meticulously painted-in all the browns of hare,

toast brown, tawny, dim, pipe-tobacco brown of hare,

olive, fawn, topaz, bone brown until the hare

became dimensional under your hand, the thick hare

fur, the mottled shag, the nobility of the nose, the hare

toenails, black and sharp and curved, and the dense hare

ears, pod-shaped, articulated, substantial, erect, hare

whiskers and eyebrows, their wiry grace, the ruff of hare

neck fur, the multi-directional fur over the thick hare

haunches, and did I say the dark inside the hare

ears, how I want to follow the darkness of the hare

and stroke the dark within its ears, to feel the hare

ears with my fingers, and the white tuft, the hare

anomaly you painted on its side, and the fleshy hare

cheeks, how I want to squeeze them, and the hare

reticence, how I want to explore it, and the downturned hare

eye, it will not acknowledge or appease, the black-brown hare

eye in which you painted the reflection of a window in the hare

pupil, maybe your studio window, in the hare’s

eye, why does that window feel so intimate in the hare’s

unreadable eye, why do I press my face to the window to see the hare

as you see it, raising your chin to look and then back to the hare

on the page, the thin hair of your brush and your own hair

waving gold down your back, hair I see as you see the hare.

In the hare’s eye you see me there, my swaying black hair.

Oh, I love this poem and how it allows me to reflect on what it means to study/explore/be inspired by something and someone.4 And what wonderful work she does with her linking of hare with the hair of the paint brush, the hair of the artist, the hair of the person viewing the painting/writing and reading? the poem!5

  1. They also have a blind spot in the center of the back of their head, preventing full 360 degree vision. ↩︎
  2. I don’t usually like the use of the word brave to describe how I’m navigating new ways of seeing — as in, someone responding to hearing that I’ve lost vision with, you’re so brave! As if just continuing to exist with such a diagnosis, which they really imagine as a death sentence, is being brave. But seeking out unfamiliar situations that frighten/unsettle me in order to get better at navigating because I want a fuller life is me being brave. ↩︎
  3. Additionally, the language used to describe how low light animals see/navigate can be helpful in understanding and communicating to others the strange ways I see. Maybe I can borrow that language as I try to describe how I see? ↩︎
  4. Taking this discussion back to its origins a week ago, I’m returning to the muse. I don’t see the rabbit as my muse, but as both a gate — an opening — and a teacher. ↩︎
  5. Reading this poem is making me want to read Seuss’ “Two Dead Peacocks” collection again, and more closely, as part of my ekphrastic project. I just ordered it from Moon Palace Books! ↩︎

Get Out Ice

As a reminder of some of the ways Minnesotans have resisted ICE this winter, Racket offered this list:

Fifty-thousand people thronging the streets of downtown Minneapolis in subzero temperatures to protest ICE’s presence in the Twin Cities. Thousands more pedaling their bikes through south Minneapolis, many in “peaceful observer, don’t shoot” vests, to honor a cyclist killed by state violence. Massive papier-mâché puppets presiding over rallies and memorials as brass bands play songs of liberation, and luminaries on frozen lakes spelling out messages like “ABOLISH ICE” and “ICE OUT 4 GOOD.” 

Anti-ICE Ice Fishing, Subzero Marches, and Art Sled Activism: A Winter of Protest in the Twin Cities

The rest of the article describe the bike ride, sponsored by Angry Catfish, in honor/memory of Alex Pretti.

feb 27/RUNGETOUTICE

5 miles
river road, north/river road, south/lena smith
50 degrees
50% puddles / 5% mud, dead leaves
wind: 10 mph / 35 mph gusts

Sunny, warmer, windy! Had to tighten my cap so it wouldn’t fly off. It felt like spring, or like spring is coming soon, and I loved it. There was a moment, early on, when I ran past dead leaves on a lawn and the sun hit them just right so that they gave off a smell that I remember from childhood: late fall in Northern Virginia, walking through a small stretch of woods on the edge of suburbia. A good memory, even if I don’t like suburbs.

So many puddles and slow-moving streams on the sidewalk. I wondered how long it would take for at least one of my socks to get soacked. Not even a block! I didn’t see the puddle I stepped in, just suddenly felt cold in my left foot. Oh well. A soaked sock was always going to happen. I think it took a mile for the squish squish squish to begin.

This run was wonderful! I went farther than I thought I would — all the way to the Franklin bridge. And I felt stronger. I even did some strides at the end. I can’t remember what I heard besdie the gorge for the first half, but for the second half I put on my “Bunnies and Rabbits” playlist. The first song that came on, “Young Rabbits,” a jazz song by The Jazz Crusaders, was wonderful to run to. Later, “Mad as Rabbits” came on and I wondered the origins of that expression. Is it from Alice in Wonderland too? Yes and no. Probably the modern use of it comes from the character, the March Hare, who throws a mad tea party in AIW, but its earlier origins are this, according to wikipedia:

To be as “mad as a March hare” is an English idiomatic phrase derived from the observed antics said to occur[1] only in the March breeding season of the European hare (Lepus europaeus). The phrase is an allusion that can be used to refer to any other animal or human who behaves in the excitable and unpredictable manner of a March hare.

Mad as a March Hare

Near the very end of my run, a sudden thought about a rabbit that plays a pivotal role in a dystopia novel I read 2 or more years ago. I can’t remember the name of the novel. Thankfully I can look it up on my library checkout history! Found it: The Memory of Animals / Claire Fuller. I would check it out again, but for some reason, my library no longer makes it available as an e-book. Boo.

rabbit fur coat, part 2

My favorite reader just texted to remind me of a infamous rabbit fur coat reference in a song: Miss Thang’s “Thunder and Lightning”:

You’re walking around like you SO fly in that 37 Dollar Rabbit Coat! Honey, That coat had to be destroyed last week after it bit the neighbors child!

This line is from the album, The Answer: Rap vs. Rap (1987) and is in response to lyrics from Orange Juice Jones in his song (The Rain) about discovering that his girlfriend was cheating on him:

And my first impulse was to run up on you and do a Rambo Whip out the jammy and flat-blast both of you But I ain’t wanna mess up this 3700 dollar lynx coat

So good! A few days ago, at the end of my run, I had remembered Miss Thang’s line (which is superior to Jones’, imho), but then forgot it again before I returned home. I’m so grateful that my best friend reads this blog and remembered us listening to it in high school and texted me from Tokyo about it!

I wish I could add it to my actual playlist, but sadly it’s not on Apple music, so I’ll just have to include it in my written one and imagine Miss Thang singing back to Jones as I listen to “The Rain” on the apple music playlist (because of course, his song is streaming even those hers isn’t).

Miss Thang’s scathing reference to a rabbit, and not a lynx, fur coat, reinforces my sense of Jenny Lewis’ rabbit fur coat; it is low-end luxury and barely status, owned by those who want to appear wealthy but aren’t. In the case of Lewis’ mom, the coat represents a toxic fixation on status and wealth. In the case of Jones, the coat represents the illusion of status.

A bonus: not only did remembering this song give me another example of the rabbit fur coat, it solved a recent mystery. For the past few days, I’ve been trying to remember who references the Trix slogan in a song — silly rabbit, Trix are for kids. Now I know: it’s Orange Juice Jones in “The Rain”!

Here’s a video with the 2 songs mashed-up. Go to YouTube to see all of the lyrics:

that 37 Dollar Rabbit Coat? Honey, That coat had to be destroyed last week after it bit the neighbors child!

rabbit hole

In yesterday’s entry I mentioned that Heather Cox Richardson said, at least twice in her Politics Chat, that she wouldn’t go down the rabbit hole. But today, I will!

1 — Disney Animation

Last night after waking up from my first sleep1, I went downstairs and started watching Disney’s classic animated Alice in Wonderland (1951). I only got as far as the rabbit hole scene, which is delightfully trippy and brings back memories of my many visits to Disney World as a kid in the 80s (my grandparents lived in Deltona — not Daytona, as people used to try and correct — a small town outside of Orlando). Details I remember from my 1 am viewing: 1. she falls down a hole after entering a tunnel, her kitten does not — her POV: far down below, looking up at a small hole of light and kitten — she calls out excitedly, goodbyeeeee!!!; 2. the speed of her fall slows as the bottom of her blue dress billows like a parachute; 3. she passes armchairs and side table on her way down; 4. at one point she lands in a rocking chair and begins rocking, while still floating down; 5. there’s a brief shot of the exterior of this opening/vertical tunnel: it’s a queerly angled tall and narrow brick building; she calls out to the White Rabbit at some point — he’s falling through, too; just before she lands she catches her foot on something — a window frame? — and softly tumbles to the ground.

How much of that is correct? Can I find a clip to watch to check? Yes!

down the rabbit hole

Mostly I was right2, but I missed many delightful details: her bright eyes glowing in the otherwise darkness; she pulls a chain, and turns on a small lamp; she catches a passing book and begins reading it; she sees her reflection in the mirror, which is upside down. Oh, this animation — I love it!

2 — I’m late! I’m late! For a very important date!

In my visions of the white rabbit, I had forgotten his pocket watch and mutterings of being late, which are why Alice follows him. She wonders, what is he late for? It must be something important, like a party! How does time work in this animated film? In the original Lewis Carrol book? In terms of the rabbit hole in the popular imagination, time in the rabbit hole is twisted, slowed down, gets wasted. The rabbit hole is the enemy of time’s efficiency, productivity, precision. When explaining why she couldn’t dig into something, HCR says, I don’t have time for that right now.

3 — rabbit holes / burrows / warrens

In a preliminary search3, I discovered this interesting fact:

Rabbits live underground in warrens. Hares live in aboveground nests. (Cottontail rabbits are the exception: like hares, they live in aboveground nests.)

source

So, because the rabbits that live in my backyard are cottontails, there are no rabbit holes for me to fall through!

Also, here’s the difference between warrens and burrows: a burrow is one rabbit’s home, a warren is the neighborhood/network of tunnels for a colony of rabbits.

Looked on the Minnesota DNR site and found out this about cottontail habitat and range:

Throughout the year, cottontails are found in brushy areas such as woodlots, shelterbelts, and even around shrub and conifer plantings in suburban areas. During summer they feed on grasses and clovers, but in winter they eat twigs and bark, especially of fruit trees. Large tree and brush piles are popular shelters for rabbits. The range of one cottontail is no more than five acres (about the size of four football fields). They run along trails within thick brush to escape predators.

Eastern Cottontail / Minnesota DNR

A thing for “gardener” Sara to note: when winterizing the backyard, DON’T trim back the hydrangeas or hostas anymore! Leave them for the rabbits!

Also found these disturbing “fun facts” — they are listed under the heading, “Fun facts”,” but, are they fun? Not for the rabbits!

Cottontails are nervous animals that may die of shock if handled or caged. Cottontail meat is tasty favored by gourmet chefs who often cook it fried, in stews, or braised with herbs and vegetables.

Back to hole-less cottontails. A new metaphor is needed — not falling down and through to other worlds, but something about edges and shadows and the fringes — the periphery! Dwelling on the edges, in the corners, not traveling to new worlds, but noticing the other worlds that are already there, have always existed in the midst of my world.

  1. First sleep is a reference to historian A. Roger Ekirch’s book, At Days Close and a BBC article that I posted about on 17 jan 2025 about sleeping habits in the 17th and 18th centuries. Instead of 8 straight hours, a sleep, a waking, then another sleep. My sleeping doesn’t quite work that way lately and involves more than 2 sleeps: a sleep, getting out of bed to pace or bounce on an exercise ball, another sleep, watching 20 minutes of something, a sleep, a bounce, a sleep. ↩︎
  2. it’s the exterior of another building; she’s doesn’t get her foot caught but lands upside down hanging from the window ↩︎
  3. My searches are mostly just googling the terms and looking through AI and then, independently, several of the sources in the search results. I have never really used/relied on AI before, so this was a good opportunity to suss it out. It can be helpful, but its conclusions are uneven and information unreliable. AI can make broad claims based on singular sources, and those sources aren’t always primary, but sometimes a rando’s blog entry. In terms of search results, the links are often businesses selling a product; any information posted is ultimately in service of selling that product. Or, the links have information designed for an individual/consumer. For example, the rabbit/bunny information my searches yielded were often for pet owners (how to take care of your rabbit) or homeowners who need to manage/get rid of rabbits-as-pests. ↩︎

a few more rabbit related things

Here’s a list of 20 pop culture rabbits/bunnies. One I had forgotten: the boiled pet rabbit in Fatal Attraction.

Dust bunnies; the Energizer Bunny; Bunny from Season 2 of “Only Murders in the Building”; Watership Down (which I remember my sister reading, but I never have); Liam (here in the twin cities, taken by ICE) and his bunny ears / Louise from Bob’s Burgers and hers; Bugs Bunny and “Kill the Rabbit”; bunny ears as tv antennas; lucky rabbit’s foot; playboy bunnies and staying at the Playbook Hotel in Buffalo because it was the cheapest option when I was 8; calling my daughter honey-bunny

And here’s a wonderful poem that I found the other day. It fits with the theme of rabbit holes and underground dwellings:

[Rabbit] / by Amy Wolstenholme

In Portland we don’t use the word, we dance around it –  furry things, we’d say, the furry things are in backfield again. As a child I only knew I should never look directly at them, the same way I knew not to look at the sun. It was wrong. It would hurt later on. My grandfather called them underground mutton – the first time I heard the phrase I laughed, and he didn’t. I guess that means it’s okay to eat them. That it’s okay to roast and spit them but never see them. As an adult I learnt the fear behind the superstition – my home is always on the brink of slipping, because long ago we built mines where we shouldn’t. And, like always, nature far outshone the humans: the furry things would run before the rockfalls, the men would disappear beneath them. So when they skipped in fields en masse, bobtails flashing, we would know that somewhere below ground people were trapped, were crushed, were suffocating. We would know that when the underground mutton set to dancing, the Earth was eating the miners.

One more rabbit thing: Inspired by my talk of the periphery, I think I will give attention to rabbit vision and rabbit eyes tomorrow. 3 sources to start with: “rabbit vision” google search, Rabbit Eye, and this discussion of a famous painting with a rabbit eye that inspired Diane Seuss.

Get Out Ice

Part of what I’m trying to do in my “get out ice” effort is to document examples of resistance. I’d like to turn it into an archive of practices of care-as-resistance (love) Here’s one I found from Sean Snow, who provides great daily summaries on Facebook:

Dungeons & Dragons Mutual Aid: A Twin Cities gaming group with 2,500 members made headlines for pivoting from tabletop adventures to a sophisticated mutual aid network. They are now coordinating food deliveries, “Know Your Rights” workshops, and legal support for members affected by recent events. What began as a social club has evolved into a logistical hub that leverages existing trust to provide real-world refuge. This grassroots response demonstrates how established community bonds can be repurposed to protect neighbors during times of crisis.

Sean Snow

feb 26/RUNGETOUTICE

4.3 miles
minnehaha falls and back
35 degrees

A much better run today than yesterday. One difference: I had a big snack — yogurt, blue, pumpkin seed granola — before I went out. It was sunny and above freezing. Less layers! 1 pair of tights, shorts, 1 shirt, 1 pull-over, gloves, baseball cap. Listened to the snow melting, wheels whooshing, kids playing, a playground whistle blowing, grit scratching the asphalt as I ran sound, my “Bunnies and Rabbits” playlist on the way back. Listened to Jenny Lewis’ “Rabbit Fur Coat” again and want to look up rabbit fur coats — how do they compare to mink or fox in terms of status? who wears rabbit?

10 Things

  1. looked up — cerulean blue sky, no clouds, no birds, no planes
  2. drip drip drip drip — water falling down the gutter
  3. the strong smell of weed — like a skunk — in the 44th street parking lot, or was it the locks and dam no. 1 lot?
  4. the annual puddles have returned on certain neighbor’s sidewalks
  5. a thin sheet of ice on the river
  6. a few more cars in the falls parking lot, a few more people at the overlook
  7. an older man standing near my favorite spot, reading the old — how old? 1940s or 50s? — plaque about the falls, his partner just ahead, patiently waiting
  8. the cobblestones were clear! no ice, no snow, only 1 or 2 puddles
  9. running south, nearing the double bridge, my eyes fixed on a something shining BRIGHT — sun reflecting off of an object — the top of a trashcan?
  10. standing behind the Rachel Dow Memorial bench, stretching and looking down at the river, out and over to the other side, watching a car travel the east river road

updated in the evening, rabbit-related: I’m watching Heather Cox Richardson’s Politics Chat for today (she is amazing), and she said in her discussion of Hillary Clinton’s closed testimony on the Epstein files today, she was an interesting Secretary of State, I think, but that’s a rabbit hole I won’t go down. This isn’t the first time HCR has used that expression when discussion a topic she doesn’t have time for, it’s often a rabbit hole she won’t go down. Another update, a few minutes later: she referenced a rabbit hole again!

rabbit fur coat

My “research” didn’t yield that much, but enough to guess that the coat symbolizes Lewis’ mom’s obsession with attaining status, obtaining wealth.

Commercial fur trade of rabbit took off in the 20s. Less expensive than other animal furs, easily dyed and plucked to resemble other fur. A more accessible status symbol.

crepuscular

A few days ago, I used the word crepuscular (“Rabbits are crepuscular grazers” — 24 feb 2026) and suggested it would make a good title for a poem. This morning I’m exploring how other poets have used the word in their poems.

crepuscule: twilight (rare: noun)

crepuscular: of or relating/resembling1 twilight;
of an animal active in twilight (adjuective)

1 — from The Possessed / John Berryman

There was a time crepuscular was mild, 
The hour for tea, acquaintances, and fall 
Away of all day’s difficulties, all 
Discouragement. Weep, you are not a child. 

The equine hour rears, no further friend, 
Intolerant, foam-lathered, pregnant with 
Mysterious grave watchers in their wrath
Let into tired Troy. You are near the end. 

Midsummer Common loses its last gold, 
And grey is there. The sun slants down behind 
A certain cinema, and the world is blind
But more dangerous. It is growing cold. 

Light all the lights, heap wood upon the fire
To banish shadow. Draw the curtains tight. 
But sightless eyes will lean through and wide night 
Darken this room of yours. As you desire. 

2 — from Le crépuscule du soir / Charles Baudelaire / trans. Roy Campbell

But insalubrious demons of the airs,
Like business people, wake to their affairs
And, flying, knock, like bats, on walls and shutters.
Now Prostitution lights up in the gutters
Across the glimmering jets the wind torments.
Like a huge ant-hive it unseals its vents.
On every side it weaves its hidden tracks
Like enemies preparing night-attacks.

3 — from Crepuscle with Muriel / Marilyn Hacker

the void of an hour seeps out, infects
the slit of a cut I haven’t the wit to fix
with a surgeon’s needle threaded with fine-gauge silk
as a key would thread the cylinder of a lock.
But no key threads the cylinder of a lock.
Late afternoon light, transitory, licks
the place of the absent cup with its rough tongue, flicks
itself out beneath the wheel’s revolving spoke.
Taut thought’s gone, with a blink of attention, slack,
a vision of “death and distance in the mix”
(she lost her words and how did she get them back
when the corridor of a day was a lurching deck?
The dream-life logic encodes in nervous tics
she translated to a syntax which connects
intense and unfashionable politics
with morning coffee, Hudson sunsets, sex;
then the short-circuit of the final stroke,
the end toward which all lines looped out, then broke).

4 — twilight school / early 20th-century Italy / Britannica entry

crepuscolarismo, (Italian: “twilight school”), a group of early 20th-century Italian poets whose work was characterized by disillusion, nostalgia, a taste for simple things, and a direct, unadorned style. Like Futurism, a contemporaneous movement, crepuscolarismo reflected the influence of European Decadence and was a reaction to the florid ornamental rhetoric of the Italian author Gabriele D’Annunzio. It differed from the militant Futurist movement in its passivity, but both movements expressed the same spirit of desolation, and many crepuscolari later became futuristi.

crepuscular animals / wikipedia

Ten examples of crepuscular animals, active at dawn and dusk, include raccoons, deer, rabbits, skunks, bobcats, foxes, bats, house cats, coyotes, and moose, with many mammals, insects, and some birds fitting this activity pattern to avoid extreme heat and predators. 

Bats! I’ve been gathering poetic lines about bats for several years now! Not because I like bats (although, after all my thinking about them, I’m starting to!), but because the poetic language used to describe them is helpful in my own thinking about how I navigate the world in my less defined light.

  1. I’m interested in this idea of resembling, particularly in relation to light and my perception of it as I lose more cone cells. Does crepuscular describe me? Am I perpetually in the light of dawn and dusk? I’m also interested in it in terms of time, where twilight = that small/brief in-between time before day/light turns to night/darkness, the stage just before a final loss (in my case, all of my central vision) ↩︎

Get Out ICE

I’ve continued to tag my entries with “Get out ICE” because ICE is still here in Minnesota and is still awful. But that is about it; it’s time to return to posting examples of ice out. Here’s one small “ICE OUT” example that I heard about as I listened to a running podcast. As she was recounting her 100k 8-hour trail race, Molly Seidel wore “ICE OUT” on her vest. She said it was important for her to make this statement:

I haven’t been super vocal on social media just because I don’t feel like that’s where I can put my voice to best use sometimes. But I think being able to make a statement on what I wear through what I do and wear that for 62 miles mattered a lot to me.

Molly Seidel / Ali on the Run podcast

I can’t remember if I mentioned it here or just on Facebook, but I have posted about Olympic athletes speaking out against ICE, most notably Jessie Diggins. Local professional sports teams, like the Timberwolves and the Frost are too.

Somewhat related, but also very different, cycling communities in the twin cities have been very vocal in their opposition to ICE. A week after Alex Pretti was murdered, thousands of cyclists did a ride in honor of him. And Recovery Bike Shop on Central in NE Minneapolis has been very active, both in resistance and in caring for immigrant communities. Just today they posted a flyer about training people for bike patrols and wrote this:

This is a game changer for our communities. Patrollers on bikes can cover A LOT more ground and reach active incidents much faster.

And bikes are not trackable like cars.

We’re still walking Central Ave TONIGHT (and every Thursday) at 5:30.

And the Holland Neighborhood Association will be at Recovery Bike Shop at 7:00pm with Council Member Elliott Payne. Find out ways to engage in the community. This is where change happens.

facebook

feb 25/RUNGETOUTICE

2 miles
river road, north/lena smith, south
22 degrees

Sunny, cold, shadowed. Most distinctive shadow: the ball-like one, made by the light of the street light. It was nice weather for a run. Not too cold, or too warm, clear trails. Unfortunately, I struggled. Sore legs, unfinished business, and some fatigue. And now I’ll struggle not to worry about what caused the bad run — this worrying about my health is the way my anxiety is expressed. No fun.

Even with my not-so-great run, can I remember 10 things I liked (or loved)?

10 Things

  1. the feel of my feet sliding on the grit as I ran up the lake street hill
  2. the bright orange graffiti under the lake street bridge
  3. the surface of the river, covered in a thin skin of ice, a pale gray
  4. the bright blue and empty sky
  5. the deep footprints on the snow-covered walking path, descending just below the road
  6. feeling strong and relaxed as I ran up the hill from under the bridge
  7. the sheen of the thin glaze of ice on the shaded sidewalk
  8. some puddles on the sidewalk where snow from a yard had melted
  9. looking through a net of bare, slender trunks
  10. chirping birds, all around

For the first part of my run, I listened to the traffic and my feet striking the gritty ground. For the second part of the run and the walk, I put in my new “Bunnies and Rabbits” playlist — see below. I heard these songs today:

  1. Rabbot Ho / Thundercat
  2. Baile InoLVIDABLE / Bad Bunny
  3. Rabbit Fur Coat / Jenny Lewis
  4. Abracadabra / Steve Miller Band
  5. I’m Drivin’ My Life Away / Eddie Rabbit

I’d liked the speed/fast beat of the Bad Bunny song, the storytelling in “Rabbit Fur Coat,” the 80s kid nostalgia of Abracadabra, and the little North Carolina Sara nostalgia of Eddie Rabbit (from June 1980, when I was 6). Jenny Lewis’ story about her poor (both, no money and tragic figure) mom made me think of Diane Seuss and her use of a rabbit motif — see below and this diane seuss and rabbits.

Rabbits, Rabbits, Everywhere — written earlier today

As is usually the case when I give attention to something I haven’t given much attention to before, that something is suddenly everywhere, or not everywhere, but the instances of it seem to grow exponentially (you might say, they breed like rabbits). The rabbit/bunny/hare floodgate has been opened! This morning, I’m finding so many rabbit references!

And what’s the point of all of this? Following the rabbit down the rabbit hole is a wonderful distraction. It is also an excellent opportunity to learn. And to learn more about rabbits, which leads to caring about them as living things and as symbols. This caring might (is) enabling me to open up a closed part of myself (closed = strong dislike of rabbits). And it is helping me to think more broadly and specifically about the impacts of humans and human encroachment on environments and the consequences of that encroachment for humans and non-humans. Plus, all (or any) of it could inspire new poems.

Here are a few rabbit-related things:

1

The killer rabbit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I should rewatch this movie because I remember the rabbit in the cave (or is it a bunny) at the end, but not that clearly. Is the joke that rabbits/bunnies are soft and cute and frail and couldn’t possibly be vicious killers?

2

Bunny Lebowski in The Big Lebowski. It’s been long enough since I’ve seen this film that I all I can remember is that she is the young wife of the Big Lebowski, who is kidnapped and is a catalyst for much of the action. Is that right? I could look it up, but I’d rather use this lack of remembering as a reason to watch the movie again.

3

Rabbit in Red matchbox from Halloween. Near the beginning of the movie, the nurse who has accompanied Dr. Loomis to pick up Michael Myers from the mental hospital and bring him to his parole hearing lights a cigarette using a match from this matchbook just before Micheal Myers attacks them and escapes in their car. Later that same matchbook appears in the grass near the dead body of a mechanic. A clue! Michael Myers must have been here! And now he’s going home to finish what he started!

4

Harvey, a Jimmy Stewart movie from 1950 in which Stewart befriends a 6 foot tall invisible rabbit. I have never seen it, but when I was younger, after having watched Rear Window, I developed a bit of a crush on Jimmy Stewart. Maybe that’s why I thought of this? I looked to see if it was streaming anywhere or available from the library. Nope.

5

Max and Ruby, Ruby and Max. A cartoon with baby brother/big sister bunnies. My kids watched this when they were young, thanks to hand-me-down dvds from my sister whose kids watched it when they were young. When and where did it air? What I remember most about this show was that the adults were almost non-existent and Ruby was the suffering big sister who rarely got to have any fun because she had to mother clueless Max. The gendering in this one — wow!

6

The documentary from PBS, The Pill. When I taught a class about debated issues within feminism, we usually started with a section on Reproductive Justice. Instead of focusing on abortion, we looked more broadly at women’s reproductive health and their access to care and control over their own bodies. I often screened this documentary and I recall a section with rabbits in a lab that also included the story of how they experimented on women in Puerto Rico. I can’t easily stream this again, so I’m relying on my memory and the transcript. The section is called, “A Cage of Ovulating Females.” Here’s the mention of the rabbits:

Margaret Marsh, Historian: Gregory Pincus wasn’t a physician, he was a scientist. And so he could give the pill to as many rabbits as he wanted to. Rabbits everywhere could take this pill. But he couldn’t give the pill to women. He wasn’t a doctor. He couldn’t run a clinical trial on human beings.

The Pill

And here’s one bit about Puerto Rico:

Getting the pill to market would require approval from the Food & Drug Administration, and that would entail a large-scale human trial. In exasperation, Katharine McCormick, asked, “Where can we find a cage of ovulating females?”

Puerto Rico had a network of birth control clinics and no Comstock laws. Pincus called it “the perfect laboratory.”

The Pill

The experiments on Puerto Rican women were considered a success, but some of the women suffered terrible side effects: headaches, nausea, dizziness, vomiting.

7

Rabbit from Winnie-the-Pooh — Winnie-the-Pooh’s neighbor who sometimes wishes he wasn’t — there’s a real Dennis the Menace vibe happening here, with Pooh as Dennis, Rabbit as the menaced neighbor. Yesterday I read about how Lewis Carrol intended the White Rabbit to be a sharp contrast to Alice:

For her ‘youth’, ‘audacity’, ‘vigour’, and ‘swift directness of purpose’, read ‘elderly’, ‘timid’, ‘feeble’, and ‘nervously shilly-shallying’, and you will get something of what I meant him to be. I think the White Rabbit should wear spectacles. I’m sure his voice should quaver, and his knees quiver and his whole air suggest a total inability to say ‘Boo’ to a goose!”

The White Rabbit in Fandom

I see a similar contrast between Pooh (as Alice) and the Rabbit (as White Rabbit):

8

Cadbury Creme Egg Bunny. Growing up, I LOVED these eggs. Unlike now, in the 80s and 90s you could only get them around Easter. More than any other, these eggs are my favorite childhood candy. Do they hold up? Not really. I remember the commercial with the bunny that sounds like a chicken:

the 1983 commercial with copy read by the Smuckers guy!

9

9

Diane Seuss and rabbits. Yesterday I remembered a line from a favorite Diane Seuss poem, I Look Up at my Book and out at the World Through Reading Glasses:

The load of pinecones at the top,
a brown smudge which could be anything: a wreath
of moths, a rabbit strung up
like a flag.

She’s referencing some famous still life painting with the rabbit, I think — this is in her collection all about still life paintings, Still LIfe with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl. I looked up “Diane Seuss and rabbits” and found two other poems by her with rabbits in them!1

excerpt from backyard song / Diane Seuss

Uncorked, I had a thought: I
want the want
I dreamed of wanting once, a
quarter cup of sneak-peek
at what prowls in the back, at
what sings in the
wet rag space behind the garage, back
where the rabbits nest

Her first poem had a rabbit/ Diane Seuss

in it. Life
story at age fourteen sifted
through a rabbit.

It had a tattoo on a hand
in it. And cherries, the kind
that come in a can.

She tended
toward rabbits back then.
Toward the theoretically mild

that are really
wild. Like ducks on a pond
that is really a moon

full of menacing weeds.
The duck gets ready for noon,
she wrote. Yes,

nonsense, I guess.
She embroidered a poem
on a foam

pillow with a felt pen.
Pinned an actual
cherry on it back then

life story sifted through a rabbit — drawing upon this poem and a few others, AI suggests that Seuss frequently uses the motif of rabbit to explore themes of wildness, vulnerability, and the grotesque. In the summary, it (AI) misnames the poem “Basket,” which is the name of the journal, not this poem.

theoretically mild, really wild

Ducks on a pond, right next to the rabbit? That has to be reference to the optical illusion — do you see a duck or a rabbit? — right?

11

The Runaway Bunny — This was one of my favorite books as a kid. At first, I wondered why I thought that, then I found the book and opened it and saw why:

book inscription: To little Sara on Easter 1978 -- from Mommy and Daddy
my copy from 1978

added, 28 feb 2026: I was never a big Velveteen Rabbit fan, but there is another bunny book I loved as a kid, Pat the Bunny.

11

Looney Tunes: I want hasenpfeffer! I am almost certain that when I watched this cartoon as a kid, this was the first time I had heard of hasenpfeffer or imagined that rabbit was something you could eat. I still never have, but whenever I hear the word hasenpfeffer I think of this cartoon.

Hasenpfeffer

From a comment: “The King wants Hasenpfeffer which is traditional Dutch and German stew made from marinated rabbit or hare, cut into stewing-meat sized pieces and braised with onions and a marinade made from wine and vinegar.”

What to do with all of this rabbit-holing? I want to orbit around all, or at least many, of these ideas. Bring them into poems. Write a series of small poems about rabbits and bunnies and hares. As I was writing this last line, another bunny zapped into my head — The Runaway Bunny! I’ll add it above. What form should these rabbit poems take? Could this be an inspiration — Seven American Centuries? Whatever the form, I like the idea of returning repeatedly to century bunny/rabbit themes, and telling a story across the poems, not in one poem.

  1. Yesterday I realized I could easily do footnotes and I’m here for it! Googling “Diane Seuss and rabbits” the AI explanation seemed useful and it was, but also a bit suspect. When I clicked on the links offered at the end of the AI summary and read the source, it often wasn’t saying what AI claims it saying. AI takes some liberties, I think. ↩︎

a Rabbit/Bunny/Hare playlist

When Scott reminded me of Thundercat’s song “Rabbot Ho,” I knew I needed to make a playlist for this recent preoccupation!

  1. Rabbot Ho / Thundercat
  2. Baile InoLVIDABLE / Bad Bunny
  3. Rabbit Fur Coat / Jenny Lewis
  4. Abracadabra / Steve Miller Band
  5. I’m Drivin’ My Life Away / Eddie Rabbit
  6. The Young Rabbits / The Jazz Crusaders
  7. Let’s Pretend We’re Bunny Rabbits / Magnetic Fields
  8. Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up) / Florence + the Machine
  9. Rabbit Fighter / T. Rex
  10. Jack Rabbit / Elton John
  11. Here Comes Peter Cottontail / Gene Autry
  12. White Rabbit / Jefferson Airplane
  13. White Rabbit / George Benson
  14. Rabbit Will Run / Iron & Wine
  15. Breathe (in the Air) / Pink Floyd
  16. Pink Rabbits / The National
  17. Mycomatosis / Radiohead
  18. Alice / Peggy
  19. Mad as Rabbits / Panic at the Disco
  20. Bunny is a Rider / Caroline Polachek

feb 24/RUNGETOUTICE

4.3 miles
minnehaha falls
35 degrees
25% puddles

Sitting at my desk in the morning, I heard some noise — rustling, I think? — just outside the window. Freezing rain or snow — graupels. Then it started snowing, not too hard, but enough to cover everything. No! I wanted to run today. Luckily, it warmed up and by the time I was ready to run, everything had melted.

10 Things

  1. a police car parked parallel to the road in the first falls parking lot
  2. aside from the police car, the lots were empty
  3. a lime scooter leaning against a bench
  4. one guy standing at the bridge overlooking the falls, with an orange hat or an orange something else (I couldn’t see)
  5. voices below on the other side of the wall, down in the falls
  6. no one else in the park
  7. big puddles everywhere — my one foot was soaked only 5 minutes into the run
  8. kids yelling and laughing on the playground
  9. the river was covered with ice and snow with one sliver of open water
  10. a walker approaching me, walking 3 tiny dogs — this made me smile

The run was mostly great. At times, my legs felt heavy (or, at least, heavier than they usually do) and I stopped to talk a few extra times. Were they sore or my lack of ferritin or some other ailment? The second half felt easier.

bunnies — nudge? muse? pest? ghost?

note: I started writing this section yesterday and have spent over four hours this morning wandering through the spaces it created . There’s a lot of movement in it — traveling from thought to thought to thought, here to here to here. Future Sara, and anyone else reading this, you might get lost.

So far I’ve written two bunny poems without really trying to. I’m starting to believe they want me to write about them. This very idea suddenly appeared in my third poem. I started writing about the moment when I first noticed the bunnies in the backyard at night and realized they had probably always been there. Then I wrote in my Plague Notebook 27: I didn’t choose to notice them as much as they decided to be noticed. And I thought: muse! Could this poem be about bunnies in the backyard and about bunnies as the thing that has decided it’s time for me to write, and write about them? For years now, I’ve disliked bunnies, and never imagined writing about them. But now here I am, writing about them, and I fear that I might learn to like bunnies.

All of this has me wondering, what is a/my muse? I’m familiar with the term, but have never seriously studied it, either as a concept or through examples of it in the popular imagination. Do I want to now? Is it necessary for my poem? Maybe instead of devoting a month to it — although that could be fun! — I’ll give it a day or two?

Muse/ Linda Pastan

No angel speaks to me.
And though the wind
plucks the dry leaves
as if they were so many notes
of music, I can hear no words.

Still, I listen. I search
the feathery shapes of clouds
hoping to find the curve of a wing,
and sometimes, when the static
of the world clears just for a moment

a small voice commes through,
chastening. Music
is its own language, it says.
Along the indifferent corridors
of space, angels could be hiding.

If the bunnies are my muse, I didn’t seek them out. I looked out the window one winter night and saw them on the lawn, not knowing what they were. Did they seek me out, or are they indifferent to me? Did they reveal themselves, or did I just happen to notice them one day? I think I do less trying to find a muse, more trying to create the conditions where it could be possible. I noticed the bunnies because I was doing a month-long practice I called the purple hour. It involved using the time when I woke up in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, to notice purple and write about it. One night, I was studying the different purples in the backyard and there they were, the bunnies. And maybe it’s more than creating the conditions where it’s possible; it’s also about being open to what could be a muse, letting it in.

Muse — to be occupied by, possessed, taken over, haunted, held captive, in the thrall of?

This idea of captivity reminded me of the poem, Captivity/ Siddhartha Menon which I posted on this log on 15 may of this year. In an essay, Menon wrote this about the final line of the poem:

“You are paralyzed.” It suggests the fatal indecision of a rabbit caught in a hunter’s flashlight, and snaps the poem shut” (Siddhartha Menon on Epigraphs).

My rabbit/bunny is back! This sentence is the only mention of a rabbit in a 872 word essay about a poem that features a bird. Where will my bunnies appear next?

Returning to definitions of muse, I googled it, and just past the dictionary entry — the nine daughters of Zeus, a person/personified force who is the inspiration for an artist — in the “People also ask” section was this question: What makes a woman a muse? Here’s the AI generated answer:

A woman becomes a muse through qualities like enigmatic allure, deep connection, and embodying creative energy, acting as a profound source of inspiration for an artist, often sharing a unique bond that fuels artistic expression, though not always romantically. Muses can be captivating personalities, friends, lovers, or even strangers who embody traits like wisdom, charisma, or mystery, prompting the artist to create, often embodying a living, breathing work of art themselves, inspiring everything from specific works to an artist’s entire focus. 

Eww. The uneven power dynamics here, between the subject (isn’t it most often a male artist?) and the object (a woman who is not an artist, or is not considered an artist) that inspires them bother me. After images of male artists and their models flashed in my mind, a phrase appeared: Manic Pixie Dream Girl. I recalled encountering a critical feminist essay about this trope back in the day (around 2007 or 2008, when I was teaching pop culture and queer theory at the University of Minnesota). I searched for it. Not an essay, a video from Feminist Frequency. Yes! I remember them. This video holds up. Around 4 and a half minutes in, they link the trope directly with the Muse:

manic pixie dream girl

And now I’m thinking about birds in poetry and how they’re used to do a lot of the heavy lifting of a poem. She’s not the only poet to write about it, but here’s a good example of this idea from Ada Limón:

does this bird want to be in this poem today? Maybe it doesn’t. You know, we always want to turn the animal into something else, right. And sometimes I want to let the animal be. Of course animals are symbols, of course they turn into our metaphors. I mean, that happens. But I also think there are moments when you just think, okay, the birds aren’t going to save me.1

VS Podcast Interview with Ada Limón

All of this makes me wonder: what am I doing as I keep putting the two bunnies in my backyard into my poems? And why do I insistent on calling these wild and mature eastern cottonwood rabbits bunnies? I’m not sure these rabbits are indifferent to me, but I think they notice me in terms of whether or not I am a threat to their main activity: grazing in the grass.

Now I’m remembering an interesting fact I encountered the other day: much of the eastern cottonwood rabbit’s time is spent eating, 6-8 of the day, both during the day and at night!) Okay, I looked it up again and I was right about the 6-8 hours a day, but here’s a delightful detail: primarily during dawn and dusk. Rabbits are crepuscular grazers. Crepuscular (cre PUS cular)?! What a word, and a good title for a poem?!

But, back to if rabbits (I still want to call them bunnies) notice me or not. Is my assumption correct about noticing me in terms of my threat level? Another google:

Wild rabbits are acutely aware of humans, perceiving them primarily as potential predators due to their innate, high-alert survival instincts. They utilize exceptional hearing and a keen sense of smell to detect people, often fleeing immediately to safety. While they may learn to tolerate consistent, non-threatening human presence over time, they generally maintain a healthy fear of people.

Yes! So, here’s something interesting: in the poem I’m working on right now, tentatively titled, Bold as Brass, my backyard bunnies do not care that I’m passing by; they keep grazing. They’re seemingly so indifferent that I’ve started calling out a pre-boomer phrase (and unironically!) to anyone around me: those bunnies are bold as brass! Where’s their healthy fear of humans? Is it that they can tell I am no threat, or are they being impudent? Or, has something screwed up their “normal” behaviors, and could that something be human-caused (like the over-developing of land, the loss of “natural” habitats, the increased need to live in the midst of humans?) Could that be the true heart of this poem?

Possibly, but first, another plunge2 down that rabbit hole! What do “experts” say about my theory of encroaching landscapes? Looked up “rabbits encroaching landscape” and What to do about wild bunnies? appeared. Here’s the subtitle: “Timid wild rabbits may occasionally eat plants in the garden, but usually live unnoticed on the fringes of our yards.” Usually unnoticed and on the fringes? Two favorite themes in my poems! Also included in one of the first paragraphs: edges, in-betweens.3 Back to “usually unnoticed,” here’s another useful bit from the article:

Here today, gone tomorrow is one way to describe rabbits in suburbia. Given the many predators who make meals of rabbits, their populations can rise and fall dramatically over the course of a year.

Come on, now, the pun was set up for you: hare today, gone tomorrow! Anyway, does my recent (for the last year) notice of backyard rabbits, almost every day, count as part of this normal rise and fall of rabbit populations? Or does it indicate something else?

The line about the gardens make me think of two things. First, a memory. My mom loved gardening and was especially proud of her West Des Moines garden (I created a digital story about it a few years ago). I recall the rabbits liked her flowers, especially her roses. On the advice of a neighbor, she sprinkled bone meal around the bush, which didn’t work. Not wanting to kill the rabbit, she managed to catch it — I can’t remember how, maybe with the help of that same neighbor — and drove 10 or 15 miles out of town and into the prairie to release the rabbit.

Second, a few feelings I recall having decades ago when reading the section in Peter Rabbit when Peter Rabbit’s coat gets caught on Mr. McGregor’s fence and he’s trapped and then when he manages (barely, at least how I remember it) to make it home and has to recuperate in bed. The feelings: not fear or relief but an understanding that life was dangerous and serious and an ambiguity as to who was in the wrong — the bold, misbehaving Peter who disobeyed his mother’s orders and stole vegetables, or the hard-working farmer who was planning to kill Peter as punishment. I recall thinking I was supposed to think Peter was in the wrong, but I wasn’t buying it.

What to do with these rabbit wanderings? And where has my plunge down the rabbit hole led me? It seems fitting to conclude this ramble with the rabbit hole, which is a reference to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and her following of the white rabbit down into Wonderland. Of course, “down the rabbit hole” is also a term used for getting lost on the internet:

“Down the rabbit hole” is an English-language idiom or trope which refers to getting deep into something, or ending up somewhere strange. Lewis Carroll introduced the phrase as the title for chapter one of his 1865 novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, after which the term slowly entered the English vernacular. The term is usually used as a metaphor for distraction.[1] In the 21st century, the term has come to describe a person who gets lost in research or loses track of time while using the internet.

wikipedia

Out-of-control curiosity. Distraction. Losing track of time. Getting lost in strange worlds. These are presented as bad things. Are they? Many of them are embraced within poetry. And they are great tools of refusal and resistance against late-capitalism and wannabe fascist governments — you’re not working for/perpetuating the system while you’re following the rabbit hole.

Does that work when the getting lost is online, where the rabbit hole is designed to be the way curiosity is monetized: the more levels of the rabbit hole you enter, the longer you stay lost in all of the information offered, the more attention you give to a site and its advertisers.

I started this ramble yesterday after realizing my third bunny poem might be about the muse. That realization was partly inspired by a recent rereading of an excerpt from Tommy Pico’s poem, “IRL.” Somehow I’ve made it back to that beginning. Here’s the last section of that excerpt:

All I need is my phone.
Subway, elevator, drifting off
in a convo—no one really seems
to notice, occupied by their own
gleaming pod of longing.
I am the captain of my shit,
possessed by the spirit
of Instagram I am omnipotent
on Twitter on Blurb on Vine
Soap boxes on the street corner
of my mind Clear, boosted, boundless
something come stop the shaking
A sun to fly towards iMean
something to do: mimicry
of purpose. The injury
of hunger is: death. The word
of the day is: Gloze.
To explain away.
Glowing gauze glozes the
etc. Weather.com says
Stay inside forever, or
drop dead. We’ve ads
for you to click. You n me?
It’s going to take soooo long
for us to know each other
ten years.

I don’t understand all that is happening in this excerpt, but the more I read it, the more doors it opens for me and my thinking about the internet, IRL, and the Muse.4

  1. “the birds aren’t going to save me” — I suppose my initial turn to the bunnies was with that expectation, where saving = giving me something else to think about other than ICE and Occupation Minneapolis and fascism and my high blood pressure and insomnia ↩︎
  2. My choice of plunge is deliberate; it’s a reference to Emily Dickinson’s “I felt a funeral in my Brain” — And then a Plank in Reason, broke,/And I dropped down, and down,/ And hit a World, with every plunge,/And Finished knowing – then – ↩︎
  3. Something else included: “rabbits will excrete, eat and re-digest their own droppings to obtain the maximum amount of nutrients.” I wonder if that’s part of what the rabbits in my yard are doing when they spend so much time stock-still in the snow. ↩︎
  4. One last thing about the Muse that I want to mention for a future discussion. What if the bunnies/rabbits are not a muse, or a catalyst for action (which was said of the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland), but a gate? As in, Marie Howe opening in “The Gate”: I had no idea that the gate I would step through / to finally enter this world / would be the space my brother’s body made ↩︎

feb 22/RUNGETOUTICE

3 miles
river road, north/lena smith hill x 3
15 degrees / feels like -2
wind: 24 mph gusts
100% clear path

A late afternoon run. It was cold but I had on (almost) all of the layers — 2 pairs of running tights, 2 base layer shirts, 1 hooded pull-over, a jacket, a buff, a cap with ear flaps, 2 pairs of gloves — so I was very warm. Only now, back inside at my desk, can I feel how the cold burned my face. I saw a few walkers, but I think I was the only runner. The river was open, the paths were clear, the sky was a grayish white.

overheard: 2 men walking a dog, heading north — when can we get out of this wind?!

Yes, the wind was rough. I don’t recall it stirring up anything, just howling, and feeling cold. 3 miles was enough for me today.

thank you past Sara!

Performing my morning ritual — my “On This Day” practice in which I read past entries from this day — I reread 22 feb 2024 and my lengthy discussion of pain. Such a gift today when I seem to be having an almost 2 month long argument with my body. I hesitate to call it pain, although I am in some discomfort. It started with a mild but persistent “cold” (never tested it, so I’m not sure what it was) that lasted more than 2 weeks. Then the discovery of high blood pressure at an annual check-up, which I’m monitoring for the next month (doctor’s orders), and that is sometimes normal, sometimes not, and is leaving me unsettled by its refusal to be one or the other. Combine that with the return of anxiety, a stretch of particularly bad restless legs and insomnia, and the acceleration of fascism in the US. Fascism aside, none of these are that big of a deal, and maybe that’s part of the problem. If they were actually a big deal, I would learn how to accept and accommodate them. Instead they linger as uncertainties, specters of worry, causing a rift between me (who is the me here?) and my body. (This litany of minor complaints is offered as gift to future Sara who most likely won’t read them as complaints, but as the documenting and archiving of what it felt like to be living in this strange and terrible and hopeful time.)

I’m not sure when I created the hashtag, body in pain, but I should do more with it — maybe create a page? And maybe I can do a little more with the 2024 entry and this — 18 august 2017.

Get Out Ice

Fight
Unlawful
Conduct
Keep
Individuals and
Communities
Empowered Act

Democratic lawmakers in New Jersey have sent a blunt message to Immigration and Customs Enforcement with the introduction of a new bill.

The “Fight Unlawful Conduct and Keep Individuals and Communities Empowered Act” – or F*** ICE Act – was introduced Thursday in the State Assembly. It aims to extend residents’ rights under state law to sue federal immigration officials for unconstitutional conduct. 

“There have to be real consequences if ICE breaks the law,” said Katie Brennan, an Assembly Democrat who is co-sponsoring the bill alongside former Hoboken mayor Ravi Bhalla, also a Democrat, according to The New York Times.

The Independent

Many of the articles about this FUCKICE Act described it as vulgar in the headline, which reminds me of a great quote from an article in MPR recently about mocking ICE and the Dildo Distribution Delegation:

“When people come out and say, ‘Well that was really vile or vulgar or distasteful,’ it sets up the question: isn’t it more distasteful and violent and vulgar to shoot people in the back of the head when they’re at a protest or to kill the citizens of Minneapolis?” Winchester said.

misheard

Read a poem last night, or was it early this morning?, by Kelli Russell Agodon that connects with my interest yesterday in sense misperceptions, and reminds me of something I wrote about on a log entry from 26 jan 2025: the 10 muses of poetry, including: Mishearing, Misunderstanding, Mistranslating, Mismanaging, Mislaying, and Misreading. The poem: “Coming Up Next: How Killer Blue Irises Spread —Misheard health report on NPR” And here’s something else from that 26 jan 2025 entry to put with all of this:

A second key might be “eavesdropping.” As it happens I have deficient eyesight and hearing, not enough to impair my regular function but enough that I can, as my colleague Karla Kelsey puts it, “squint,” either with the eye or the ear, without difficulty. Some of my best lines—especially the generative lines, the bits of poetic grist from which poems develop—come from phrases I’ve misheard in conversation or (at least initially) misread as text. I guess you could say I “own” such material—I make a lyric and creative claim to it—by mishearing or misreading it.

An Inheritance Reassembled

I bought a collection by Waldrep after discovering this intervew, and a few of his poems. Maybe it’s time to read it!

feb 21/RUNGETOUTICE

4.25 miles
minnehaha falls and back
18 degrees / feels like 6

After a week of warmth, winter is back and this time the paths are clear! Hooray! It is (almost) never the cold but the uneven trails that bother me in January and February (and March and often April). I felt good as I ran south and even better as I ran back north. As I ran, I thought about how I was wearing my dead mother-in-law’s purple jacket and my dead mother’s teal cap with the tassels. I liked feeling as if they were both there with me. I also thought about #2 (see below) and what it means to be good at something. I imagined it not as something you are, I am good at x or y or z, but as a moment you experience or as a means to a deeper end: to feel free or satisfied or joyful — because I can run well, I am able to float on the trail and devote more attention to this place or to travel farther on this trail or enter the flow state and feel closer to the earth, the air, the water.

10 Things

  1. a flash or a slash or a blur of bright red below me — with a second glance I saw that it was a person with a red coat walking on the winchell trail
  2. a BRIGHT dot and a thought whispered in my head — yellow — an instant later recognition, a crosswalk sign
  3. thump thump thump the deep bass of a song exploding out of a car
  4. another car, more music — a song that I could almost but not quite hear — I strained my ears to identify any lyrics or a melody, but couldn’t
  5. the faint echo of the train bells near the falls
  6. the falls were still gushing from behind the ice columns, the dark water of the creek was rushing
  7. a group of people standing at the wall, looking down at the falls — they were laughing and cheering as they threw something below — I think they were snowballs
  8. the river was completely open and was mostly a deep brownish blueish dark gray — it stretched wide and far and looked more like a wall than water
  9. my feet slid (but didn’t slip) on the grit on the trail
  10. the paths held a range of people — single walkers, walkers with dogs, running pairs, running trios, adults and kids walking single-file — but the benches held nothing — they were empty

some things to remember

1

For almost a year now, I’ve been jumping from project to project. In the spring, it was color, then in the summer it was water and inklings, in the fall my book manuscript on echolocation and the gorge, and this winter it has been love. So many projects! And I have more big ideas that have been simmering for years and waiting for the light of my attention. But, I also like wandering without a clear purpose or goal. I like devoting a month to a random topic, like shadows or windows or wind, making a playlist for it, exploring new things that I haven’t encountered before. It’s difficult to balance a desire to wander and experiment with the need to turn it into something.

And right now, the need to turn it into something is winning. Even as I write this, I’m thinking of another project which would be part of a larger manuscript on how I see. So far, I have written about how I am seeing color (inner and outer color), how I navigate, looking at the world as if through water (inklings), now it’s time for another section/chapbook of this — thoughts? Optical illusions or hallucinations or mistaken identities? I’m imagining this might include examples from my log of seeing something in a very WRONG way — like disembodied legs walking toward me on the trail.

My starting point could be to gather: examples from past entries; lines from poems that speak to/of the beauty and the danger of these illusions; some research on illusions by scientists and psychologists; excerpts from essays by G. Kleege and Naomi Cohn; examples in art — like Monet and Magritte. Along the way, I want to turn this work of gathering into a resource page for others.

2

In my post from 21 feb 2017, I posed the question, what does it mean to be good at running? What does it mean to be good at something? And now I’m wondering, what does it TAKE to be good at something? The word excellence echoes in my head as I think about my studying of Aristotle and the figure skating in the 2026 winter Olympics. Two different models: Ilia Malinin (the quad god) and Alysa Liu. And I’m also thinking about the idea of needing to suffer for your art and where joy fits into your practice. And, another question — is the goal always to be good, to excel, to master?

3

A book to buy, or to check out of the library: Against Breaking — the power of poetry / Ada Limón

4

A mural to find:

a storm drain mural for water quality, designed and painted by local artist Precious, shows a sunset over a cityscape in vibrant colors. You can see it at the Mississippi River Gorge scenic overlook along Mississippi River Boulevard in Highland Park.

FMR

5

a poem to read again and to place beside my restlessness, my desire for movement, and my desire to find new ways to understand stillness:

The Art of Silence / Christine Anderson

a Buddhist monk taught me to sit silently
be the moon floating over my back field
a buttercup cradled in a clump of spring grass
sit hushed
as the broad shoulders of granite mountains
in their shawl of clouds—
sit despite
an unquiet morning
that buzzes and twitters and zips
sit to be a dewdrop
in the garden
a perfect pearl of daybreak—
a Buddha
sitting.

Get Out Ice

Found a substack list of LOTS of anti-ICE stuff happening around the cities. This one seemed particularly fitting:

We want ICE OUT!!! Of our city, our state, our community, and for one night only, out of our margaritas.

Celebrate National Margarita Day this Sunday 2/22 at Hai Hai with NO ICE margaritas to support our restaurant community. ICE doesn’t belong here anymore and we are pulling frozen water out of our favorite cocktail to prove it. A portion of each No Ice Marg sold will be donated to @thesaltcurefund for restaurants in need. If and when ICE leaves, restaurants will have a long way to go to recover from the impact their occupation has had on our community, join us for a drink and some laughter and help us take one step forward towards recovery.

Hai Hai Instagram post

feb 20/BIKEGETOUTICE

32 minutes
basement

Watched the women’s cross-country relay for most of the bike, then Alysa Liu’s amazing Free Skate for the last 10 minutes. Scott and I watched Liu’s performance last night, and I watched it again this morning. Admittedly, I can’t really see that much of it — no details, not her beaming face, none of her lines, only the feel and speed of her movement, the energy of her joy. And I guess as I watch it I am a little sad not to be able to fully witness her artistry. But I still loved it. And I’ll be watching it again and again as an antidote to all the other shit happening right now.

Bunnies

Earlier today, I read in an old log entry about my discovery, last february, of two backyard bunnies. Then I read a post on Facebook from Minneapolis Parks about how some rabbits pee blue. It felt like a nudge, today you should write about bunnies!

Here are some sources for inspiration (or more) about rabbits/bunnies:

1

Have you seen weird blue spots in the snow lately? There’s a good chance it’s rabbit pee. Eastern cottontails (the most common rabbit in Minnesota, you’ve probably seen them running around yards at dusk) sometimes eat buckthorn branches and bark, especially toward the end of winter. Buckthorn contains a phytochemical that turns urine blue after being exposed to sunlight.
So, don’t be alarmed if you come across one of these spots, it probably means a well hydrated rabbit stopped by. (Minneapolis Parks)

2

Looking out the kitchen window, seeing 2 dark forms in the white snow — bare patches or something more? Staring for a few mnutes — am I imagining that slight shift? No, 2 animals, standing still for minutes. What are they doing? Quick movement, then bounding figures. Rabbit-like. But these animals look so dark — is it a trick of the dim light — bunny fir darkened in the lilac light? [there is no indigo in a backyard illuminated by neighbor’s security lights.] Or, could these creatures be raccoons?

update, 20 feb 2026: A definite answer: bunnies! All late fall and winter, 2 or more bunnies have been hanging out under our crab apple tree — at night, in the afternoon, at sunrise and sunset. They’re very bold, these bunnies, not running off when I walk by. When this happens, I’ve started saying, these bunnies are as bold as brass! Why? Not sure. And, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea: I like bunnies or rabbits about as much as I like squirrels, which is not at all.

3

The idiom bold as brass describes someone who exudes extreme confidence, someone who is brazen or very forward. The term bold as brass is ascribed to the Lord Mayor of London in the 1770s, Brass Crosby. Crosby defied the House of Parliament by supporting the printing of a pamphlet regarding the proceedings of Parliament. The phrase bold as brass was first recorded in Life’s Painter of Variegated Characters in Public and Private Life by George Parker published in 1789, some time after the incident involving Brass Crosby. Some say this disproves the link between Crosby and the idiom bold as brass, others say it reinforces the link. In fact, the word brass was used to mean boldness or brazenness for at least forty years before the appearance of Brass Crosby on the political scene. The idiom bold as brass reached the zenith of its popularity in the early 1900s.

4

an illusion: duck or bunny

5

A cup holds
sugar, flour, three large rabbit-breaths of air.
(My Weather / Jane Hirshfield)

6

But then the rabbits tire
And the fire catches up,
Stuck onto them like the needles of the cactus,
Which at first must be what they think they feel on their skins.
They’ve felt this before, every rabbit.
But this time the feeling keeps on.
And of course, they ignite the brush and dried weeds
All over again, making more fire, all around them.
I’m sorry for the rabbits.
And I’m sorry for us
To know this.
(Rabbits and Fire/ Alberto Rios)

7

The rock that is not a rabbit suns itself
in the field, its brown coat that isn’t fur
furred with light. The rock that isn’t a rabbit
would be warm to a palm but wouldn’t
quicken or strain from touch.
(The Rock that isn’t a Rabbit / Corey Marks)

8

it is the
sadness of the unperceived and therefore never felt and
seldom expressed, except on occasion by polka dancers
and little girls who, in imitation of their grandmothers,
decide who shall have their bunny when they die.
(Green Sadness / Mary Ruefle)

9

A white rabbit hopped beside me and for a moment I thought it was a blob of snow that had fallen out of the sky. The rabbit and I studied each other. Rabbits taste like chickens. My My mother and father had taught me how to hit rabbits over the head with wine jugs, then skin them cleanly for fur vests. “It’s a cold night to be an animal,” I said, “so you want some fire too, do you? Let me put on another branch, then.” I would not hit it with the branch. I had learned from rabbits to kick backward. Perhaps this one was sick because normally the animal did not like fire. The rabbit seemed alert enough, however, looking at me acutely, bounding up to the fire. But it did not stop when it got to the edge. It turned its face once towards me then jumped into the fire. The fire went down for a moment as if crouching in surprise, then the flames shot up taller than before. When the fire became calm again I saw that the rabbit had turned into meat, browned just right. I ate it, knowing the rabbit had sacrificed itself for me. It had made me a gift of meat.
(The Woman Warrior / Maxine Hong Kingston)

I ended up doing other things today and didn’t have much time to work on it. I found a title and some opening lines:

There is no Indigo

In a backyard illuminated
by a neighbor’s security lights
there is only lilac.

I think I’m going to also need to include the line about how I like bunnies as much as I like squirrels, which is not at all.

Get Out Ice

The only ice I am into today is the Olympic ice and Alysa Liu’s free skate!

feb 19/SHOVELWALKGETOUTICE

7.6 inches
30 degrees

When I went out for my run yesterday in the early afternoon to “beat the snow” I had no idea it would snow so much. What was completely bare yesterday morning, is now covered in white. Wow. It is very winter wonderland-y. If I didn’t need to take a day off from running, I’d be out there right now with my yaktrax. Instead of running, I settled for an early morning shovel. This winter, I’ve been shoveling my sidewalk and the sidewalk of my neighbors on both sides. The snow hasn’t been too hard to shovel and it feels good to help others, even in this small way. Today as I shoveled the sidewalk of my neighbor to the south, she opened her door and called out, Thank you Sara! Normally I listen to a podcast or a playlist when I shovel, but I didn’t today. I’m glad. I might not have heard her thank you if I had!

10 Things

  1. the snow was so bright that even though the sun wasn’t out, I wore sunglasses
  2. chirping birds
  3. a droning snow blower
  4. the sharp scrape of a shovel
  5. the snow moved easily under my crappy plastic shovel — it was both fluffy and wet
  6. without the snow, the sidewalk was slick
  7. the serviceberry tree/bush at the edge of our deck was loaded down with snow —
  8. once I accidentally brushed against it and snow fell under my jacket and down my back — brrr
  9. later I gently knocked the heavy branches with my shovel; a soft layer of snow fell on my head and covered my sunglasses
  10. my shovel unearthed clumps of dead leaves at the edge of the sidewalk

walk: 60 minutes
Winchell trail to Rachel Dow Memorial Bench
32 degrees

Every winter I try to do at least one winter wonderland walk, when it’s not too cold or too windy and everything is covered in white and winter feels like WINTER — as in the ideal form of winter. Today was the day for this year! Admittedly, the edges of the trail and the curbs were very wet, but I didn’t mind because I had on snow pants and boots.

As I walked to the river, I recited Wordsworth’s “Snow-flakes” — Out of the bosom of the air/Out of the cloudfolds of her garment shaken — and watched small clumps of snow dropping from the branches. I listened to the water falling over the concrete ledge, then the limestone ledge, then into the ravine. I felt the snow compacting through my boot and creak creak creaking with every step.

added on 20 feb 2026: Rereading my entry from 20 feb 2023, a mention of footprints reminded me of something else about my walk on the Winchell Trail: lots of footprints. I liked knowing that other people had taken this walk before me and wondered if they loved it as much as I did. A distinctive thing about these footprints: even though the snow was new, the footprints weren’t pure white. Many of them were tinged with yellow — not from dog pee, but from something else. The over saturated ground? The snow itself, polluted? And, related to footprints, the tracks from cross-country skis! Unfortunately it took me a few minutes to process that they were there and that I should not be walking over them and break the trail that someone had made. So I ruined a block-length stretch of them before realizing and shifting over to the unbroken snow.

The view of the river through the tall, slender trees was amazing. The water was all open and a blueish-greenish-gray — at least to me. I took some pictures but none of them captured the beauty of this moment.

snow-painted trees, a fence, the open river

When I got to the Rachel Dow Memorial Bench, I brushed off the snow and sat for a few minutes. I heard the birds and the faint rumble of a pick-up truck across the river. Then I walked back on the trail closer to the road, and it finally happened — an SUV sped through the puddles on the edge of the road and splashed me. When I run, I often wonder/worry if this will happen, but this was the first time it actually did. I didn’t mind; it was warm, and I dressed for it. Did they do it on purpose? Possibly. No other car splashed up water. Do I care? Not at all.

Get Out Ice

Another sticker in the Arbeiter bathroom. Maybe I should make a sticker to put up in that bathroom? A poetry sticker?

Best Friends Forever / Epstein and Trump

feb 18/RUNGETOUTICE

It is 1:30 pm. It is sometimes raining, sometimes snowing, and is all-the-time windy. It is also 32 degrees. But the pavement is bare and it might not be this clear for a few days because we are supposed to get some more snow. Should I go out for a short run when I have the chance? Or, are the conditions too crappy, my left knee too sore? Future Sara will let us know! Sara from 2:47: I did it! I went out for a run in this blustery weather!

3.3 miles
river road, south/north/neighborhood, south
31 degrees / feels like 17 / snow
wind: 25 mph gusts

Not the best conditions, but I’m glad I went outside. I started by running south on the river road trail, but it was tough. I was running straight into the wind and stabbing snowflakes. I turned around at the Rachel Dow Memorial Bench, then turned off the river road and onto Lena Smith Boulevard at 32nd. I was plannng to do some hills but the road was blocked off. Instead, I meandered through the neighborhood.

I encountered one other runner, at least one fat tire. Any walkers? I can’t remember. It was difficult to see what was ahead of me. Snow was thick in the air and I pulled the visor of my cap down low to block it. If I saw the river, I don’t remember what it looked like. When I turned around to head north again, it was much easier and more fun. The snow was swirling in front of my face, looking like white confetti or bits of styrofoam. It wasn’t as cool, but it reminded me of the scene at the men’s Free Ski Big Air final that Scott and I watched last night. The sky was black, the heavy snow was illuminated by the bright lights of the venue. I remember admiring it and wishing it would snow here again so I could run through it. Well, the snow today wasn’t nearly as heavy as what I saw on the tv, but it was still delightful. It will probably be a slippery nightmare tomorrow, but today it was fun!

Lisel Mueller!

I’ve posted several poems by Lisel Mueller over the years: When I Am Asked/ Lisel Mueller, The Blind Leading The Blind/ Lisel Mueller, Sometimes, When the Light/ Lisel Mueller, Things/ Lisel Mueller, and Monet Refuses the Operation/ Lisel Mueller. But, I’ve never checked out any of her collections until now. Yesterday I picked up Alive Together: New and Selected Poems / Lisel Mueller. I started at the beginning, and stopped when I found this poem:

Losing My Sight / Lisel Mueller

I never knew that by August
the birds are practically silent,
only a twitter here and there.
Now I notice. Last spring
their noisiness taught me the difference
between screamers and whistlers and cooers
and O, the coloraturas.
I have already mastered the subtlest pitches in our cat’s
elegant Chinese. As the river
turns muddier before my eyes,
its sighs and little smacks
grow louder. Like a spy,
I pick up things indiscriminately:
the long approach of a truck,
car doors slammed in the dark,
the night life of animals—shrieks and hisses,
sex and plunder in the garage.
Tonight the crickets spread static
across the air, a continuous rope
of sound extended to me,
the perfect listener.

coloratura = elaborate ornamentation of a vocal melody, especially in operatic singing by a soprano.

I imagined that Mueller knew something about vision loss when I read her, “Monet Refuses the Operation” a few years ago, but I didn’t know that for the last 20 years of her life (she died in 2020), she was losing her vision and couldn’t read. I found out about that while reading this interview, “Slightly Larger Than Life Size“:

Mueller speaks always in a steady, gentle tone—even when describing the death of her beloved husband, Paul Mueller, in 2001 or the partial loss of vision she has suffered over the last 20 years. “I’m blind for reading, really,” she explains plainly, almost as if she were describing someone else. “I use an enlarging machine. And I have two friends who come read to me.” 

Mueller also no longer writes, in part because of her diminishing vision. She treats this circumstance with the same tough realism—compellingly at odds with the ethereal nature of her poetry—as the other hardships in her life. “I do miss writing,” she replies when asked the obvious question. “But I simply don’t have the images coming to me anymore that would start a poem. The language no longer flows. I would have to force it and come up with some artificial things, and that’s not my way. I’m someone who has learned to put up with things as they are. Because of the blindness, because of what happened to my husband, because of leaving the country that I was born in and coming here—I accommodate myself.”

Slightly Larger Than Life Size

I accommodate myself. Love that line! A title for a poem, I think. I wouldn’t say I put up with things; rather, I adapt and find new ways to be, to see. I like the line about not forcing it and coming up with artificial things. I agree.

In my imagined poem titled, “I accommodate myself,” I might start it with a line from Mueller’s “Losing My Sight”: I never knew . . . . / Now I notice. Maybe I should make a list of all of things I’ve noticed since my vision began declining?

The perfect listener. Reading this line, I immediately thought of Ed Bok Lee’s line in “Halos“:

That visual impairment improves hearing,
taste, smell, touch is mostly myth.

I do notice things much more than I did before my vision loss; I’ve made it a big part of writing/attention practice. I’ve devoted many runs to listening or smelling or feeling the various textures. So, being a good listener didn’t just happen because my vision declined; I worked for it. Yet, even as I’m noticing more with my ears, I do also seem to struggle to hear what people are saying to me. So much so that I asked for my hearing to be checked at my last appointment. It was fine. So, what’s happening? Why do I need more time to process what people are saying, or need to ask them to repeat it? FWA thinks I might have an audio processing disorder — something one of his favorite Youtubers has. Possibly. I think it has more to do with how people use visual cues — gestures, their surroundings — to convey the meaning of their speech. People with normal sight don’t realize how much they are relying on vision when they speak and they don’t recognize how that impacts people who cannot see the things that they are referencing. I find this frustrating and also fascinating to think about how we our senses work together.

One more thing about Mueller’s poem. I’d like to memorize it. There are too many wonderful lines that I don’t want to forget.

Sharing the Love

I have not given much any attention to building an audience here or on social media and, as a result, no one is seeing/responding/sharing my love poems. It is probably also because of the algorithm. Scott suggested that I put the link in the first comment and post a picture of a dog. It’s time for me to think again about if I want a bigger audience. Actually, the better question is: how can I reach people with my work? For me, it’s less about a big audience, more about finding ways to share what I’m doing and connect with others. Experiment time! The goal for me is not a bigger audience, but finding ways to contribute and connect. Hmm . . . I’ll have to think about it some more.

a few minutes later: As a first step, I’ve decided to try sharing my love poems again on Facebook. I put the link in the first comment and posted a photo, not of a dog, but of this Valentine that Scott noticed in the bathroom at Arbeiter Brewing:

Valentine, I’m falling for you & hoping the system does, too.

Also, I posted the STOP ICE photo that I posted here yesterday on my Instagram.

Maybe one of the biggest reasons I’m not sharing on social media is because it’s hard for me to do it with my bad vision. Everything takes so much longer and I can’t always see when I’ve made a mistake. And, I’ve been self-conscious about posting photos that I imagine are poorly cropped or framed strangely. Time to get over that.

Get Out Ice

Seen on a bathroom door at Arbeiter Brewing:

sickers on a bathroom door at Arbeiter

feb 17/RUNGETOUTICE

4.3 miles
minnehaha park and back
47 degrees
wind: 13 mph / 32 mph gusts

Warm, but windy, which made it feel colder, but only sometimes. The rest of the time it felt warm. Warm enough for bare arms. My left knee was a bit stiff and sore. Maybe I should take a break from running tomorrow.

overheard as I ran near Minnehaha Academy: a whistle blowing, then an adult voice — Okay fourth graders! I guess recess is over.

10 Things

  1. at least 2 runners were wearing shorts
  2. all of the walkers were bundled up in coats and hats and long pants
  3. open water!? I think the ice has fully cracked on the surface of the river, but it could just be much thinner in parts. Looking down at it, there were blobs of white, with larger stretches of pale grayish, blueish, greenish
  4. the falls were gushing behind thick ice columns
  5. voices below — an adult with several kids — were they hiking behind the falls?
  6. a police vehicle parked sideways in the parking lot at 44th
  7. the cobblestones near the falls overlook were all ice-free, but not puddle-free! squish squish squish
  8. more of the walking path is clear and open — a few clumps of snow, wet and shiny pavement, grit
  9. an old pick-up truck was parked under the ford bridge, up on the sidewalk across the road from the trail — was it hiding — if so, why and from whom?
  10. the walking half of the double bridge was covered in slushy snow, the bike half was mostly clear with a deep puddle in the middle

I decided that I would listen to music for the second half of my run. Because it was windy, I put on my “It’s Windy” playlist. The first song: Sailing / Christopher Cross The last song was the sound of birds chirping. Huh? Oh — checked the title of the track: “Breeze (forest)”

Get Out Ice

When FWA got home from his errand this morning, he told me that all of the Stop signs in the neighborhood have a stenciled “ICE” under the “STOP” in a matching font. Of course I had to check and take a picture!

STOP ICE

I’m not sure how long these signs have been this way. I hadn’t noticed, but I don’t drive, so I rarely see the stop signs. I wondered how long it took someone/someones to do this? I hope the city leaves them alone.

added, 18 feb 2026: Three notes from Scott. First, as we drove to the library, Scott and I noticed more stop signs with “ICE” and some without. Scott guessed that this stop ice action was probably not that systematic. Second, he also pointed out that it is not a stencil, but a sticker. Would I be able to notice that if I got close enough? I’ll have to take a walk today and check. And third, Scott informed me that these stickers have been on stop signs for several weeks.

Love

I finished my love poems. I decided to call it, We Love, We Love, We Love, We Love. I posted it on instagram, facebook, and as the home page of my author site: sarapuotinen.com

feb 16/RUNGETOUTICE

4.05 miles
river road, north/south
51 degrees
50% sloppy

51 degrees! Another run with bare arms. Lots of puddles, but also lots of dry path. I was able to run on the walking path for long stretches. The surface of the river has cracked — no open water yet, but patches of thinner ice in light gray were scattered all over. A bike passed by blasting music: “Losing my Religion” by REM. I heard some kids’ voices at a playground before I reached the river. Saw/heard an ambulance rumble by on the river road, its LOUD siren freaking out all the nearby dogs. Near the end, recited Alice Oswald’s “A Story of Falling” as I ran — in my head, not out loud. Also near the end, heard the bells of St. Thomas chime twice — it’s 2:00 already? Wow.

I stopped to walk several times, often because I had become trapped on a part of the path that was suddenly blocked by a short wall of snow or a deep puddle. One of the stops was at a bench nearing Franklin that I have delighted in noticing before. It is dedicated to “Margaret Carlson, Dog Lover.” Today I remembered to take a picture of it!

“She cherished her girls; Schnapps, Candy, Maggie, Mitzi and Suzi*”

*yes, it should be a colon, not a semi-colon, but who cares; I’d rather give my attention to the fact that one of her “girls” is named Schnapps, and another, Candy!

I’m not sure if I’ve written this yet, but I’d like to remember: when I go out running now, I carry a whistle and my passport ID card. And I don’t listen to any music, so I can be better aware of what’s happening around me.

Get Out Ice

I am almost finished with my collection of love poems. Here’s the final poem, which is an erasure of a Facebook statement by Carbone’s Pizzeria on Cedar near Lake Nokomis:

This New Normal / 15 February 2026

This New Normal

We are with you. We love you.
love Always.
We Love
We Love
We Love
We Love
this new normal together,
love

feb 15/RUNGETOUTICE

3.5 miles
locks and dam #1
45 degrees
100% sloppy

It felt warmer than 45, warm enough to take off my pull-over and run the second half in short sleeves. I know winter is coming back next week and that I will enjoy running in the snow some more, but today I liked spring. I ran south on the river road trail, which had more people and more puddles than 2 days ago. Everything was bright — the sky, the silvery reflection on the water’s surface. In fact, writing this 10 minutes later, I’m having trouble seeing the screen because my eyes are still adjusting from how bright it was outside.

I heard the torpedoed call of a cardinal, the dripping of melting snow down the eaves, the whoosh of car wheels on the road. I felt the grit on the path, the warm air on my face, the cold, damp sponge of my sock. Squish squish squish!

Turkeys! As I ran south, I noticed a group of women gathered at the edge of the path, near an entrance to the Winchell Trail. I looked below and saw — or did I hear them first?! — 3 wild turkeys grazing in the grass and making some noise. Excellent!

The water under the ford bridge was still a thick white. Sometimes geese gather down here, but not today. Above, voices drifted down. Was it a bridge brigade: neighbors gathering together with signs and horns to protest ICE?

Get Out Ice

Here’s the beginning section of something Robert Reich posted that’s spreading around Facebook:

This, from one cabinet secretary to another. I could not say this any better:

”The New York Times reports that Department of Homeland Security has sent Google (owner of YouTube), Meta (Facebook and Instagram), and other media corporations subpoenas for the names on accounts that criticize ICE enforcement. The Department wants to identify Americans who oppose what it’s doing.

I’ll save them time.

***

Hello? Kristi Noem?

I hear you’re trying to find the names of people who are making negative comments on social media about ICE enforcement.

Look no further. I’ve done it frequently. I’m still doing it. This note to you, which I’m posting on Substack, is another example… You will find what I’ve said, and you’ll find it’s very critical. I’ve done some videos that are very critical of you and ICE, too.

Let me not mince words: I really truly believe you’re doing a sh*tty job.

Robert Reich

feb 13/RUNGETOUTICE

3 miles
locks and dam #1 and back
46 degrees!
75% sloppy

Okay first false spring! So many less layers today: running tights, shorts, short-sleeved shirt, pull-over, cap. No gloves or long sleeved base layers or coats or buffs. And, by the end of the run, I took off my outer layer and was walking back with bare arms. Nice! I’ve told the kids for years, whenever they wonder how they can make it through the long winter, once you get through January, it always warms up for a few days around Valentine’s Day. And, like it usually does, it warmed up right around Valentine’s Day!

I felt good during my run. Happy, strong, able to run through moments of wanting to stop. I wasn’t able to avoid puddles though. Squish squish squish. Soaked socks.

10 Things

  1. patch-work surface below: white and pale blue — will the ice split before it gets cold again?
  2. birds! sounding excited for spring
  3. deep puddles everywhere — they were particularly bad on the double bridge, I had to grab onto the wooden railing and climb around them
  4. a car passed me twice blasting some music that sounded like enya
  5. encountered lots of runners — were any wearing shorts? I can’t remember
  6. drip drip drip
  7. the sun was reflecting off of the water on the path, everything was shiny and bright
  8. at least one or two fat tires
  9. a few walkers in bright yellow vests
  10. the grassy boulevard was a combination of mushy snow, very slick snow, and grass, and mud

When I reached the locks and dam #1, I ran halfway down the hill and stopped to record a thought, and some false spring sounds:

False spring / 23 feb 2026

restless / still

At my annual check-up a week ago, I told my cnp that my legs were restless and I was waking up several times a night (which has been the case for a decade now, I think). She ordered a blood test for my ferritin. Yep — very low: 16; she wants it to be at least 40. So, iron pills for a month, another test, then maybe iron transfusions. This description is for future Sara who likes to remember these things, and present Sara who imagines a future Sara that will. This description is also prompted by two references to stillness in my “on this day posts” from past years. In 2021 I posted a passage from an audiobook I was listening to, Wintering:

There are gaps in the mesh of the everyday world and sometimes they open up and you fall through into somewhere else. Somewhere else runs at a different pace to the here and now where everyone else carries on. Somewhere else is where ghosts live, concealed from view and only glimpsed by people in the real world. Somewhere else exists at a delay so that you can’t quite keep pace. Perhaps I was already resting on the brink of somewhere else anyway, but now I fell through as simply and discretely as dust shifting through the floorboards. I was surprised to find I felt at home there. Winter had begun. Everybody winters at one time or another. Some winter over and over again. Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, side-lined, blocked from progress or cast into the role of an outsider.

Wintering / Katherine May

Here stillness = a lack of movement, frozen in the cold, removed from the action. Reading this passage again, I’m not so sure that I think of stillness, but when I read it a few minutes ago, and then read a line from Elizabeth Bishop, I thought, still. Here’s the line from Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “Five Flights Up”:

Still dark.

When I read this brief line, I thought about how much I like that still can mean more than one thing at a time. Still dark = it is still dark, the dark continues, it is too early for light, we continue to be in the time/place of not-yet-day. And, still dark = it is quiet, there is a lack of movement, everything is still and dark, nothing moves and nothing can be seen.

Maybe I should spend some time studying Bishop? I have read several of her poems, even studying one more closely — The End of March on 30 march 2023. And now I’m thinking of Jorie Graham and studying her, or finally writing a poem about being still and restless? And all of this makes me think, again, of a film still, a photograph, an image frozen — my “how I see” project!

Get Out Ice

Thinking again about today’s false spring weather. FWA asked how many false springs I thought we’d have before it was warm for good and I said, I wasn’t sure but that I knew it would get very cold again. The earliest spring has stayed is the end of March. I added, no one believes that this warm-up will stay, that we’ve made it through winter. What this warm up does it reminds us that a world beyond winter is possible, which is easy to forget when we’re in the deep of it. This feels like a metaphor for ICE’s leaving of Minnesota. It’s not over, they’re not really leaving. No one here believes that. But this withdrawal of troops does signal a victory and demonstrates that a world beyond ICE beyond Trump is possible.

Love

I’m working on the introduction to my love, minnesota-style chapbook. Since I’m a little stuck, I tried to think about it as I ran. A sentence popped into my head, and I recorded in the middle of the run: “Words don’t merely describe something, they do something.” And I added, and I’m particularly interested in what these words did/do to me, to others here in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

feb 12/RUNGETOUTICE!?!

5.4 miles
bottom for franklin and back
41 degrees
40% puddles

Puddles everywhere. After about a mile, I could hear the squish sound of my wet sock with every foot strike. Who cares? Not me. I’m happy for warmer weather and clearer paths. I wasn’t sure how far I’d run, but I just kept going and made it to the bottom of the franklin hill. First I was going to stop at the trestle, then I wanted to make it a little closer to Franklin. When I reached Franklin, I looked down at the uneven, cracking ice on the river’s surface and decided I needed to run to the flats to get a closer inspection. Very cool — cold (temp) and aesthetic (strange and interesting and other-worldly).

I heard birds, felt warm sun on my face, smelled sewer gas (below, near the rowing club), saw a woman biking in a tank top.

Get Out Ice!?!

The official word, announced this morning by Homan, is that ICE is leaving Minnesota and Operation Metro Surge is over. But, is it over, or just taking more hidden forms? And was this move made primarily to get the budget passed and/or ease the pressure being applied in D.C.? Whatever the case, it does seem to be a failure for the Trump administration and it also seems to be bullshit. They are staying and will continue doing bad (as in unconstitutional, terrible) things here and all around the country.

love

While all that I wrote in the last paragraph seems to be true — and scary and difficult to imagine and endure — something else is true: people are speaking out, resisting, caring for each other, paying attention, reclaiming democracy, organizing together, refusing to be intimidated or overwhelmed by the administration’s tactics. Will this stop ICE or Trump? Maybe not, but whatever happens, the love that has been expressed/practiced in Minneapolis for the past 2 months isn’t going away and too many of us have witnessed what it has cracked open that can’t be fully fixed by the administration. There is another world possible.

feb 11/RUNGETOUTICE

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
35 degrees
15% sloppy

Sun! Above freezing! Melting and melted snow! And I think I remember hearing chirping birds somewhere. Plus, the falls were faintly falling! Today’s run felt much better than yesterday’s. I felt stronger and calmer and more capable of handling everything — running included.

10 Things

  1. two benches at the park were occupied, one near Sea Salt and one just across the road from the Longfellow House
  2. a low, dull whine coming from the indoor ice rink at Minneahaha Academy
  3. the gentle curve of the retaining wall wrapped around the ravine between 42nd and 44th, covered in white
  4. much of the snow near the bench above the edge of the world was melted — the bench was empty, the river was white
  5. a few cars in the parking lots at the falls
  6. two people standing on the path at the edge of the falls looking up at something — but what?
  7. 2 fat tires
  8. a man and a dog emerging from a snow-covered trail, climbing a snow bank and then crossing the road
  9. a long honk from a car across turkey hollow
  10. the soft sound and the slide-y feel of my feet striking the grit on the path

As I ran, I thought about my low ferritin and wondered what impact it has made on my running. Is it why I struggle to run more than 4 or 5 miles at a time? Then I imagined how much better my running might be after a few months of taking the iron pills my np (nurse practitioner) prescribed for me.

Here in Minnesota, we have a few months (if we’re lucky!) before it’s spring, but it sure feels like it today. In honor of that feeling, here’s a Mary Oliver poem I just discovered in my recently purchased Little Alleluias:

A Settlement / Mary Oliver

Look, it’s spring. And last year’s loose dust has turned
into this soft willingness. The wind-flowers have come
up trembling, slowly the brackens are up-lifting their
curvaceous and pale bodies. The thrushes have come
home, none less than filled with mystery, sorrow,
happiness, music, ambition.

And I am walking out into all of this with nowhere to
go and no task undertaken but to turn the pages of
this beautiful world over and over, in the world of my
mind.

***

Therefore, dark past,
I’m about to do it.
I’m about to forgive you

for everything.

I love this poem! To turn the pages of this beautiful world, to forgive the dark past, to declare, I’m about to do it in a poem. I want to borrow that line.

Get Out Ice

An IRL friend shared a post on Facebook with some wise words about care and love. The whole post is great, but here’s an excerpt that explicitly discusses care and another form of love: relational humility and the de-centering of needs/desires

So beloved white women kin, please let us watch each other. If you see this happening, please turn towards our kin and ask them to hold a contradiction with you: we need the efforts and care that are being brought forth, this strategy that uses our privileges to build things that are needed but, at the same time, and with the greatest of humility, we have to recognize that we carry within us deeply rooted survival needs that are about our own comfort and centering; our desire to feel and be seen as valuable and worthy. And because those needs are deeply rooted, we often don’t see them when they crop up, although others do. Which is why practicing relational humility rather than defensiveness is key to this moment.

Link arms with each other and say, hey, while we are doing this work, let’s check each other on what we are bringing to it. Who else are we in relationship with? How are we checking our actions against something other than the minds of other white women? Is there anyone else doing the same thing or something similar and can we help them rather than start something new? Is there a part of us doing this thing because we have an image of ourselves as brave and selfless, a kind of inner hero narrative? Come on, loves, tell the truth. Where are we holding on to control rather than care, feeling a sense of ownership to our work that we are attached to, expressing false humility when we actually want the attention, and believing that we know what is best for whatever moment we are in? Are we trying to build an empire or just a moment for the people nearest to us, people we want to create safe? Loves, beloveds, there are a number of white women engaging in empire building right now, even though it is called care.

Raffo Susan

there are a number of white woman engaging in empire building right now, even though it is called care.

love

I have written 14 love poems using words/lines/phrases from the social media statements of local businesses. For Valentine’s Day, I want to gather them in a small chapbook to be shared and spread. I’d like to include a brief introduction that would explain what, why, and how I put these together, and might offer a more straight-forward description of how love is being imagined and practiced here in Minnesota. This afternoon and tomorrow, I need to write this introduction.

feb 10/RUNGETOUTICE

3.7 miles
lena smith hill
33 degrees

Windier today. Colder too. The run wasn’t as easy. As always, there were moments that felt great, when I was strong and joyful. And there were moments that felt not so great, when I was tired and overheated. I did the hill on the river road once and the hill on lena smith 4 times. The road and the trails were mostly clear. It was only when crossing an alley or a block or running up the river road hill that it was icy and uneven. And somewhere — where was it? — there were several deep puddles covering the sidewalk. Oh, I remember: near Minnehaha Academy. 3 deep puddles, at least.

Someone was walking with a dog and holding up a sign. I couldn’t read what the sign said, but people were honking in support, which didn’t sound like support to me. All honks sound threatening or aggressive or seem to signal a warning, especially now when people are using them to alert neighbors of ICE.

Get Out Ice

Read this great story about reclaiming ice on Facebook from Sean Snow:

In an incredible display of solidarity on the East Side of St. Paul, thousands of neighbors gathered at Lake Phalen this weekend for the “Shine Light Over ICE” vigil. Organizers transformed the frozen lake into a massive canvas of resistance, placing thousands of LED luminaries and candles on the ice to spell out messages of welcome and protection for immigrant neighbors. The event was organized by local interfaith and community groups, and was designed to reclaim the word “ICE” from a source of fear back to a source of shared Minnesotan joy.

Freezing weather makes our hearts warm

In Minnesota, we know something the rest of the country doesn’t… the cold has a way of clarifying things. It strips away the unnecessary and forces us to huddle together for survival. We don’t hide from the winter… we drive right out onto the frozen water and light a fire. By turning a frozen lake into a source of warmth and light, our communities proved that no matter how cold the political climate gets, the hearts of Minnesotans burn hot enough to melt the fear. We are winter people, and we know how to keep each other warm.

Source: https://www.twincities.com/…/st-paul-lake-phalen-event…/

We are a winter people and we know how to keep each other warm. Also, the line about the clarity of the cold.

Love #14

In today’s love cento, I took words from 3 different posts by a pub near my house, Merlins Rest. I was unsure what to make out of them until I read this line,

“Community. Connection. Conversation. The Three C’s that Merlins Rest Pub was founded on.”

The Three C’s of Love

Cannot close, Committed
Calling attention, aCcountability: Caught.
Community Connection Conversation
Celebrations Challenges Change
Continue Continue Continue
Cold City Compassion

Does this work? I almost wonder if any of these “3 Cs” could be the title of a poem? I like the idea of creating another poem, using Merlins Rest Pub’s words, with this title, Cold City Compassion.

Cold City Compassion

In the bone-deep Minnesota cold
we invite you to join us.

Together, we will continue 
to keep each other warm.

Maybe I could use the quote about being a winter people as an epigraph for this poem?

feb 9/RUNGETOUTICE

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
39 degrees
40% sloppy (snow/ice/puddles)

Ran in the afternoon, which is when I run most days this winter. It felt much better than yesterday. I think the effects of the second shingles shot are lessening. And I was less worried about blood pressure and heart rate too; both have gone down — not quite to normal numbers, but much closer than a few days ago.

It was sloppy out there! The snow and ice weren’t slippery — thanks Minneapolis Parks Department for sprinkling dirt on the trail! — but they were wet, and there were deep puddles in several spots. I managed to avoid completely soaking my shoes or socks.

Today it is gray and a dingy white — writing that, I’m thinking of a line from a Diane Seuss poem; I’ll find it after I finish this recounting of my run*. Gloomy, humid, wet. I didn’t mind. It felt more like early spring than deep into winter. Right after going outside, I even smelled thawing earth! There were some runners and walkers and bikers on the trail, but no cross country skiers or eliptigos or hoverboards. (Earlier today, when Scott and I were heading back from a meeting, we saw someone speed by on a hoverboard!)

The falls and the creek were frozen and everything was still. No one else around, which was a little unsettling. A few minutes later, heading out of the park, I heard some kids at the playground. Earlier, as I passed the parking lot, I heard the train bells and horn blaring. Was it a normal alert that the train was crossing an intersection, or a different warning?

I don’t recall hearing any birds or seeing any squirrels. No wild turkeys or yipping dogs. No bad music blasting out of a car window. Passing a trash can at 42nd, my nose crinkled as it got a faint smell of poop. My first thought: a diaper, but more likely dog poop. Yuck!

Near the end of my run, I decided to recite — again, out loud! — Alice Oswald’s “The Story of Falling.” It helped distract me, or focus me, or moved my mind somewhere other than how much more I had to run. I think it’s time to return to reciting poems on the trail! Maybe I’ll start with my Emily Dickinson experiment: pick a different ED poem to recite for each mile run.

*Here’s the Diane Seuss poem. It’s so good, and not too long, so I’ll post the whole thing again. I first posted it on 1 june 2024, when I was reading Seuss’ Pultizer Prize winning, Frank.

Legacy/ Diane Seuss

I think of the old pipes, 
how everything white 
in my house is rust-stained, 
and the gray-snouted
raccoon who insists on using
my attic as his pee pad, 
and certain
sadnesses losing their edges, 
their sheen, their fur
chalk-colored, look
at that mound of laundry, 
that pile of pelts peeled away
from the animal, and poems, 
skinned free of poets, 
like the favorite shoes of that dead 
girl now wandering the streets
with someone else’s feet in them.

white as rust-stained, certain sadnesses as dull, soft, and chalk-colored

Get Out Ice

This morning, I watched Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance. Wow! So much love. Such a powerfully layered f–k you to hate! So many beautiful stories of a culture!

Here’s what was written about it on Facebook:

I watched Bad Bunny deliver the most American halftime show I have ever seen. Then I came home and watched it again. And I am not okay. In the best possible way.

He sang every single word in Spanish. Every. Single. Word. He danced through sugarcane fields built on a football field in California while the President of the United States sat somewhere calling it “disgusting.” Lady Gaga came out and did the salsa. Ricky Martin lit up the night. A couple got married on the field. He handed his Grammy, the one he won eight days ago for Album of the Year, to a little boy who looked up at him the way every child looks up when they dare to believe the world has a place for them.

And then this man, this son of a truck driver and a schoolteacher from Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, stood on the biggest stage on the planet and said “God bless America.”And then he started naming them.

Chile. Argentina. Uruguay. Paraguay. Bolivia. Peru. Ecuador. Brazil. Colombia. Venezuela. Panama. Costa Rica. Nicaragua. Honduras. El Salvador. Guatemala. Mexico. Cuba. Dominican Republic. Jamaica. The United States. Canada. And then, his voice breaking with everything he carries, “Mi patria, Puerto Rico. Seguimos aquí.” My homeland, Puerto Rico. We are still here.

The flags came. Every single one of them. Carried across that field by dancers and musicians while the jumbotron lit up with the only words that mattered: “THE ONLY THING MORE POWERFUL THAN HATE IS LOVE.”

I teared up. I’m not ashamed to say it. I sat on my couch and I wept because THAT is the America I believe in. That is the American story, not the sanitized, gated, English-only version that small and frightened people try to sell us. The REAL one. The messy, beautiful, multilingual, multicolored, courageous one. The one that has always been built by hands that speak every language and pray in every tongue and come from every corner of this hemisphere.

That is the America I want Jack and Charlotte to know. That when the moment came, when the whole world was watching, a Puerto Rican kid who grew up to become the most-streamed artist on Earth stood in front of 100 million people, sang in his mother’s language, blessed every nation in the Americas, and spiked a football that read “Together, we are America” into the ground. Not with anger. With joy. With love so big it made hate look exactly as small as it is.

And what did the President do? He called it “absolutely terrible.” He said “nobody understands a word this guy is saying.” He called it “a slap in the face to our Country.” The leader of the free world watched a celebration of love, culture, and everything this hemisphere has given to the world, and all he could see was something foreign. Something threatening. Something disgusting.

Let that sink into your bones.

The man who is supposed to represent all of us looked at the flags of our neighbors, heard the language of 500 million Americans across this hemisphere, and felt attacked. That’s not strength. That’s not patriotism. That is poverty of the soul.

. . .

Bad Bunny didn’t say “ICE out” tonight. He didn’t need to. He just showed the whole world what America looks like when we are not afraid of each other. When culture is shared, not policed. When language is music, not a threat. When a flag from every nation in this hemisphere can walk across a football field together and the only words you need are the ones he gave us:

The only thing more powerful than hate is love.

Michael Garrett — NC Senate

feb 8/RUNGETOUTICE

2.6 miles
river road, south/north
28 degrees
25% ice-covered

A beautiful morning for a run! Sunny, warmer, clearer trails. There was some ice, but most of it had been sprinkled with dirt so it wasn’t slick and dangerous — there’s a metaphor there, right? I was glad to be out on the trail, albeit with some anxiety. Two days ago, at my annual check-up, my blood pressure was in the high zone. High enough to need to monitor it daily for a month to see if I need to go on medication. Some other test results were “abnormal,” too: high cholesterol, high thyroid, low ferritin. Bad test results make me anxious, or is my potentially out-of-whack thyroid? Or maybe it’s just living in a city occupied by ICE for more than 2 months and living under a federal administration that is careening towards full totalitarianism vile evil unhinged extremely dangerous falling apart and is desperate to hold onto power. I’m struggling to find the words to effectively describe this administration. So, yes, I was worried as I ran, wondering if my heart rate should sky-rocket the more I ran. Thankfully it didn’t. The run wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t the big escape I had hoped for, but it did bring me some delight and some beautiful moments to look to when I’m feeling overwhelmed. Can I find 10?

11 Moments of Beauty

  1. the sizzling sound of wind moving through the brittle leaves still remaining on a tree
  2. quiet, then the softest knocking cutting through — a woodpecker somewhere close by?
  3. yes! looking up at a tree, I could actually see the white underwing of a downy woodpecker, it’s tiny head hammering a branch
  4. wide stretches of clear, dry trail
  5. stopping at the Rachel Dow Memorial Bench, looking out at the frozen river, wondering what Rachel would do in this moment, then believing she would be part of this amazing love spreading across the city, the state, the country
  6. a good morning from a passing walker
  7. a feeling of movement below me, then spotting a walker on the Winchell Trail, the remembering running down there, nearer to the river on a warm day
  8. the rhythmic clicking of a passing runner’s snow spikes on the bare pavement — click click click
  9. running over the slick ice and not slipping or sliding because Minneapolis Parks had sprinkled dirt — and not salt — on it recently
  10. speaking — out loud, but softly — the words to Alice Oswald’s “The Story of Falling” that I re-memorized earlier this morning — It is the story of the falling rain/to turn into a leaf and fall again/It is the secret of a summer’s shower/to steal the light and hide it in a flower
  11. (added 9 feb) a woman below, on the winchell trail, calling out, her name is Freya!, and a man responding, you’re a good girl! — just yesterday, Scott, Delia, and I had encountered this friendly woman and her dog near 7 Oaks. She was so friendly and kind that we agreed encountering her had made walking out in the cold, on the icy paths, worth it

Just writing this list, and the words preceding it, have made me feel better, more relaxed!

Get Out Ice

Even if I’ve written this before, I’ll write it again: I am finding that focusing on the fierce love and care that Minneapolis is practicing and de-centering/quieting the endless examples of ICE awfulness is helping me to endure this time. Well, more than endure. The love I am witnessing, and attempting to practice in my own way, is inspiring and making me hopeful about possible futures. It is also restoring my belief in democracy.

Here are 2 examples I shared on Facebook today:

1 — Rebecca Solnit post

One of the nuts things about organizing in the Twin Cities right now is that even the most long term organizers who’ve been here for decades can’t keep keep track of all the resistance that is going on. There are so many self-organizing crews just doing work that in any conversation with someone from another neighborhood you might stumble over a whole collective of people resisting in ways you didn’t think of. There’s a crew of carpenters just going around fixing kicked-in doors. There are tow truck drivers taking cars of detained people away for free. People delivering food to families in hiding. So many local rapid response groups that the number is uncertain but somewhere between 80 and the low hundreds . . . .

Rebecca Solnit on Facebook

2 — @terileigh via Liz May

every restaurant, church, karate dojo, dance studio, school, barber shop, and other small business has created their own underground grassroots supportive network to protect their neighbors, get people to and from work, and raise funds to pay everyday bills.

@terileigh

feb 5/RUNGETOUTICE

4.45 miles
minnehaha falls
33 degrees
60% sloppy and wet

A run outside! Above freezing! Less layers! And I made it all the way to the falls! It was sloppy, but I’ve run through worse. No lakes covering the entire path, only small ponds. I felt stronger running up all the small hills; it must be the hill workouts I’ve started doing. Maybe I should run to the falls and do some loops around the park — I could do the hills there multiple times? It’s strange, but I like running up hills now.

10 Things

  1. birds singing and sounding more like spring
  2. the dull, quiet whine of a power tool off in the distance — a drill on a construction site?
  3. the falls are completely frozen, so is the creek
  4. voices rising up from somewhere down below at the base of the falls
  5. faint traces of brown dirt discoloring the snow, making it less winter wonderland, but also less slick
  6. kids yelling and laughing on a playground — a teacher’s whistle blowing (not a warning about ICE)
  7. empty benches everywhere
  8. a few cars in the park parking lot
  9. another runner behind me, beside me, then in front of me. I delighted in hearing the sibilant sounds of their feet striking the slushy snow
  10. a few seconds of honking above on the ford bridge — someone honking at ICE or another car’s driving or in solidarity with a bridge brigade?

Get Out Ice

Today’s Get Out Ice moment is in honor of my mom, who was a fiber artist until she died in 2009, and my daughter, who is a fiber artist now.

AS OF FEBRUARY 5TH.
WE HAVE REACHED A TOTAL OF
$650,000 IN DONATIONS
Funds last week were donated to STEP St. Louis Park emergency assistance for rent and other aid and the Immigrant Rapid Response Fund.
We are working on donations to other local organizations
– stayed tuned for more info.
We are speechless. We are overwhelmed with the generosity of the fiber community and beyond. This outpouring of love and support is felt around the state.
Because of you, we can help so many people who need it.
Thank you thank you thank you.
Keep knitting. Keep resisting. Keep showing up for your neighbors.
Melt. The. Ice.

Needle & Skein Instagram post

The $650,000 came from people purchasing a $5 pattern for the Melt the Ice Hat:

In the nine years that Gilah Mashaal has owned Needle & Skein, a yarn store in the suburbs of Minneapolis, she has tried to maintain a rule that “nobody talks politics” in the shop. But amid the weeks-long occupation of the Twin Cities by federal immigration paramilitaries, Mashaal and one of her employees decided to turn one of their weekly knit-alongs into a “protest stitch-along”.

They didn’t want to return to the “pussy hats” that symbolized women’s resistance to Donald Trump in 2016, so Paul, their employee, did some research and came back with a proposal: a red knit hat inspired by the topplue or nisselue (woolen caps), worn by Norwegians during the second world war to signify their resistance to the Nazi occupation.

‘Rage Knitting’ against the machine

Love #13, version 2

This morning, I was trying out all different ways to create a poem out of text from a few local businesses. Nothing was quite working; partly because I am fixated on erasures and blackouts and can’t see (literally and figuratively) how to execute this effectively. One way out: Mary Oliver. My whole poem centers on a phrase from a MO poem, “Lead”:

I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never
close again
to the rest of the world.

Here’s my version of those lines, using words from Social media posts:

Here, now, 
on this day,
my heart
breaks, 
and tomorrow
it will stay open
to everything.

Or this variation:

My heart breaks
here, now,
and tomorrow,
it will stay open
to everything.

feb 4/BIKERUNGETOUTICE

bike: 30 minutes
run: 1.4 miles

The trails looked sloppy and slippery, so I biked and ran inside today. I was planning to watch Poker Face while I biked, but I couldn’t find it. Tried “Pluribus” again but it was too much for me . . . again. Finally settled on the new Knives Out movie, which I really enjoyed. While I ran, I listened to a podcast with one of my favorite triathletes, Taylor Knibb. She talked about her season and her experience DNFing at Kona: she had heat stroke in the last few ks and even though she was winning, had to drop out. When they checked her temperature, it was around 105. Yikes.

I don’t remember much about my short run. One thing: at some point I lifted out of my hips, focused on my arm swing, and felt like a smooth, efficient machine. Fun!

Get Out Ice

This morning, read the news that 700 ICE agents will be leaving Minneapolis today. That’s good, but not nearly good enough. All of ICE should be leaving should not exist. On the way to Costco, driving near the road that leads to the Whipple Building where ICE brings the people they’ve arrested or kidnapped, Scott pointed out a truck hauling several Black Jeep Wagoneers entering the freeway. Black Jeep Wagoneers are the type of vehicle ICE often drives.

For much of the day, I was working on another love poem. I wanted to do another erasure poem, but so far, I’ve been struggling with it. Here’s some of the text that I’ve come up with:

Love #`13

My heart breaks
open, will stay
open
for all
who are feeling this occupation

Do I like it? I’m not sure. It all centers around a heart breaking open, instead of just breaking.

feb 3/RUNGETOUTICE

4.1 miles
river road, south / lena smith, north / hills
13 degrees

13 degrees sounds cold (I guess), but with the sun and all of my layers, I was too warm. Lots of sweat dripping down my forehead. On the way to the river, the sidewalks were bare, but on the trail, they were covered in slick ice and uneven snow. Bummer. Decided to turn off the trail at 42nd and run north on the Lena Smith Boulevard, and then do some hill repeats. It was wet with wide strips of icy snow. If it hadn’t snowed 2 days ago, the path would have been dry and it would have been a wonderful day for a run to the falls or the flats or the lake.

After a fun day yesterday, getting lost in baking m-n-m cookies for Scott and crafting erasure poems out of local business statements, today felt draining and a bit overwhelming. I’m not anxious, just tired and uncreative, which is not surprising. It’s an exhausting, unrelenting time here in Minneapolis.

One bright spot: I discovered this morning that there’s a new Mary Oliver book out: Little Alleluias! It’s 3 books in one: The Leaf and the Cloud, which I own and have taken notes all over the margins, so a fresh copy will be nice; Long Life, which I have checked out of the library enough to wish I owned it; and What Do We Know, which I haven’t read; plus, a foreword by Natalie Diaz. I bought it online from Moon Palace, and will pick it up in a few hours!

Alice Oswald

Still making my way through the Alice Oswald interview for the Paris Review. Here are today’s lines to remember:

Interviewer: Is swimming important to you?

Alice Oswald: It was probably when I took up gardening that I discovered that being was better than thinking–that actually you don’t have to think things through, you can garden all day and your mind will have been moved by the gardening. And it’s the same when you’re in water. You’re thought through by the water rather than having to think.

 an interview with Alice Oswald

I like the distinction between thinking and being, and the idea that doing something physical, like gardening or swimming, will move your mind. What does it mean to be thought through by the water? I’d like to pose this question before/during/after a swim at the Y — which I hope to do this week — and a swim at the lake — which I won’t get to do for 4 months.

Get Out Ice

1 — caregiving as resistance

Here’s a great article that I want to read more carefully when I have a chance: ‘We have to keep showing up for each other’: In Minnesota, caregiving is a form of resistance Wow, I would have loved to write about this on my TROUBLE blog!

2 — protectors not protesters

But behind the violence in Minneapolis—captured in so many chilling photographs in recent weeks—is a different reality: a meticulous urban choreography of civic protest. You could see traces of it in the identical whistles the protesters used, in their chants, in their tactics, in the way they followed ICE agents but never actually blocked them from detaining people. Thousands of Minnesotans have been trained over the past year as legal observers and have taken part in lengthy role-playing exercises where they rehearse scenes exactly like the one I witnessed. They patrol neighborhoods day and night on foot and stay connected on encrypted apps such as Signal, in networks that were first formed after the 2020 killing of George Floyd.

Welcome to the American Winter

3

Minneapolis Parks invite kids to write love letters to the city. I love Minneapolis Parks!

At parks around Minneapolis, heart-shaped love letters from kids are providing some wholesome relief during an especially grueling winter.

(source)

feb 1/RUNGETOUTICE

2 miles
river road, south/ lena smith, north
25 degrees
100% uneven snow-covered

We got about 2 inches of soft, slippery snow this morning. Very pretty and very difficult to run over (through? on?). The trail on the river road hadn’t been cleared yet, and it was uneven. I feel very lucky that I didn’t twist my ankle or roll over my foot. I would have liked to run farther, but decided I should head back after a mile on the road. Lena Smith Boulevard was better, but slippery ~ I could feel and hear my the spikes on my yak trax catching. Even with my not-so-great conditions, I’m still glad I was able to get out to run above the gorge. It looked like a winter wonderland! Everything white and soft gray, sometimes snowing, sometimes not.

I heard some horns in the distance, at least one siren, maybe a whistle. Encountered SUVs and wondered who was driving them. A big part of the resistance and caring for the community is bearing witness and observing ICE. I can’t easily or safely do that with my low vision. I’m trying to find my own ways to show up. One way: I’m writing and giving a lot of attention to the powerful and loving words of small business owners. Another way today: I shoveled the sidewalks of my neighbors on either side when I went out to shovel mine. It’s not much today, but it’s something.

Get Out Ice

Here’s is a recent statement from one of Scott’s oldest clients. They asked him to post it on the main page of all of their restaurants.

Dear Guests and Staff,

Minneapolis and the state of Minnesota have had a very challenging month. Everyone within our communities has been affected by the actions of our federal government these past few weeks. Their original promise, purpose and intent was to ensure safety and to administrate with decent behavior and professionalism. However, it has evolved into a climate and behavior that is unfair according to the principles of our Constitution and individual-civil rights.

Day and night, our owners and staff have been assembling aid in many forms for our immigrant community. During these unprecedented times, we have kept our restaurants open to continue serving our guests and to ensure our workers can remain employed. Any past, current, or future closure of our restaurants in support of a protest was and will be the decision of the majority of the team at each location.

The generosity and care our staff has shown for each other is unselfish and truly inspiring. Many have sacrificed their money, time and efforts in the interest of helping other human beings without asking for anything in return. That is the American way!

We are seeing neighbors and communities come together all around us, and we hope this can be a time for all Americans to unite behind our collective shared values: life, liberty, and happiness.

We believe in civil rights for all and equal justice under the law. Our immigrant-friends and neighbors are one of the many things that make our country great.

In the name peace, calm and law and order for all,
Nova Restaurant Group

Nova Restaurant Group Statement

And here’s a draft of an erasure poem (that needs some work), made from the above text:

I like the idea of centering it all around the idea of what is the American way. I’ll keep working on it.