For Ukraine There is no place in my body no nerve in my system no string in my heart no corner of my mind that knows how to make sense of war. I’m thinking about a mother giving birth to the sound of planes ripping the sky open the pain contracting through her body the fear flowing from breast to mouth the shock waves that spark from one nervous system to the other because a man chose to feed hungry ghosts with blood. I wonder how the land feels when it did not consent to bombs on its soil and if it can find any way to make something generative from the kind of death that calls men of a certain age to be soldiers in a battle they never wanted. I wonder how the wind feels about carrying both screams and prayers on the same breeze and if either will ever truly be heard or find a safe place to land. I wonder what it must feel like to have to pack up your whole life and run from the ancestral lands where your grandmother’s grandmother prayed and try to find home in any place where sunflowers don’t have roots. I don’t understand any of it but I know what it feels like in my body and I feel the way so many of us are collapsing into the pain of knowing how haunted we all are and the ways we keep hurting each other and not knowing what to do but maybe we can all just slow down a little. Just enough so we can stay with the trouble stay in our bodies stay connected to each other be gentle with ourselves keep our hearts open expand and contract through grief and rage through tenderness and care through falling apart and mending again and again. I am the mother I am the child I am the soldier I am the land I am the wind I am the the prayers of grandmothers carried on the breeze and they remind me that this is not so far away and we are not so far apart. Gina Puorro February 26, 2022