Heather Christle

I cried in front of a crowd—mortifying—while reading a poem I wrote for my dead friend Bill. He would have laughed. He would have liked it.

The tears of white women are subject to specific scrutiny, because their weaponization has so often meant violence toward people of color, and black people in particular. The tears could be real, by which I mean physically present, or imagined, metaphorical. Whether they exist on the face or in the mind, the tears of a white woman can shift a room’s gravity. They set others falling to help her, to correct and punish those who would dare make her weep.

I have always preferred parallel lines to perpendicular ones

Do you remember the hopelessness of watching a parent cry?

Tears are a sign of powerlessness, a “woman’s weapon.” It has been a very long war.

Some mornings I awake with an enormous sensation inside me and cannot identify whether the urge is to cry or write a poem or fuck someone. All at once? My body has cross-indexed the impulse.

The word I have seen people use most frequently to describe the way elephants examine the bones of another when a herd comes across a skeleton is reverent.

Some people will write about one thing as a way of not writing about something else. Like Tony Tost:
I don’t know how to talk about my biological father, so I am going to describe the lake: it’s blue, with swans.17

I fear that to write so much about crying will tempt a universal law of irony to invite tragedy into my life.

Some people think of reading poems and stories as a way to practice responding to imagined circumstances, without having to risk the dangers of real life.