Kristina

“And I’ll Be Damned If I Cannot Dance With You “

Today is “Texas Hold ‘Em”, the seventh track on Cowboy Carter. Through each of my three listens, besides restraining myself from dancing in this very public space I happen to be writing in, I found myself wanting a good time. The good whiskey-guzzling, tornado-escaping into a dive bar time is something I may never have but it’s not the point.

I was nostalgic for the time where my friends and I used to dance at a bar over the state line in West Virginia because it was the closest thing we had to a club. Drinking and dropping it low and backing it up and laughing and slow dancing with our friends and crushes. A time was had.

I don’t crave that exact experience again but I am so damn happy I had it. I never have to wonder what it was like to have the “red cup kisses.” We didn’t do it for the gram or to be seen because not a single picture was ever taken at that club. We did it because we needed the release.

As I am writing this, I am realizing that is what never changes.

Needing the release.

Sometimes, the “you” in “And I’ll be damned if I cannot dance with you” is me.

Sometimes, that is all the release I need.

“Don’t Let Go.”

I almost didn’t write this today. After all, it’s “just” an interlude, “Smoke Hour” with Willie Nelson that features song clips from Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Roy Hamilton, Chuck Berry, Charles Anderson and Son House. But this sixth track isn’t “just” anything.

There was an intention.

It’s let me give you the history, the foundation on which country and rock and blues and gospel was built. You are going to hear it and if your ignorance won’t allow you to hear it, even with Willie playing it, that’s on you. You have chosen your truth even if it’s a lie.

And another truth comes into view: There is nothing new under the sun. We are ever in the practice of highlighting, attributing, borrowing, paying tribute with our homages, and being influenced by those who come before us. I spent hours today in the company of poets who read original work but undoubtedly there was the influence of religious texts, other poets, and musicians. It is all around us and we cannot help it sinks deep into our psyche, falling in step with our thoughts, coming out to play in the expression of our art.

We only need to say thank you and play the next song.

“So Be Fond Of Your Flaws, My Dear.”

Today’s listen was the 5th track from Cowboy Carter, “My Rose.” Three listens. Back to back to back. I don’t know who she is singing to but what I love about this song, this 53-second nugget, is the harmonies. Let me tell you why. When you hear anything that encourages the listener to “be fond of your flaws”, you want it feel like a chorus of people trying to lift you up with their voices, which is exactly this song did with her harmonies.

Sometimes, the negative voices seem to boom and drown out any semblance of positivity. We can focus on our thorns, not even believing ourselves worthy of our gorgeous petals.

I need every bit of power encouraging me, hoping the best for me, acknowledging my inherent “rosiness.”

Even if it’s just for 53 seconds.

“Shine On Your Own”

The fourth day of my Cowboy Carter musings. Three listens. Back to back to back. Today’s track was “Protector” featuring her daughter, Rumi Carter.

I wondered if I was going to be able to write about this. I wanted to run away from it so I stalked my own floors in circles as if it were going to take me someplace else, far away from my wishes. In November of 2022, a door was shut on me. Life most likely would never be able to grow within me.

I booked first class tickets to the Santa Fe retreat that I planned on going to and I sobbed at a dancing hands ritual and wanted to take my bra off in the moonlight and panicked and wrote and cried and dreamed and laughed the whole time I was there.

Listening to this song also reminded me of the poem “Etch a Sketch” in my book, “She Lives Here”:

I maneuvered the white knobs in my head over the years.

Dexterous hands that exist only in my imagination

Sketched brows, thick, heavy, hairy

Noses with width and forgettable nostrils

Lashes so long they rested on the apples of the cheeks.

Narrow hands, bony fingers, wide feet.

An afro

Strands that are coarse, curly, silky, kinky spring to life on this

One head

A buck-toothed smile

He will need braces.

Diagnoses made, the other side of 37 reached and

I could not get my fingers to work,

Manipulate the knobs

Not even where my dreams reside

I picked up the gray, flat screen with the red plastic frame

And shook it

Until

He disappeared

And I crumbled.

The aluminum powder and the beads

Dissipated

Because he

Was never real.

Because he

Was never

Ours.

Even though a part of my heart will always be cracked, I know it’s because I yearn to protect and yearn to be needed. Maybe this isn’t always a healthy thing. But it’s real. And it’s God honest me. I remember wanting to protect my brother since we were both little (I am 20 months older) and peering over my sister’s crib, when she first came home. I wanted to make sure her jaundice was gone. I remember fighting two boys for a friend at 9. I still think of my guest room as a just in case they need it spot for my brother and sister even though that will likely never be the case. I journal about my dreams for nieces and nephews and hope they happily live out their own.

I long to be a resting place for them. Their Auntie who will always be there for them.

I even have to disentangle myself from those thoughts when it comes to my own husband. I want to be his protector but there have been times I have had to realize he wants to be mine, too.

That is the beauty of our love.

While I will not have a daughter where I see her father’s gaze, I know I am that for my mother. When I watch my sister cradle or embrace her children, the joy I feel for her is indescribable. It belongs to them.

When I hear my brother’s children speak or are reminded of him with their mannerisms, I can’t help but be transported to our childhood…it’s so damn beautiful. It all belongs to them.

Everything is as it is supposed to be even when it hurts.

“I Got Love to Create.”

Day 3 of Cowboy Carter was “16 Carriages.” Three listens. Back to back to back. I am solemn and while I listened, I was transported back to my mother’s sadness, my mother’s prayers and how hard she worked while I was a preteen. I know, as the song said, “Daddy grinded” but I couldn’t see his work the same way. I know I lived in the manifestation of his work aka the house but a mother’s work, a woman’s work.. oh it hits different, my friends.

I am 16, waiting for the world to open up to me but I didn’t know what that would mean. The anger, the loneliness, the numbing, the great love and a fear that I am still learning how to leave on a “back road on a holy night.”

We grow up and we want so much not to be forgotten but also remember that it only counts if the people who knew you remember how you loved them and in the wisdom of the late great Dr. Angelou , remember how you made them feel. I understand the yearning of legacy. I may never get it with a child but I hope when you close your eyes, and try to picture me, you are flooded with the deepest, warmest love and know I yearn for that warmth, too when I close my eyes.

“You Were Only Waiting For This Moment to Arise.”

So on with my Cowboy Carter musings. Today, I listened to “Blackbird”, the second track featuring Tiera Kennedy, Brittney Spencer and Tanner Adell. I was looking most forward to writing about how I felt after hearing this song the first time. As American Requiem fades and the toe tapping and guitar’s presence arrive, I am already in tears.

It may sound strange but there is a purity to the sound and the softness of these beautiful Black women’s voices that make me want to carry it forever. I am 11, swinging my little feet towards the spring sun, waiting for my moment to arise. It is nostalgia. It is the hope that nostalgia brings. I am sure the meaning of Sir Paul McCartney’s lyrics only make it that much more powerful as he wrote it inspired by the treatment of Black girls in the 1960’s, watching in sorrow from across the pond. As I listen, I see Beyonce being passed the baton by the spirit of these women and sharing it with Tiera, Brittney, Tanner and even me.

I carry the hope of the women who came before me and pray to make this freedom count.

I am strengthening my wings.

I promise.

“A Lotta Taking Up Space”

The other day while writing my morning pages (or in my case, afternoon or evening pages), I wrote that I needed to express how I feel about songs from “Cowboy Carter”, Beyonce’s latest album. I knew so because while I was listening to the album in the car, I cried. I uttered to myself or out loud “We can do what we want! Finally!” The decision was made that I, for as long as I wanted, would write after listening to one song (in order) each day. No boundaries..just my thoughts after playing a song a few times. Today was “American Requiem.”

I am aware many artists have and will experiment with many genres of music. But not all of them will be lauded for it. For some, the attention never came and never will. But because of her position in the world, Beyonce created a masterful work weaving country, rock, gospel, R&B, blues, hip hop and opera unapologetically that people will not only notice but give the time of day.

As a Black woman, that alone is revolutionary.

Expression without limits. There is judgment but it arrived. It got to be birthed. And millions, if not billions, will make a choice to accept, reject, or ignore it.

But it gets to be here. It gets to exist. That is enough for me to rain down tears.

Obviously, this is not just about one woman’s talent. I think she ripped the words from my throat, lifted the words from my pages when I chose to express we, as Black women, are not a monolith. We don’t all sound the same, love the same, eat the same, hate the same, move the same or want the same.

But we do all take up space as individuals.

We have a right to. I heard it.

I heard a reclamation.

Am I?

I scrolled on Tiktok and a creator referenced the notion that our art used to reflect the times. Many artists have mused that it should always reflect the times. I felt my pulse quicken (that also could have been the coffee but I digress).

I had to ask myself if my art is reflective of the time. The answer lately is if the time is about me and personal struggles, then it’s yes. But more than anything, the time we are living in as a global community has sapped so much from my being, tested my courage, my willingness to change, that creating art has felt like a long-lost love I am slowly finding my way back to. I want to shout at him and exclaim “I’m on my way…the train was just running late…but I am coming!”

I never really left you.

I told my husband, my therapist and a friend if I could turn into some kind of time-bending, immortal superhero with infinite resources who could protect the people of Haiti, Sudan, Congo, Palestine and hungry, near frozen people making concrete their bed tonight not ten minutes away from me, I would.

But I am a lone soul.

As often as I can fool myself into feeling completely helpless, the truth is I am not. You are not and although we will never be the fantastical superhero I described, we are not helpless.

Let me repeat.I am not helpless. We are not helpless.

I am at the very least capable of putting my drop in the bucket.

For me, it is writing here about the people I hope are freed and the peace I am so desperate for it aches. It is taking a small portion of our household budget monthly to donate to 3-4 trustworthy causes. Automate it and forget about it.

It will cost me less than I have ever spent on sandwiches and the mediocre cups of coffee I tend to sip.

So no, I am not helpless. I just can’t do it all. None of us can. Not on my own.

We never have.

That type of individual thinking is a delusion.

Grieving

It occurs to me that I haven’t written here in months. But I didn’t realize why until I am watching a glimmer in my therapist’s eye as she is telling me to grieve. Yes, I know I lost a grandfather, an organ, the possibility of being able to grow a child in my uterus and a friend in 2023 but I’ve been dealing with all of that. But she pointed out something else I have been grieving.

The rights to my first book of poetry and prose “She Lives Here” were reverted back to me last year. There are loose ends to tie up that I am responsible for that I have been distracting myself from for months. But why?

My therapist had the nerve, the unmitigated gall to point out the truth. I am also grieving everything that went with writing, promoting, pushing, doing readings for “She Lives Here.” This is not to say it is over but it’s been a couple of years, almost three and it is no longer a new work that I am excited about birthing into the world. It’s been here. It is still my baby that I am proud of and will always carry with me but the truth remains. As I pointed out above, I have become a reluctant expert in grief. But have I learned to move through it? Is there really a coming out on the other side or will there always be moments when I retreat back into the darkness of the cave, unwilling to peek my head back out?

I believe these questions will stay with me as waves of grief hit me in the months and years to come. I think the sadness is natural. I think there is beauty in letting it be what it is. I think there are smaller things to grieve like the closure of the freshness and newness of She Lives Here and the tsunami sadness waves like losing my grandfather. And it is all real. It is all valid. And all of it is worthy of recognition and attention.

Coming Up For Air

Without a doubt, these last few months have been the hardest of my life. Someone told me in December that I would be walking through a shadowy time but nothing could prepare me for the impact. I didn’t know I was living with a necrotic gallbladder, 2 surgeries were coming, and we would lose people we loved. I rarely am able to sleep a full night but it leads to levels of exhaustion that make me feel aged. I haven’t written since my poem for my grandfather and this afternoon was the first time I wanted to write anything. I thought here would be the best place to start. I am thankful a few people in my life have reminded me that it’s ok to take breaks. A friend suggested I am creating a new body.

God, I hope so.

I am missing joy so much. I could cry at the thought of it.

I wanted to follow up that last sentence up with something about gratitude but I am going to let that one stand. Because it’s the truth. It’s a bit hard to see there’s another time coming—a stretch where pain is a faraway memory, Hubby has gone through the procedures he needs and we are vacationing on the other side of the world, taking pictures, recording the beauty in the small notebook I keep at the bottom of my purse.

So here are the questions I am putting out into the world, the void, and God:

What is the best way to hold on until the other side unfolds?

How do I put pride aside to ask for what I need and actually accept it? (this is a particularly hard one for me as I worry about being a downer, a nuisance, and do not have family nearby).

There’s a part of me that knows I am already doing some of the right things: counseling, keeping doctor’s appointments, working and saying no when I need to. But those things don’t produce joy. And the small pockets I get it in—reading, hearing my grandmother’s voice, watching TV or going on a long drive with my husband and the very occasional outing to a friend’s—they’re good and needed. But I know my soul is crying out for more.

So this is me. Coming up for air, struggling to exercise patience and trying to answer my soul’s cry.