attunement 2020

all what you have been through
you are still you

and all
you have been through
we
see this in you

the loves
the mishaps
the times you felt alone

you need not always be
attuned

 best
if you were. when
you are



- katya.20
20

2020

get out on the road
if you can. lose your map
away from them
they play out the decade on
the news

a quarter century collected
oil dripping off the undercarriage
burning rubber on the
slats

enough standing aside
enough watching enough
waiting

go! get lost
in your life

i am

i stretch i breathe i let my feelings arise
i am saturated i have too much to do
i am talking to a friend
i am

o

our hearts located
a drip away from 5
o.clock

your crow foot eyes
see

the past got nothing future
got nothing on you
on me

we got each other
in the city feel the kick
of life

hit the latitude
with attitude over dry and barren highways
east

not one degree short
of circling
encompassing the
earth

water on ice

the wind whipped through
made sense of the calm
they got so tired they
fell asleep walking

the sky turned blue long after the dawn
they forgot to remember they
had not stopped
talking

when she finished the sentence he awoke
with a yawn and asked for two eggs
over easy

she fried the eggs by the sun
in the palm of her hand

the sky turned white long after the blue
the end of the day long overdue
washed down with water on ice

exist.ential

I've been writing this piece called Trouble '99 since late spring of last year. I read it in its entirety a couple weeks ago and found it several shades darker than i expected. Which corresponds to one of my three beta readers' critique. Writing is not unlike painting. You add layers until you find an image that best represents what you wish to portray. Yet with fiction you wanna let it be its own honest creation, which is often outside what you intended. Mixing conscious and unconscious elements. Let it be what it is. My characters may have fallen into a hopeless situation as they walk through the pages, but there is always hope. I think my work is often threatened by an existential mood. I have wrestled in my heart with this since I was a child, one day in the backyard when the limit on life first struck me. So words naturally come out of me that reflect that disappointment. Implicit in my sadness, is how much i love life and all its intricacies. How badly I wish to live on!

chica

she left the city swollen
sometimes with her way of certain
being
self-righteous. inflammatory
happenings surrounded her
creating a greater family
wherever she go refuse to be
stereotyped
gen.x
predating the baby boomers'
babies on
the evolutionary timeline. USA

attention: not to mention
she considered herself the luckiest
one alive

tv watchin girl

she checked herself
against another morning

of dutiful obeisance

 

renting heads out for free 

on an episodic wave of programmed 

tv

 

perry mason would take her 

unfulfilled potential white

and black past

noon

 

subject and object 

switched

 

a murder mystery

is watching

me

mood.i

i spoke to you by phone long distance
before the call i was collected and after i was
hurt again

i believe
the space i made the contact
with god was what allowed
me to

survive underwater deep
breathing inside the
divide

holy day

there was no newspaper on the holy day. plenty of fellowship and coffee at the church of aa. there were not any usual stores open but seven eleven. a woman stood barefoot in the cold in front of the store as people came and went. she appeared dissociated and did not respond to any caring voices. what can be done? in a couple of months the sacramento bee will be phasing out newsprint on saturdays. times change and yet i hope for things worthwhile, that they not fall off the margins.

space.force

the harvest of satellites
from station to
station

 appellation of meteorites
chemical analysis
of stardust

don't fuck with
the usa

HOW

whatever you are doing
be willing to give your utmost
no matter how petty
or trivial

give a damn
when you are doing
this

fully
honestly
intentionally
with all your heart and mind and spirit

cultivate this practice
and no one can ever
fault you

hero.ic

super motivation for
emulation

you say i saved you
cannot we both be one another's
inspiration?

my trail is shorter than yours
i see you far ahead and what
has happened

weeks i was catatonic mired
in depression. could not write
my verses

we were meant to be
to resist to
fight this morbid tendency cannot
we read the story
aloud?

something about
being worn down and off
and out
so bad you become
real

spot.light

i was calling out to you
i think
   i think
          i hope
   i pierced through

the dusk was blue
the dawn
too

a candle trembled
the fog horn
blast

all was muddled outside
a circumference and
that's how i
how i
knew

i kept calling
    calling

calling for
 you

go where no one has been

we are pressured in many ways in this life. we live in an atmosphere rims around the world. the condensation builds up by the heat, the clouds form and the rains come. the pressure and heat build up some more. how do you respond? you don't have to be intimidated! go ahead and rocket across the boundary. go where no one has ever been before. laugh out loud! the way you interact with your environment, your community, your greater family and yourself, is unique in time and space. keep the faith! we need you!

con.jure

the ghosts of poets

arise from the marshes they
trudge to their post

abandoned cabins moored to the foggy
coast

portraits peel off
the walls. unread books crestfallen
to the bare floor

how much life was lost

here? to honor the word

may i conjure you now
at your most glorious
to speak?

to help fight this

useless feeling

im.print

when i live
crafting these poems of words i
forge my peace with
language

the sun burns on
imprinting shadows
and the dreams oh

the feelings anchored to thoughts
keep me dreaming

as i type across
our time and
space

memory of a friend who did not make it out

we were living out of motel rooms back then and only a couple of people we could trust. pumping air into bike tires and patching them up, so for some freedom out on the streets. you had to be able to get out of a tight spot fast. someone was always having a breakdown or a meltdown except for the lifers who kept calm and had an eye for any advantageous situation. swoop down like a buzzard and pick apart the meat and leave the bones to sink into the earth. socioeconomics pushed a nasty current downtown and hung a red tide. they marked up for resale whatever they could not themselves consume. the players threw a party to look unselfish. many swam off into eddies and lost touch with reality for days, then, when it hit, let's hope you could hit the ground running to make up for all that lost time. kids were kids and lost time lost money for every adult who had no fixed income or paycheck. outside of the clear specifications of sanctioned work or disability in a capitalist society, lay the gray zone. lots of marginalized people in the mix. try to discover what you had of value then stir up some demand. could be a skill. could be a quality you carried yourself. you had to get creative and put yourself out there. try not to resort to the least common denominator. plenty of good boy and good girl gone bad scenarios. some who could not recover from loss or trauma. god! i'm so fortunate i got out of there. i wish you had, too.

peel session

my version of aromatherapy was dropping a grapefruit peel down the sink and turning the switch to obliterate. i met someone like that. her life like a grapefruit peel after she lost her daughter to suicide. i did a lot of deep stretches. i wrote a letter on greenish colored paper with a pinkish colored pen. i had an assortment of vivid dreams and got up easily every morning at four am. prayer got me through a couple rough patches. the rain materialized and cleared into sunshine. i got to feeling so very alive.

creature of celestial tongue

i woke to voices sung high in some distant land. they touched into my subconscious and drew me headlong into the world to carry out this mission. to build a creature of feathers and cotton and infuse it with such love that, when called upon by a touch of the paw, it may invoke these celestial notes, opening its half-sewn mouth for to give us all we need to go on another day.

they

the kid was cold. damn cold. they already had three layers what with an undershirt, a tee shirt, and a hoodie. they wanted to adjust the thermostat but it was off limits. to save money is why, they reminded themselves, i guess i will have to put on a parka. they did exactly that, and ran around the apartment building exactly 4 times. the old lady was out there with the old man. the old man shouted some words of encouragement on the second lap. their breath rose towards the clouds. the old lady clapped through her mittens. they put their arms in the air and made fists in the sky.

we gen x

we gen x in the shadow
of the boom

we subjected to vietnam era
rerun documentary
our own stories gunned
down with jfk

they got so worried
during the second war
they waited for victory
to procreate

 

the grandparents
in shell shock reverie
of d.day

we gen x in the shadow
of the boom

we eat astronaut ice
cream and toy with the key
hung off the neck
by a string

mtv lashes out lovely
by light and sound so
we paint the basement walls
all night. under

the influence

bumping our heads
on the deep cut

 

we gen x

in the shadow of the boom

our thumbs blistered
by joysticks inside the impossible
space

hidden in the slant
of the attic and papered
walls

novella. sneak peek

Here's an excerpt from my WIP (work in progress): "The night hung heavy and winter would not wait. The days grew shorter and colder in Chicago. We haunted an apartment wedged between others on a long city block not far from Division, the four of us. The whole block seemed to shake every time a train passed by. Factory chimneys exhaling smoke, incessant sounds. What I loved about the city was how it’s so alive. There was all kinda weather coming through, winds blasting across Lake Michigan for days. Early snow subsided to rain, and all the kids on their way to school pushed gleefully through the puddles. Skyscrapers stood tall among the trees. The vertical life in Chicago in obvious contradiction to the system of streets and rails. All diversity of people caught up in all diversity of things, twenty four hours a day. Altogether it made for a life you would not wanna miss."
- Katya Mills

say the things

the kick back sunday, cooking a simple breakfast for you and someone you love, listening to a game on the radio, when you get the call...and you take the call...and cannot say the things you need to say. left with that sinking feeling. how can we stick up for ourselves? we must find a way to speak our truth. then continue on with the kick back sunday, laughing and carrying on and not haunted by the omission.

something from nothing

i know how to crash and burn. it's easy to live reckless, to not pay attention on purpose. what's hard is the reconstruction era. coming to a clearing and realizing there's nothing left, even the foundation may be scarred. how terrifying to start from scratch. but you can make something positive out of negative space. creating something out of nothing is one of the greatest joys of living.

december 6

today will be like most days and i am content with the lot i have. out of bed without an alarm just before five am, woken by the cold nose of one of my two kittens in our little family. i will take my single pill and put the coffee on, do a couple of jumping jacks and make a single phone call. then for the coffee and water in an lamp lit room at an old oak desk i have had for a quarter century. i still don't always know where to situate my feet what with the outcroppings of two crossed wooden legs in the way. there will be this silence amid the brief blasts of furnace and sound of keys tapping. i used to write on paper as a kid but i am a late gen x and got my first mac plus, and what a dream, on my 17th birthday, and never really looked back. i don't often know where to situate myself in my writings, for every author will, but i do try and be honest about life and these days i am working on telling these stories in a more linear fashion, so they can be read without so great a confusion folks give up right early.

against the shadow of trauma

when i was younger it was easy to be welcoming to strangers, not having had too many awful experiences. today safe shared spaces may be harder to come by. you never know who’s packing heat. so long as we are all able to respect one another, not judge and condemn, powerful things can happen. when people are willing to listen, speak, and challenge without devaluing one another, it’s like the sunlight carried in and turned out of someone’s pocket! i still believe in being welcoming. i try to foster willingness in my heart to let my shoebox apartment, despite the risk you find my home shoddy or small or wonder why i’m not able to afford better. it is an honorable thing to do against the shadow of our collective trauma. i can offer a spirited smile and prepare a nice dish. i am grateful for those who have done the same.

raspberry.red

when we were kids a raspberry was a scrape you got running around rough. the kid with the biggest raspberry was honored for a warrior. i remember once when i was 8 i injured myself on purpose, jumped from a real high spot hoping i would break my leg. i ended up landing on my hands and sprained my wrist. i wanted a cast for kids to write their names on, and all i got was a sling and a bag of ice. i went on to hurt myself in decidedly dangerous ways in life. driving too fast in the rain, age 17, i hydroplaned and rolled my vw. i was known to put a cigarette out on my arm. i had a lot of one night stands with strangers. hooked up with randoms. addiction was my tried and true. i wanted to numb the shame that came of hiding and fighting my identity. that was my biggest secret. i was trying to protect myself. i ended up in jail and rehab after rehab until finally i had to face myself, take my medicine, and face the world. my lease on life was renewed.  today i have learned to let the feelings rise and fall. be true to yourself no matter what. today i like my raspberry red. i pack a peanut butter sandwich for my lunch with jam.

machine 4

we all get drawn down and nothing left to give
coffee can only take you so far in a capitalist society
which would be happy to work you to death then
take your bones and drill holes in them and use them
for machine parts to keep on working towards what
only god knows

book review

Ame and the Tangy Energetic 

by 

Katya Mills (Goodreads Author)

 

Nick Reeves's review 

Dec 01, 2019

liked it

Katya Mills comes on like Douglas Coupland's pill-addled street scion in this skid row helter skelter psychic tumble through a downtown United States of Imagica.

Ame & The Tangy Energetic rails against the sheen and shite of corporate pop culture and captures both the hyperreality and the blur of the high, the bleed-out of the sidewalk comedown.

Mills will dose your soda with her magical, druggy, otherworldly cocktail when you ain't looking.

A tale of getting clean, with washing machines.

(Also well worth checking out are Katya's YouTube readings of 'Ame...')

december 1

first sunday. last month of the year. up at dawn. i listen to the heater ignite off the pilot while drinking coffee from my union jack mug. the heads of the palm trees are bobbing, dancing. i see them through the window, signaling the storm. i think back on what i have accomplished and ahead to the challenges i face. working my first year as a manager for a nonprofit organization based here in sacramento. i am responsible not only to my staff but also my therapy caseload. stressed and tired i come home looking for calm and rest. while i wish i could be building community, i cannot always summon the energy. i tend to devote more time to my writing projects at home. i have to strike a balance to sustain physical, emotional, spiritual, and psychosocial health. there's only so much you can do in a day. i am trying to spend less time online and more time reading books...considering how life has gone this year and what lies ahead, i guess what i hope for is to keep a spiritual core. what i mean is move away from self-criticism or comparing myself against other measures, and towards acceptance of my life, as is. there are plenty of ways i feel disappointed. and while i want to allow myself to feel, i also want to check it against my reality, the context of my life, and show myself some love for staying on the pulse, and going after what matters, courageously moving forward in the proper direction. i am lucky and blessed to be alive and have my family and friends, food and shelter. i have enough cash on hand to navigate a capitalist society, and a fair amount of freedom to roam around and position myself in the places where i feel useful and valued. i am grateful for the gift i have to outreach to my community in ways i see i can help make a difference. thank you for visiting my site today. i wish you all the best. keep the faith.   - katya w. mills