Hi. My name is Geramee. I’m a writer living in Ohio.
I’ve decided to start a blog as a reading and listening journal in the hopes that if someone comes across this they’ll decide to strike up some conversation with me about something here. Please take that as an invitation to reach out.
Admittedly part of this exercise is to foster better reading & listening habits in myself and engage a text with some kind of narrative-grounded discourse, which I hope will strengthen recollection/understanding and ‘practice’ the text inside a space I create.
“This Practice” by Ada Limón, which also appears in her collection Sharks in the Rivers describes pretty accurately what I mean to do—a practice (fiercefully) of what I wish to remember. I love this poem’s use of “our” and the specific details of light, face, and creek. It taps into and activates a kind of intimacy with such quick precision.
The poem also calls into question the tension of memory & time. The slow slip of it. Entropy. The grip of forgetting—tightening—and how/what we might do to try and unlatch that grip a little bit. This is one attitude to hold while facing what overwhelms us and it has everything to do with invention “[l]ike the Russian soldier / who had to make up a word to say how / hard he would fight.” Practice is invention.
For instance, today I am in Tucson, Arizona. I am sitting across a dear friend. We’re both working. Music is playing (the song quoted below and others). Incense burns. Her cat crawls across the table. Peers outside the window. Hops to the floor and sniffs my backpack next to me.
I have been here for nearly five days, and today I leave. I don’t want to, but I have to. I’m a little overwhelmed with the not wanting to. Time spent with friends is time spent remembering them. To remember this way is a kind of practice and I mean practice as both custom and repetition.
“The decay will just turn to bloom as we look at the good old-fashioned moon.”
I think often about repetition. I wrote a little chapbook about it, for which I’m currently seeking a home. I think I have spent too much time in my life practicing the wrong things.
So here I intend to to do the work of remembering what I wish to. Things like Tucson. The music on right now. My friend’s face. Her cat’s. Ada’s poem. The exactness of the stillness I have here right now, and how it is different than all other stillnesses. Through practice, I intend to find what I wish to remember and fiercefully invent my life.
If you’re reading this, thank you for practicing me for this little slice of time.