Status Updates From Tanya: Poems

in that time when I love them,
I am with them because I speak of it now.
If their death is past,
so should my love for them be
but i hold their death inside
my living love.
if this death is past tense, rigor’d,
my love isn’t.

Reading is erotic, sharing language, bodies and minds across time and space.

I became a writer by becoming a reader-this fact lifted confusion clear out of the page.

You would lead me to that place books always promised:
where anything could happen but it was a matter of context-
place and time and body and politics- the analysis of which
was a mix of judgment and soul, of egos and logos and trust
that everything that happened in books happened inside us.

I was embarrassed. I thought she was envying my young body.
Many years later, now that I envy my own young body, I realize she wasn't coveting
mine
but finally claiming her own.

Resting in middle age for energy to make everything for everybody, shortly, longingly.
She's the main character even though she doesn't travel.
She is the traveled.

What did she do in all that time? With this one honor on her?

As a representative of the larger demographic body of herself?