Three Poems by Maya Weeks
spontaneous land trust
i’m looking for a pee spot &
no better than a puppy
dragonfly the color of serpentine
a woman ran running by me
overnight the tops of the hills have turned red
potato library
a mouse who runs across the road
as it turns out i have been biting my tongue while working
i am smiling so big and there are moths all around
there’s this thing called time
i feel like a boysenberry among boysenberries
a vulture on every post
a hundred crows
veering toward
it’s fine to have a calling
there’s a man with a dodge ram i see on the road every day
it’s fine to want to be around animals
i literally do not know what to tell anyone about anything
least of all myself
standing around waiting for the sound of waves to reach me
salt the leeches
i’m at the beach where adults sit calmly on rocks
wind blows through my sweater, shakes me
people make themselves comfortable in public
i sit here yammering
small paper cup at the show feels like my childhood. you don’t have to
only talk about the future
no channels
no lulls
kind of a channel
kind of some lulls
i trust my dreams to tell me everything
Dr. Maya Weeks is a white settler writer, artist, and geographer from California working on feminist environmental justice with qualitative and creative methods. A first-generation college student, she holds her BA in Language Studies, Spanish from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and her MFA in Creative Writing, Poetry from Mills College. Weeks earned her PhD in Geography at the University of California, Davis, where she wrote her dissertation on marine pollution, gender, and feminist political economy. Recent poetry has been published in Paperbark and recent nonfiction in Zócalo Public Square. A record, Tethers, is out on Full Spectrum Records. She has exhibited at Vague Research Studios and performed at Historical Materialism. She’s the author of a poetry chapbook, How to Be on the Outside of Every Inside/How to Be Inside Every Outside (These Signals Press, 2016). She’s the outreach manager at the California Public Domain Allottee Association and an affiliated researcher at the University of California, Davis. In her free time, she surfs and studies small ruminant husbandry with the goal of caring for a flock of sheep. Maya lives and works on unceded Chumash land (Santa Barbara, CA).
