Whenever I play chess with my body, it always wins by making me vomit or have diarrhea or both in a phenomenon I aptly refer to as diavomarrhea. Let me give you this example:

Me: Let’s go to sleep now, body. The second half of the night was hellacious. We really need to rest.

My Body: How about, instead … just hear me out … we have violent diarrhea all morning long? Hmm? How. [claps] About. [claps] That? [claps] Let’s to that. [Jumps up and down with glee]

And here’s the thing: My body never bluffs, ever. It’s down to destroy me. It really is.

Clare, last night I saw horses, more than a dozen of them. First, I saw the dust they were raising as they ran, then I heard their hooves on earth, that dry drumming, then I saw them through the trees just on the other side of the Virgin River. They weren’t wild but they had enough space to act wild. There they were in the sage and dry grass moving like the river when it’s boated, fluid like that and strong, wanting nothing but this moment, nothing but each other. Keep writing your horse poems, Clare. A horse is a heart outside the human body who reminds us we each carry a heart within us, one that beats like a hoof hitting dirt. We need horses more than ever. We need your poems.

I am grateful for this pain. This pain is a compass. This pain is a signal. This pain is my dearest friend, my greatest protector, my guide, my heart. This pain is everything.

Me: I’m going to stay up late. I do my best writing at night

Also Me: In bed at 9:29 p.m.

I’d rather be trampled by horses than trammeled by poets.

The word of the day is ikigai, the convergence of one’s personal passions, beliefs, values, and vocations, translated loosely as one’s reason for being. What’s your reason for being?

As long as there are poets, something will survive.

There are lots of ways to lose if your focus is love. Lots of ways to gain if your focus is power. Pay attention to what you’re losing and what you’re gaining.

Bleary, I just misread “The Middle Ages” as “The Middle Oranges.” Now, I can’t stop thinking about The Middle Oranges, that period in history that can be divided into Early Oranges, High Oranges, and Late Middle Oranges.

Maybe, in all those words Frank O’Hara wrote about orange, he said something about The Middle Oranges. We’ll never know, will we?

I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.

— Frank O’Hara, from “Why I Am Not a Painter”

Gray wind. Gray branches. A horse on the hill and no ships in sight.

My suffering dies inside Ocean Vuong’s poems.

Lay it all aside and love.

To those who live with trauma: I’m glad you survived; I’m sorry you lived through what you lived through; I see you; I love you; I carry you in my heart.

It’s OK to buy blueberries and not eat them all. We all love imperfectly.

Morning: fire. Evening: fire. The first, literal, accidental, and brief. The second, metaphorical, intentional, and eternal.

Emotion is consistent. It’s only specific emotional states, which we perceive as separate from emotion as a whole, that are inconsistent. We learn that. We learn that we feel happy or sad or joyful or sorrowful or, or, or, ad nauseam. We cleave and cleave emotion until it’s all these little slices of pie sitting beside each other or across from each other. We’re doing the separating. We’re creating the binaries, the opposites. Emotion is emotion. It’s a whole. And, as a whole, it’s a constant.

I saw two cups and, in my haste, mistook them for a single cup. In my mis-taking, I divided my perceived single cup and suddenly had two cups again. But they were crucibles. Contaminated and useless. Each half couldn’t contain anything, not even contaminants, without the other. We are ore. We are bright, sometimes. We are chlorinated, sometimes. We are isotopes, sometimes, that glow hot like embers, like iodine-131 or its cousin, I-123.