In the spirit of Yellow Chapel work, This week I invited Consuelo Wise, Shannon Rickman, Gabe Flores, Arielle Renee, Dakota Lacroix, Marina Tait, Mary Edwards, Stephen Kurowski, Kellie Maledy, and Chelsea Clark-James to send over love lists that go beyond the romantic realm. The aftermath was woven into several unconventional love songs (by Richie Havens, Kate Bush. Laurie Anderson, The B-52s, Congress-Woman Malinda Jackson Parker and more) then piped out onto Freeform Portland radio waves.
Big love!
The yellow of my knee
Tomorrow morning around 9am, a scalpel will slice into my knee skin and the hardware that was once hammered into my patella, will be removed. There is also a chance, if my bone is too damaged to carry on by itself, to generate healthy cells and smoothly glass over and under muscles, that I may end up with the part of someone else's kneecap, a very recently deceased someone else's kneecap, inside my kneecap. A surgeon called Dr. Greenleaf, who has a great reputation for doing this sort of thing, will continue doing this sort of thing...on me. I know this is a necessary sort of thing, the kind of thing that will enable me to climb volcanos and crawl across the skinny part of Idaho, so I'm sending a little waft of yellow into the ether, to the surgery Gods, to Winter and Spring and Summer and Fall, to the Pacific Ocean, to all the books I've ever read and want to read, to the dear humans of the world, to trees of all kind, to deep sea creatures that light up black, to hidden corners, to dust, to Pluto, to love. This little waft of yellow is more gigantic than little. It's a yellow that carries the weight of the sun. It's here for me. It's there for you. It's breathing in, breathing out. It's in our veins and nestled in the roots of ancient banyan trees. It's a multipurpose yellow, for cleaning toilets, for attending arias, for radio silence, for the crunch of snow, the swipe of a credit card, the back of a left-handed handshake, a crab's shell, a Burmese tiger nap, a bowl of minestrone soup, two claps, one ball, spinning, spinning, spinning then caught by the sweaty hand of a child. It's a squeeze. It's a tug. It's a mighty rubdown. It wanders and lopes. It's a parade on the face of the moon when no one is looking.
