(After Reading Marie Howe’s “The Kingdom of Ordinary Time”)

There are eight blank pages at the back of her book. She earned an MFA the year I was born, teaches at Columbia and has an award for “sustained literary achievement.”

I don’t have a degree. I’ve known only the twenty years of living since I dropped out of university.

Two decades of learning and unlearning, leaning in to this life of broken things—some mended, some left behind, others grafted together to make something new, beautiful, whole.

I’ve learned how to plant some things and uproot others. I’ve known the weight of both full wombs and empty ones.

I’ve memorized the feeling of a small body pressed against my skin in the hour before the sun rises, the sky outside the bedroom window a threshold between darkness and light. And in the moments between waking and sleep, I’ve learned our skin, too, is a threshold: between souls, between what I once held inside and what no longer belongs to me.

I’ve learned, standing on my porch each night, that my heart bays to the howl of the coyote, because there’s a wild animal awakening inside me, too.

I’ve learned the smell of tomato vines beneath my fingernails, the exact taste of a golden beet, uprooted from the ground by a five year old boy, I’ve learned how to spin honey from a hive, weave tangled hair into braids, peel the skin from a peach without nicking the flesh.

I know that a mirepoix simmering on the stove smells like welcome and heat radiating from the woodstove feels like home.

And I know there is something I will learn from this (though I don’t know it’s meaning yet):

Yesterday, a moth flew into my open mouth in the hushed darkness.

I feel an answer fluttering in the periphery of my thoughts, and maybe these eight pages are here for me to pin it down, but perhaps there is only space for the question.

I pick up my pencil and begin to write. Here, in The Kingdom of Ordinary Time.

I don’t have a degree, but I know ordinary. I am educated in the everyday.

I scratch my pencil across
the pages left empty,
graphite smeared on my left palm
like the wing dust on my tongue
when I spit the moth,
still alive,
from my mouth
and turned to face the moon.