I AM MY OWN COUNTRY NOW by Kai Coggin

I AM MY OWN COUNTRY NOW

        November 6th, 2024

I am my own country now.

I am seated at the very bottom of myself
at this time of highs and lows,
ebbs and flows,
moving through colors of emotion
with no wind at my back, waiting to see
if I can again pull myself up from the depths of defeat.

Here I am, borderless inside myself,
surrounded by a country that no longer dreams it can dream.

I am my own country now,
patriotic only for my own quiet tenderness,
a citizen of loss
and finding again a reason to hold on.

The capital city of my heart sparks
a little flame on the hilltop of my soft body,
and I am trying to find again a reason to stand
up for the vision of freedom I held for us all,
to light the way somehow through
all the impending unabridged darkness.

I am my own country now.

My neighbors pushed a lotus back down into the mud
when we were so close to the surface,
when we were at the cusp of breakthrough,
when we could almost see her iridescent petals
reflecting the sunlit stars blushing with sweetness—
now lost in a poisoned swamp of collectively stepping backward.

I am my own country now.

I have taken the stars from the old flag,
and hung them from my eyelashes—
left the red, left the stripes, left the scars,
left the blue empty night square there
as some long-lost pinpoint of progress.

I am my own country now,
and here, the shores of my hands
are slowly opening again from the fists of this,
knowing the shapes of new truths—
I am the only homeland I know.
No one can govern my life.
No man owns my body, my choices.
I am free I am free I am free
even if I die
in that freedom.

I am my own country now, an individual revolution.

I threshold my collarbones
to greet first the small tender ones,
the vulnerable green,
the silent lichen and supple mosses,
the sapling sycamore and autumn redbud,
the black-capped chickadee, wood thrush, and squirrels,
the swirling colors of my koi fish rippling outward their dances,
my two year old niece Luca
smiling down a yellow slide into my arms,
my gaggle of teenagers I bring into the forest
leaving poems as breadcrumbs home,
my sweet little black dog frail with age
who wakes me at dawn to remember the sun rises,
my wife, too, defiant with hope, fiery with love
building her new citizens.

We populate ourselves with those
who can hold us and who we can hold,
landlocked together in a country all our own.

We chop firewood together,
two axes splitting hardwood for winter
whatever cold and bitter may come.
We cold-plunge naked into our backyard pond
fresh and freezing again as torrential rains answered drought.
We dig our fingers into cold dark earth
and drop red tulip bulbs into the soil, blanket them up again
with the promise of spring, wrap ourselves too in that promise.

We will stay close to our land, to the trees,
to our small circles of love.

I will stay close to the poets, hold our words as Light.

We are our own country now.

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Link to audio recording.

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Kai Coggin (she/her) is the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Hot Springs, AR, and a recipient of a 2024 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship for her project Sharing Tree Space. She is the author of five collections, most recently Mother of Other Kingdoms (Harbor Editions, 2024). Coggin is a Certified Master Naturalist, a K-12 Teaching Artist in poetry with the Arkansas Arts Council, an Interchange Grant Fellow from the Mid-America Arts Alliance, and host of the longest running consecutive weekly open mic series in the country—Wednesday Night Poetry.

Coggin was awarded the 2023 Don Munro Leadership in the Arts Award for Visionary Service, and the 2021 Governor’s Arts Award for Arts in Education. She was twice named “Best Poet in Arkansas” by the Arkansas Times, and nominated for Arkansas State Poet Laureate and Hot Springs Woman of the Year. Her fierce and tender poetry has been nominated nine times for The Pushcart Prize, and awarded Best of the Net in 2022. Ten of Kai’s poems are going to the moon with the Lunar Codex project, and on earth they have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, Poets(.)org, Prairie Schooner, Best of the Net, Cultural Weekly, SOLSTICE, About Place Journal, Sinister Wisdom, Lavender Review, and elsewhere. Coggin is Editor-at-Large at both SWWIM and Terrain(.)org, Associate Editor at The Rise Up Review, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. She lives with her wife in a peaceful valley, where they tend to wild ones and each other. www.kaicoggin.com