after Joyce Sutphen

What have I learned from joy, other than how

to run from it? Tonight, a single poem tells us

everything we need to know about presence and

I feel the past weeks peeling off of me, the skin

of an orange in one piece. If this moment is fruit,

I have been throwing it into the street and

wondering why I’m so hungry. Is there anything

to know other than what’s happening in your own

body, in the place where your body meets the body

of the earth? I have been so sad and scared this week,

and not once have I found joy in the fact that I could

walk outside and let the sun paint me whole again.

I could spend every second with poems. I could do

all the things I keep saying I’m not ready for. In meditation,

Julia tells us to open a door into joy and look around,

and someone holds my hand until I reach the hinge

but I have to walk into it alone. There is no one else

around and I’m surprised about it. I sit on the floor

of a cave barely bigger than three of me and watch

the ocean exist in its own body, which is to say

everywhere.

My shoulders are warm and bare and I gather my knees

into my arms. Even here, I am afraid. Even here, I am

doing it anyway. Today I gave myself five minutes to feel

my frustration’s crackle and the second I laid my phone

down, my shoulders dropped. My eyes caught the maple tree

outside and watched it move with the breeze. Have you ever

noticed that it’s the leaves that move, not the trunk?

The parts that find home in themselves are not easily swayed.

The places we’re growing are vulnerable. We get to be both.

~

Bio: Tristan Richards (she/her) is a poet from Minnesota, known for facilitating Unfold, a daily writing workshop each April. She has self-published two chapbooks: Not All Challenges Are For Us (2022) and The Year Was Done Right (2019); and poems in ALOCASIA, trampset, and Writers Resist. Tristan is the recipient of a Professional Mid-Career Artist Grant from the Minnesota Prairie Lakes Regional Arts Council. She holds an MA from University of St. Thomas and a BA from Gustavus Adolphus College. You can find her at tristanwritespoems.weebly.com