Canyons

When I was young I used to drive
with no companion or destination in mind.

Cutting through heavy valley heat on the 101
then curving toward the coast through Topanga Canyon
1969, on an unmarked road by a no trespassing sign,
parked between the boulders, eucalyptus and
sage with four-track off and eyes closed
I’m seventeen and waiting for a
transformation—that wasn’t coming that
afternoon.
Or any time soon.

For every hasty engagement
there was a Benedict Canyon.
For every cleaving together
there was geography.

The Secret Lives of Things

The Secret Lives of Things I want to learn from slime molds How they take the shape Of tapioca or icicles or pretzels Pink toothpaste, brown cigars Sucking nutrients From rotting leaves and wood And then become blue crusts Yellow splotches, tawny curlicues And vanish. Their weird diversity and transience Speak to me of beauty […]

Jewels

You must never, I say to myself, curse life again. The beauty comes from the difficulty, the trap-door -ever-giving-way-to- trap-door infinite capacity of life. That we survive it is amazing, that we suffer is beautiful, because we are suffering in jewels. Glittering in the sun with all the decadent superb richness of our life’s […]

Mother Hands

“You have a mother’s hands,” My husband said to me when our son was a few weeks old. I was holding a whimpering newborn, cooing and shushing in his ear, while gently stroking his back in a clockwise motion. “Do I?” I smiled, amused that I was now a mother. With mom hands. When do […]

Open Letter to the Selfie Generation

Dear Millennials, You are beautiful. Do not listen to people who say you are vain. They are over fifty, and they are jealous of your pores. They do not realize how good they would look if photographed with the Camera+ app. Buy a selfie stick. You create the life you live. Photograph it from the […]

The Corset’s Last Breath: Frederick’s of Hollywood is Dead

I heard that the first place I’d worked in Oregon shuttered today the same way we hear everything now: a Facebook post. A friend was tagged in a dim cell phone shot snapped in the dying Lloyd Center Mall in Portland. Lloyd Center has been dying since I first moved to Portland in 2003. A […]

Winter Term

Winter Term Men reach a certain age and rest: forty-five for a decade, seventy-two until death. Only in academia does this happen to women as well. Something about the books, and all that youth to push against. We reach a tousled middle-agedness early, and then grow slowly into ourselves until, at sixty, we are gorgeous, our […]

Double Mastectomy Ins & Outs

It’s been a couple of months since my last post on PDXX — months (1? 2?) that have both flown by and dragged on like a train with wooden blocks stuck under its wheels. I had a double mastectomy on November 4, a preventative surgery I chose after finding out I have the BRCA mutation. The post below […]

100 Days of Depression

View this post on Instagram This doesn't even look like me. #100daysofdepression Day 1 A post shared by Lauren Hudgins (@laurenhudgins) on Nov 14, 2014 at 8:02pm PST On November 11, I started a #100DaysofDepression selfie project on Instagram. I photograph myself once a day while battling Seasonal Affective Disorder. This isn’t an original idea. […]

“Beautiful and Brainy”

Madison Holleran was a 19-year old University of Pennsylvania student and a promising track star at her university, until a week ago, when she threw herself off a parking garage in Philadelphia. Many young adults commit suicide everyday, but interestingly Madison’s death was reported in cities where seemingly she had a very small, or even […]

Visitant

Literary pilgrims welcome

beauty