Hazy Skies
Where I am living now, the seasons have no pivot... Springs are mercurial, senselessly violent in their cold and snow. I experience winter here like a death, wait endlessly for a green that will outgrow my grief.
On bee-ing free: racial justice, surviving apocalypse, and paying attention
White supremacy doesn’t just uphold police brutality and mass incarceration, migrant detention and colonial extraction on Native land; it’s death-dealing and ordinary and wants to last forever.
Self-Deception in the #PublishingPaidMe Marketplace
If I think too much about the racial inequalities in the publishing industry, it might push me to the point where I stop writing.
A Scream
It seems insidiously cruel that we don’t get to be asymptomatic carriers for the prejudice and hatred that others infect us with.
A Quiet Truth
In America they kill their children.
Someone thinks this of us. It may be true. If we are brave enough to see and accept that it is, what will we do about it?
On Constructive Anger
Being Black and being a woman, I have a complicated relationship with anger. Sometimes I am reluctant to show anger, irritation, or frustration for fear of being labeled an “Angry Black Woman”...Unfortunately, I am frequently angry when existing in most spaces.
A Moment for Communal Listening
In an effort to come to terms with the voices that we have ignored or silenced as a nation, we will be taking a week to listen and honor the Black voices within our creative community.
Ruminate's Role in this Moment
One of our roles as individuals is to dedicate space to listen to those who name this truth with uncompromising honesty—the grief, the pain, the anger, the sorrow. Another is to transform this listening into self-reflection and from reflection into action. To do things that you can do even if they seem too small to make a difference.
Out of the Wildflowers
And the wildflowers. The wildflowers pushing against all odds, against this endlessly small room, this seed encasing the pivotal word: might. They come. They are mighty.
Woman
I told her she was the perfect mom. This was when she tried to pull the tubes from her arms the gloves from her hands. One of the nurses said, “Oh, she’s a fighter.”
Given Light and a Mother Who Was Always Dying in Secret
No one remembers her mother right or observes the rites to keep her whole. The woman becomes fragments, patches for quilts, and the daughter loses the needle, what North should have drawn from her hand and pinned where she could always find it.
This is the Day
All we’ve ever had is this day with its daylily moments—bright, crisp, delectable. Shriveled by the next morning. As my hair grays and my bones grow fragile, life feels more and more like those time-lapse nature films we watched in grade school. As the pandemic arrived, someone sped up the projector. Sunrise, sunset. Moments quick as a hummingbird’s heart.
Postpartum Balding in the Time of the Pandemic
Every day I read about the spread of corona, concentric circles that keep edging closer and closer to my world. And the economic ruin it's triggered. Climate change. The election. Meanwhile, a bald patch forms at my temple. I cut my hair into a bob and wear it down every day to cover it.
Social Distance, Then and Now
In those months, months of northern winter when my husband took the car to work and I existed alone with a baby in the American suburbs, the sheer brutality of our way of life rained down on me and showed me that I had not, before, understood.
The Day You Were Dying
I ate lunch looking out at the struggling town and remembered the day your son and I showed up unannounced on your doorstep and shared our news, and how you invited the nearest relatives to celebrate our engagement with burritos and Pepsi in your formal dining room, our paper-wrapped meal eaten over a crocheted lace tablecloth.
Feathered Hope
Are bird songs only a matter of mating propositions and territorial disputes? Or might the Carolina wren tell bawdy jokes? Does the tufted titmouse have political aspirations? Is the mourning dove actually a comedian?
Atonement
Finding myself in a seven-year-old world of hurt, I hastily replaced the garbage can’s lid, kicked off my skates, clutched them to my chest, and sprinted through the Pauls’ and Toners’ grassy front yards to the quiet haven of my own room.
Yellow
Melissa Reeser Poulin's poem "Yellow" was the winner of our 2016 Janet B. McCabe poetry prize and is featured in Issue 40: Nowhere Near.
My Year as Beloved
I lost another friendship due to the devastating effects of alcoholism, the second friendship I lost to the disease last year. Intellectually, I understand her reasons for abandoning the friendship— she was stuck between choosing her alcoholic lover or a friend. I know deeply what it is like to confuse love with pain, choosing iron shackles of loyalty over goodness and growth for one’s soul.
Pink Balloon
To my mind, I am looking at a snapshot of myself and my dad at the same age. I remember then thinking how my father, a carpenter by trade, could fix anything, and maybe a decade or so later, how he seemed to break everything. When caring for animals, it’s straightforward: be gentle with them, be firm when necessary but never hurt them.
Ordinary
I, too, crave the ordinary. I desire the familiar comforts of a beautiful home, a healthy family, steady income, and fulfilling work. It’s so easy to shut out noise around me – the evils that haunt me – the challenges that face my world, my country, my neighborhood.
Awaiting Further Instruction: A Letter to Virginia Woolf
Dear Virginia, I’m writing with some wonderful news. I’ve done it! I have secured a room of my own: a third floor home office in which resides a perfectly adequate writing desk, yellow flowered armchair ideal for reading, and windows overlooking my backyard. As per your wise suggestion, it is even possible to lock the door.
Hazy Skies
Where I am living now, the seasons have no pivot... Springs are mercurial, senselessly violent in their cold and snow. I experience winter here like a death, wait endlessly for a green that will outgrow my grief.
On Transitions
To end, I will not offer any more of my own words on this transition—the small one (me leaving Ruminate) or the big one (the pandemic). Instead, I turn to the words of the regular contributors of The Waking. Collectively, their voices tell a story—one of grief, hope, and resurrection.
Contemplative Consequences from a Decade of Singing
Don't dwell on if the notes you sang were fine-tuned or not, as you can't take the notes back. A lot of plans in life fall flat, but the best that one can do is learn from it and aim to do better the next time.
How to Be Divorced
Your sister who has gone through her own divorce not long ago and still was able to show up and walk alongside the whole time. You look at her struggle, her transformation, her healing. You study it, not wanting to miss anything.
Letters To You
Dear Grandma, One day, I came home from school, and you were just gone. Mom said it was because you missed Grandpa and you missed Korea. I knew better. You left because you were fed up with me, fed up with trying to teach Korean to a granddaughter who kept refusing it.
The Annunciation
To DeFeo, her Annunciation wasn’t specific to Mary or Christian interpretation. It was a promise to her, in particular, a “realization of all that is good in this existence…and of certain powers creatively.”
How to Find Water (For Thieves)
Krishna is a thief. A good thief. He steals wonderful things—milk and kisses, butter too. Love, actually. That’s why he’s dark—and radiant; he tries to hide his goodness in the night.
Put Down the Ducky: Sesame Street Wisdom for the Age of Attachment
I love my thinking mind. I have awesome thoughts; they keep me responsible, help me earn a living, form my sense of identity, entertain me. I’m scared to put them down, even for a short ten minutes.
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Ruminate Community
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The Waking is an online literary magazine and a part of the Ruminate creative community that houses high-quality literary writing about what it’s like to be human. We are interested in short-form prose and image-text hybrid work. This art can be beautiful, it can be strange, we just ask that it feels true.