Earth Archives | Monster Mom Comics

The Gut

Monster Mom — Wed, 10 Jan 2024 19:01:25 +0000

The Gut | from 6.21.21 edited 12.15.23⁣

I could write about yesterday
I could write about love
about eyes overcoming my gut, pushing up on my heart. Or
I could write about that year when I started feeling again.

They don’t seem to go together
I’m sure they do
pausing this to feel that
turning off the ears
I’ll just watch my skin in the sunshine. Today
my arm and thigh and hand
warmed through the morning windows.
I don’t put my hair up. I allow
heat on my shoulders
like too many blankets
until clouds relieve me.

See—we are connected,
sunshine and skin and clouds and morning.

That’s what I’ll write about.
Dawn in the dew grass,
before I allowed myself to sleep at night __
and only because days wouldn’t hold
enough hours – I surrender.
I’m learned at life in a sleepless trance.

The year I re-learned to feel I didn’t cry.
I let the dew and sunshine and impulses of
a nervous heart carry me to stillness.
I questioned what numbness was. what shock was.
what possibly could tamper down on the blank times
what could close the lid on exhaustion and not be death.

A boldness in my gut lives carrying
this life in and through to more life.
I am still a secret
awake in surrender
watching and feeling and
watching further and closer
for depth in the periphery where
breath pushes up on the heart
low and steady
the motor of the gut.

The post The Gut appeared first on Monster Mom Comics.

Down to Earth

Monster Mom — Sat, 17 Apr 2021 01:36:53 +0000

The post Down to Earth appeared first on Monster Mom Comics.

The War of Man vs. Earth

Monster Mom — Sun, 03 Apr 2016 03:08:20 +0000

From my breasts I am fierce. I am wild.

I walk the mountain trail topless–just like the men sun tanning their bare chests–my bare feet step solid, pads on my paws built by clay earth bake into my soles.

I am tender and private. Solitary in the landscape of my mind. Travelers pass on the trail. “Right on” the woman says as the man averts his eyes. I go home, nurse my child, and paint a woman whose breasts cry a milky river.

It was a commissioned piece, for a book the client has only envisoned.

My breasts cried those milky tears. They cried a sour flood all over the bed sheets in pools that stained dozens of new futon mattresses.

I cried the war of man vs. nature. I cried the earth adjusting to the comfort under the human.

I held it crying uphill tears. I breathed it down to a calm so my baby wouldn’t drink it. My body and breath soft as the breast of earth while my mind battled in adjustment to my mans world.

Heuristic biases. The words stick out of something I read yesterday about design influences on culture running alongside our human inability to shift out of our comfort to see solutions from a different new old or timeless perspective.

My body, lying uncomfortably still, controlling my calm for one hour, two hours, so my baby would rest, wouldn’t stir, wouldn’t cry at my leaving her alone. I breathed and quieted and listened to the ancestors who saw more, sending wisdom.

From my breasts I am fierce, I am wild. I walk the landscape of my motherhood. I walk the ridge after dinner where the sun sets across the valley–where giant oil machines crane their steel necks, pecking at the land like stinging mechanical mosquitoes.

I cry a river of milk. It becomes a stream where the white wolves drink. It flows like a waterfall over the ridge cliff.

I was commissioned to paint her. In a red sari dress with her breasts spurting milk like wild faucets. Soaking the silk fabric like broken fire hydrants soak the street. Spouting more ferociously than any waterfall. Like geysers I cried for the war of man vs. Earth.

The post The War of Man vs. Earth appeared first on Monster Mom Comics.