Oct. 22, 2023
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Strolling (2020-___)
By Jessica Suzanne Stokes
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Strolling (2020-___)
By Jessica Suzanne Stokes
Originally published: "Strolling (2020-)" from The Ending Hasn't Happened Yet (Sable Books 2022)
Baby swings covered in caution tape.
Masks as the most common litter.
We wanted to grasp walk and roll in one word so we might describe how we
moved together and for
some time stroll rolled off our tongues and held us both
until its implied leisure no
longer lapped at what provoked our moving.
But we kept moving.
We'd see some deer wander by the river nearest our apartment
and turn the deer into a flicker of a promised otherwise
letting their leisure together at a distance from us
move us to stroll again.
Then, an idea of a person began leaking from me
and perhaps the days of their dripping away
led us to say goodbye to them at the river
just past the baby swings.
There were so many goodbyes then to people we knew as more than ideas
as hospitals ran out of rooms and we didn't know what to do about any of
the swollen grief.
So you walked and I rolled at a distance from leisure, from lovers, from
friends, from together.
For months after, we wandered the subdivision behind our complex
never nearing the river. Eventually, we brought dog and cat treats so each block
we'd meet a friend we earned unfairly. We sought out any company that
might wag and scamper with us.
One day the weather changed enough that we forgot ourselves and
strolled back to the river.
The deer were deer, not stolen friends, not flickers of escape routes, but
animals whose home was threatened by us and by the construction of
some new university building whose purpose we'd yet to determine.
And we started leaking
all the water and food we'd hoarded as we became preppers
without being prepared for any of this
all the masks we'd disposed of before we made and bought some of cloth
all the ideas and people we'd lost
Jessica Suzanne Stokes
Jessica Suzanne Stokes is a disabled poet/performer/educator/scholar and co-founder of the HIVES Research Workshop on interdependent, multispecies HIVES of crip community at Michigan State University. At MSU, they’ve taught Intro to LGBTQ Studies and Intro to Creative Writing. In their research, they analyze contemporary poetry’s methodologies for crip climate survival. Jessica writes about disability poetics in Jacket2's "Discordance" Series. Their work has appeared in Wordgathering, The Mayo Review, and the book We Are Not Your Metaphor: A Disability Poetry Anthology. They recently published an essay in Amodern on stutter as a Black/crip coalitional method in Douglas Kearney's Poetics. Jessica has a purple wheelchair and too much red hair.
Image description: A person with white skin and too much red hair wearing purple lipstick who is wearing a collared shirt criss-crossed with red, blue, and yellow lines on a starry black base; they’re leaning on a green walking stick with blurry woods and water in the background.