Marta Luzim’s Writing the Wave: Still I Rise

Stone, rocks and ant hills, I step over and around, climbing, sweating, eating the rawness of the cold air. It is colder than the tundra in my soul, the claws of criticism of my walk on this earth, takes courage and valor which justifies my experience, my journey to surge up against the tsunami of rejection. She feels this blood ache in her heart, this tearing of her guts, and the lying words that she feels intuitively in her body. She’s been told she is cruel, crazy and obscure. That she has to wear tight dresses and spike heels and pretend they don’t hurt and cut off her breath, her lungs, from staying alive. She scrapes off the scabs of all the wounds and allows them to pulsate while the air heals. She is an outcast in a world that wants her to close her legs as she births herself into the world. A pregnant virgin who only wants her own voice to be heard. She is woman, Woman, female, the one who can’t fit her body into a square peg, or tie the rope around her neck so her black nightmare scream can’t be heard. She is playing a song that nobody hears except in their sleep. The ocean’s foam touches the tips of her toes in her sleep, and dead fish covered in tar wash up to the beach. She picks up this being of the sea world and kisses it, cries for it, and then says the Kadish prayer. Lifting its tiny soul into heaven. What am I talking about as I write this? I don’t really know. That is the thing. That I don’t know…it all comes through channels of light that lifts me higher and higher into domains of clouds that are covered with soot and grass. Why does everything have to make sense? Why do we have to find language so can understand the depth of our sorrow and joy? Why not our primal voices? Dance, or roll in mud, or chase a butterfly. Why do we have to know the answers? Why can’t we just stay on this journey without others telling us to turn here, or stay still or just be quiet. You make no sense. What does making sense have to do with living life? Life is a series of I don’t knows, and yes, maybe and then an epiphany. Don’t tell who to be or what to say or how to act. I will wear my outlaw dress down to my vagina and let the whole damn thing hang out, hang out, hang out and expose my deepest heartache and ecstasy to the world. And if one person applauds and says YES…then it is all worth it.

– By Marta J. Luzim, MS

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