Roots Are Tough as Dreams

Poetry inspired by Torrin Greathouse and Dasha Kelly

Recently, my dear friend, Dasha Kelly came to visit, and she featured at the monthly reading series and open mike at my bookstore, The Feminist Bookstore in San Diego. There, she gave the prompt for the 10 minute free writing session: Roots Are Tough as Dreams. I had also just been reading the poetry of Torrin Greathouse, which is deeply vulnerable and usually visceral. The body as the site of all reckoning. What came from these words and images swimming in my head combined with the prompt is what follows. It was a gift from my body, my visceral rootedness, and I’m excited to share it with you.

Roots don’t ask for permission.
They arrive like a whisper in the bloodstream,
then bloom into a command.

I used to live like a loose thread—
unraveling on purpose.
Years slipped past me like open windows,
and I slipped right through them—
unheld,
unpromised,
a suitcase always half-packed in my chest.

I called it freedom.
Called it oxygen.
Called it the art of leaving before the leaving could touch me.

I loved like weather—
passing through,
touching down,
never staying long enough to learn the language of permanence.

One foot in the door,
one already ghosting the hallway.

Then something ancient
rose up in my body
and said:
No.

Not loudly—
not cruelly—
just with the gravity of tides
that do not care what the moon thinks of them.

Stay.

Grow.

Become a place something can belong.

I laughed at first—
like you do when the truth sounds too much like a trap.
But you can’t outwit your own blood.
You can’t outrun the drum that built your bones.

Something deeper than thought
began planting itself in me—
threading roots through marrow,
through breath,
through the quiet spaces I used to keep empty on purpose.

And then—
I was no longer just a body moving through the world.
I was a world.

A whole universe forming
in the dark cathedral of my belly.

Month by month,
I grew heavy with it—
not just weight,
but meaning.

Roots curling through every organ,
every rib,
down my legs,
into the soft surrender of my feet,
like the earth itself had chosen me
as its temporary sky.

Until the day came—
because it always comes—

when something larger than fear
wrapped its hands around the life inside me,
the life that had rooted me
as much as I had rooted it,

and pulled.

And pulled.

And pulled.

Until I broke open—
not into pieces,
but into truth—

everything I had been
spilling forward
into everything I was becoming.