{Tell me about a breakfast you were once privileged to have, Eggs over easy? Grapefruit? One thin slice of toast? Not even that. You ate a pickle- an it never tasted so good. You vowed to eat pickles for breakfast for the rest of your life. Then what happened? Tell me. Be Specific. Go. Ten Minutes. }

Red mingled neon lined diner seats holding conversations and memories tucked beneath tables set with old silverware shaped in compass formations and pointed in the four directions. Hunched low, eyes diverted to the sun setting just beyond the shadow of the stained half pulled blinds.

It was on odd time for breakfast, but timing was never my strong suit, or any suit for that matter. The coffee dressed in brown, and creamers that cause cancer stacked in messy pyramids. (Sometimes I missed the smell of cigarettes with a side of bacon)

It made the perfect setting, for the perfect breakfast. Because, in the words of Thomas-Builds-A-Fire, “Some days is a good day to die, and some days is a good day to eat breakfast.” And given this my first meal outside of the ward, I was lucky to be alive.

“Where you from, hun?”- the waitress asked with a forced drawl, the kind you heard in the bonanza reruns grandpa watched when we were kids.

“Well,” I hesitate, trying on words in my mind, seeing how they fit. “I guess, I never really felt like I was from anywhere, if I must be honest.”

“That would be nice, now wouldn’t darling,” she says, “Nobody up in yer business all the time, no embarrassment from being picked on as kids, or yer kids embarrassing you.”

She stops, and with her, time stood still, hot pot of coffee in stasis, the sound of smacking gum between red lips reverberating through space. She gives me and my bright orange jumpsuit a look over, soft and southern eyes drinking me all in.

“Well damn, hun. You do look well traveled and in need of, oh, I don’t know, some greasy kind of healing” she snaps, her fingernails like knives unsheathed.

“Today was a good day” I proclaimed, grinning with a pharmaceutical smile, “Didn’t have to use my AK.”

“That’s nice, Hun.” She grabs my menu, gives me a wink, and disappears into the greasy purgatory of the setting sun. The sound of time unwinds, the clank of glass, and the choir of line-cooks, standing in for the angels.

“Today was a good day..”

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”

― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“” Listen also to what is not said. It is a listening not just with your ears- though ears are a fine thing- but listening with your whole body, with your heart and the hairs on your arms and the small toes of your feet. Try doing it this way, when you read James Baldwin, one of our great American writers, out loud: “ (Old Friend from Far Away, pg. 27)

“On the 29th of July 1943, my father died…
(reading from Notes of a Native Son James Baldwin Full Audiobook mixed with old radio recordings from 1943 and other found sounds. mixed by Si Matta)

Listening to the sound of words in my brain tossing with the gusts of wind blowing south through the San Luis Valley, hitting the house in waves like a chorus for the sonnets rattling in my bones.

{Here alone, listening to what is not said in the daily search for clarity, divinity, or, just a padded cell far away from the prying eyes of gossip and social reproach.}

No matter the criteria for a forced hermitage, the silence can be deafening, a meditation to madness, and/or the peace that always seemed so elusive and out of reach-, like soft dust in the mesa wind, fleeting like fathers, and like Baldwin I understand that father wound. Fueling pen and therapy bills.

“I often wonder what I’d do if there weren’t any books in the world.”

— James Baldwin

A good book can grip you like that, old memories, kitchen sink, shadowboxing someone else’s story. A good book is a hustle, and a grift with reality, a dance with the matrix programmed by others vulnerabilities and tastes. Like a home, a good book can trap you.

{I listened with my organs,
straining through black
tar tobacco smoke
and words
shoved
down
throats,
spoken
in rooms
that didn’t
deserve
me.

“Don’t you know me dad,
I’m your native son”}

It was a mystery, a secret recipe passed down from Sunset magazines and the backs of cleaner boxes.

“Jules, what’s in that?” people would ask. “It’s a secret,” she’d reply.

It tasted of pistachios and cottage cheese, walnuts and grapes. Heaping green mounds adorned our cousins’ plates, alongside Grandma’s chicken and the promise of safety.

“The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.” ~Joan Didion

The dashboard glowed faint and useless, the numbers flickering with a tired rhythm that offered no comfort. The gas gauge hovered above empty, the check engine light a steady, accusatory orange. I stared at the dash, willing it to tell me something, anything. But it only pulsed with the stubborn life of a machine too old to trust. I cut the engine. The silence that followed felt heavy and broken, pressing against the thin, dinted glass of the windshield.

The mesa unfolded in front of me, open and exposed, stretching endlessly under a bruised sky. The sun was already swallowed by the horizon, leaving only a thin line of fire on the edge of the world, burning away the last warmth of the day. A chill crept in, sharp and insistent, curling beneath my jacket and into my bones. The desert air tasted of dust and old dreams.

I sat still, knuckles pale against the steering wheel, watching as shadows drifted along the roadside. Out here, the distance wasn’t just space. It was a presence, looming and impossibly broad, a kind of emptiness I couldn’t drive through or leave behind. It was the kind of quiet that made you think of everything you’d ever lost.

A River runs through me.

Was anything left back home? Did the fog still roll in off the water, thick and forgiving? Or had even that faded, leaving behind only dry riverbeds and brittle grass? I tasted nostalgia like iron on my tongue—sharp, metallic, unyielding. Memory flickered, unreliable and distant. I tried to recall faces, voices, the weight of belonging, but the details slipped away, replaced by the drone of cicadas and the endless sigh of the wind.

Had I ever really belonged anywhere? Or was it only the illusion of belonging I missed? Or the comfort of a place that remembered me, even as I tried to forget it?

I opened the door, letting the cold rush in. The air outside was thin and empty, charged with a restlessness I couldn’t name. I stepped out, boots crunching on scattered gravel. My shadow stretched long and distorted, a thin echo on the faded earth. The land was silent except for the wind, which carried the faint smell of sage and something burnt.

I wandered a few steps from the car, eyes searching for some sign: a familiar rock, a twisted juniper, anything that would anchor me. But every landmark felt strange, hollowed out, as if the world itself had shifted in my absence. The land offered no comfort, only space and silence and the slow, creeping dread that whatever I was searching for was already gone.

Sunset on Columbia River from Bridge of the Gods. 193?

Time felt heavier here, pressing down, flattening hope, flattening memory. I kept scanning the horizon, looking for signs. Anything that would tell me which direction was forward, which was back. But the desert gave nothing away. The world was pared down to essentials: rock, sky, wind, and the slow ache of longing.

I found myself thinking about the people I’d left behind. Friends I’d promised to write. A sister who never answered the phone. The neighbor with the old dog who always barked at dawn. Had they changed, too? Did they remember me, or was I just another name lost in a stack of mail, a number in an address book never dialed?

The stark beauty of the mesa cut deep. It was a beauty I couldn’t carry with me, only endure. I stood by the old 4Runner, staring west, wondering if the Gorge remembered me. Wondering if the dust there was still dark, still alive, or if it had turned to ash, scattered and lost by time and wind.

The wind shifted, colder now, bringing only the scent of stone and emptiness. I slipped back inside, shivering, my hands trembling against the cracked vinyl seat. The darkness outside pressed closer, hungry and vast, and the world I once knew felt impossibly distant, receding in the rearview.

Circling in dreams.

“You were really beautiful, thank you”- Nick Cave

The road unwound like
a long-held breath,
its rhythm soft as
the heartbeat of stone.

She leaves the earth of
Mesas behind, red dust
curling in the rearview,
the bones of
old places.

The sky is wide enough
for her grief tonight,
stretching taut,
bruised with stars,
a canvas for memories
she cannot bury.

She drives east, a hymn
to the unbroken road.
Her body a map,
etched in ink, scar,
and story, a nurse’s hands,
a wanderer’s soul.

But grief does not shake;
it settles, heavy
as a stone,
silent as the wind.

The sky stretches endless,
its wounds glowing
faint in the
morning light.

She breathes it in,
the ache, the wonder,
the endless gathering
of what is lost
and what remains.

She wonders if she
could reach up,
pluck her sorrow
from the heavens
and hold it like
a wildflower,
its petals torn
but still fragrant,
resting on graves.

to something,
she can’t
yet
name.

© Si Matta

“I walk in and out of several worlds every day.” —Joy Harjo

Link: Poet Warrior: A Memoir, By Joy Harjo

Some mornings, I wake unsure which world I’ve landed in. My body is here, jittered, somewhat grounded, pressed to the cold skin of earth, the taste of coffee lingering at the back of my mouth. But my mind is scattered across dream and daylight: one part drifting through old stories, the other scrolling the infinite blue of my phone, looking for a sign that I still belong to something older than algorithms.

Dreams have always been more than private flickers behind closed eyes. Among my people, dreams are the braids that bind us—to land, to each other, to those who came before and those not yet born. Dreaming isn’t solitary; it’s a communal current, threading through ceremonies, firesides, and quiet dawns. The dreamers are weavers.They return with gifts: stories, warnings, laughter, medicine for the waking world.

Joy Harjo calls these dreamers “poet warriors.” I read her words in Poet Warrior and feel the braid tighten around me, a gentle, insistent pull. She writes, “We are evidence of love, the burdens and gifts we carry,” and I sense the weight and the lift of that inheritance. She reminds me that story itself is a braid, never a single strand, but three, four, a dozen voices woven together. The dreamer listens not just to their own heart, but to the wind rattling the cottonwoods, to the ancestors whispering through the river, to the coyote slipping through the dawn.

I often reflect on what it means to be part of a story that is bigger than just myself. Poet Warrior isn’t a book that moves in a straight line. Instead, it circles and returns, built from fragments and spirals. Harjo’s chapters loop back on themselves, weaving together poems, memories, songs, prayers, and prose. Each layer adds meaning, like a river building up silt or a petroglyph deepening with time. Reading her work gives me permission to let my own writing roam, to braid together poetry and memory, image and reflection, to trust that the story will hold together, even when I can’t see its full shape.
#

I can’t do anything
but talk to the wind,
to the moon
but cry out goddamn goddamn
to stones
and to other deathless voices
that I hope will carry
us all through.” ― Joy Harjo

The first time I pressed my hand to a petroglyph on the basalt cliffs above the Columbia, I didn’t know what I was supposed to feel. The stone was warm, almost oscillating. The spiral carved there was older than any story I’d heard in English, older than the language I never learned but sometimes dream in. It felt like a conversation I’d arrived late to, but could still lean in close and catch a word or two. Stepping into a circle already formed, voices looping through the centuries, I pressed my ear to the stone, caught a word, snagged a thread, and let myself be woven in. Even if I had missed the beginning, somehow, I belonged.

“Remember, you are this universe and this universe is you.”

I think about craft, what it means to make a mark meant for someone you may never meet. The old petroglyphs were not just art, but message: I was here. We hunted here. Water came from this place. The salmon ran strong. Maybe a prayer layered in, or a bit of trickster mischief. The tools were simple. The intention was not. Harjo teaches that poetry, much like petroglyphs,is a way of listening as much as speaking. She writes, “I follow the spiral to the core, to the source, to where dreaming and the story begin.” My own tools now are a cracked phone, a battered notebook, a keyboard sticky with coffee rings. My marks are digital, ephemeral, a tweet, a story pinned to a map, a GPS breadcrumb trail a cousin left to show where the old berry patches still grow. But the intention remains: to reach someone beyond my sight, to leave a trace that says,

This is what mattered to me. This is what I saw.

#

I sit up in the dark drenched in longing. / I am carrying over a thousand names for blue that I didn’t have at dusk.”― Joy Harjo

When I read Poet Warrior, I recognize the mark-making urge in myself. The need to leave something, not just for remembrance, but for renewal. Harjo reminds me that every mark was new once, every story is a risk, every dreamer in danger of being erased or misunderstood. The work is not to guarantee permanence, but to show up with intention: to carve, in whatever medium, a story that’s honest, open, and willing to be found. “The story is always ahead of you, waiting to be found,” Harjo writes. Her words invite me to experiment with form: to let prose and poetry flow together, to create layers a future reader might sift through like sediment, discovering pieces of what was meant.

The best marks, I think, are collaborative, layered with meaning the maker never imagined. In Harjo’s words, “We all become ancestors in training.” What we leave behind is not only for remembrance, but for renewal.

“Honestly, all crows are not ravens”
― Munia Khan

Ravens fly mid thought across the white backdrops of Sangre de Cristo peaks, descending in hushed lines of wind brought together through patterns and will- stingy in the knowledge of flight. I watch sad and mad in my jealous indignation at such a feat. Perhaps it is the plight of the human to have to deal with heartbreak, bills and 9-5 because we forgot how to fly ourselves.

The air was heavy with the scent of possibilities, mist mingled in fire smoke and ravens wings.

Did you know that the black we see in the raven is not black at all but a spectrum of rainbow light so distinct and grand that only the chosen may glimpse.

I have always wanted to be chosen by the raven- to be seen, to fit in. to be a part of something only registered as a secret- to be a key holder to esoteric knowledge and the divinity of unseen light.

The mountains sang in up drafts and bitter wind, songs of a corvid knowing echoing beneath basalt and longing.

I looked up by chance, to see an Eagles dance- and a song of Fuck You to the Raven brood. I assume it is because they shine like the sun, and Eagles are jealous too.

Black against the snow, rainbows against the sky.

And you know the sun’s settin’ fast
And just like they say, nothing good ever lasts – Iris Dement

Caught up with Ana at the San Cristobal post office, where the Sangre de Cristo Mountains keep watch and the air smells of sage when the wind shifts. She’s always got her hands busy; sorting mail, humming under her breath, listening more than she speaks.

She tells me things were different once. Her mother remembers when Dennis Hopper might be seen at the café in Taos, drifting in with the sunrise, pockets full of stories and rumors. Back then, folks say D.H. Lawrence wrote letters just up the road at his ranch, chasing words like they were wild horses. Ana says it felt like all kinds of people passed through—artists, poets, wanderers—leaving a trace of themselves in the dust and laughter that filled old adobe porches.

Now, Ana sorts through postcards from Santa Fe, the odd letter from grandkids in Albuquerque, bills addressed in shaky handwriting. The bulletin board out front is cluttered with lost dog flyers and sun festival announcements, a faded poem tacked up by someone who never signed their name. It’s quieter these days, she says.Stories get traded softly, almost like apologies.

She pulls out a letter addressed to “The Friend I Miss.” Says sometimes she finds a book tucked in a parcel, or a clipping about Aldous Huxley, who once wandered these mountains and left behind only rumors and a few lines about the light. There’s always a stack of undeliverables; a map with trails nobody walks anymore, postcards with no addresses, messages that seem to drift in from another time.

I ask if she misses the old San Cristobal. She shrugs, says the world turned inward; most folks wave from behind car windows and screens now, and even the newcomers with dreams of writing keep mostly to themselves. But sometimes, when the Sangre de Cristos catch fire at dusk and the cottonwoods whisper with the river, Ana swears she can still feel the old magic—just a heartbeat away, just this side of dreams.

“Some folks call her a runaway. A failure in the race. But she knows where her ticket takes her. She will find her place in the sun”
― Tracy Chapman

Wilma stands beneath the sour glow of the Dollar General, the jaundiced sign humming over sage and river stones. Inside, the aisles are bright with plastic—candy-bright, memory-light—replacing the smell of bread that once crept from shuttered doors just down the road.

She rings up locals—faces creased by wind, pockets heavy with worry—stories trading hands like loose coins: a missing dog, a sun-festival in a canyon, a brother lost to the blues. Wilma gathers them in, her touch gentle as rain on dust.

At closing, she slips outside into the blue hush, mountains looming—watchful, bruised. She lights her menthol, exhales halos and steps under the holy light of neon, flickering behind her as coyotes call just beyond the shadows. Wilma walks home, steps soft as moth wings, carrying the day’s small losses, still searching for wild iris, just this side of dreams.

“Vivir de recuerdos es morir.”
— Frida Kahlo

Rosaleen unlocked the door at eleven, the screen creaking open as pale dust danced in the shaft of morning light. The diner was quiet, its checkerboard curtains catching the sun, red trim glowing against the hush that filled the space.

In the kitchen, Tia was already at work, hair tied back, moving with a calm efficiency through the rising scent of chile warming in the pan. She hummed something old, her tune for no one but herself, as steady as the rhythm of her hands.

Out front, Rosaleen wiped down the Formica counters, set the forks straight, and checked the register. The visitor log lay open, names drifting across the page in blue ink—Wyoming, Berlin, Austin, even a doodle of a mountain. Locals knew to come after noon, their boots heavy, their stories heavier. Tourists arrived earlier, the screen door snapping shut behind them as they glanced at the Marilyn Monroe prints, the pie safe, and the handwritten sign:

“Breakfast All Day / Open 11-5.”

Coffee was poured, pie was served. Rosaleen’s voice was gentle, with just a trace of her grandmother’s Spanish in it—her cariño, soft as a secret, slipping into the morning air.

In the far corner, the jukebox played a song just out of reach, something slow, a melody that tasted of Patsy Cline and sunlight warming old tile. Tia called out orders in a timid voice that brooked no argument, red chile glistening as she wrapped burritos tight in Christmas colors. Rosaleen’s laughter mingled with her aunt’s in the steam and clang of pans.

The hours slipped by, measured in coffee refills, the sighing hush of the screen door, and the ever-growing list of names in the visitor registry—a traveler from Maine lost on the backroads, someone from El Paso, someone else just passing through.

At five, Rosaleen turned the sign, rinsed the last mug, and listened as the jukebox winds down its last dance- “I go out walking, looking for you”- She stood by the screen door with sunset falling across the empty booths, thinking of all the names left behind—lost, just on the other side of dreams.