Author: ©️K.T. 2025

from the inner city to the outer rural:

On By ©️K.T. 2025In 2-flat, agraria, biographical, bucolia, Crone, crone chronicles, Earth hospice, Home, inner city, limineen, outer rural, planetary hospice, Portage Park, Rainy Lake Miami Meadow, ruralia, Stabilization, transformationLeave a comment

first in a series

new geographies

All movement is thirst.

Hafiz

she moved out of the city of them, into the country of Her Self

in January 2017, i impulsively yet instinctively, instinctually, bid on a house in the country — after viewing one listing on the internet employing the most banal search terms — and never having physically toured the interior of the house; after losing the first bid, and rebidding within minutes to spare, in the second round — as my unfamiliar real estate agent was at the gate at O’Hare about to board a plane for a Caribbean vacation, i won with a numerological bid (against the agent’s advice) and closed escrow on March 30th; then in late July, i abruptly and stunningly — listed my home of 22 years in the city — for-sale-by-owner— without even a for-sale sign and telling only a handful of people — selling it twice, the second time, successfully — also using numerology, in August; then closed sale and left for the country house on September 29th —

nine months time – a human gestation.

Continue reading “from the inner city to the outer rural:” →

venus 𝖗𝖃

On By ©️K.T. 2025In Poem, poet, poetryLeave a comment

and she and i were out of sync
and he and i were out of sync
and the crows and i were out of sync
and he and i were out of sync

and she and i were out of sync

and he and i were out of sync

and we were all,
out of sync

but mostly, i Am out of sync

so i stepped back,
and out,
then forward, and back, yet again,
then circled,
and waited, waded, treaded, floated

it

out

to keep from

sinking

ai | crone collaboration 2.0

On By ©️K.T. 2025In AI, art, Arte Digitora, Assay, liminality, limineen, Ouroboros, Samsaric Ferris WheelLeave a comment

i entered the following directive and multiple variations of that general concept into the photo/art application that i subscribe to:

A carnival at night featuring a Ferris Wheel with a sign reading "Ouroboros" and a roller coaster with a sign reading “Life" - with fortune teller / psychic booth in foreground

ai has trouble with words, specific compositional and artistic directives – although its rogue mashups are sometimes weirdly gorgeous

i’ll need to commission an artist in order to get closer to the carnival scene i’ve experienced in my liminal imagination and that has been living and lodged there for more than a decade

Continue reading “ai | crone collaboration 2.0” →

Hydrangea nostalgia

On By ©️K.T. 2025In flora, from the inner city to outer rural, july, Lajuana Lampkins, nostalgia, PoemLeave a comment
revised for the fourth of july, 2025
voluminous, meandering hydrangea shrub
july 2023

This Hydrangea nostalgia bush was grown from a 2017 autumn cutting from its parent which is, or was, located in the front yard of my brick 2-flat in the northwest side neighborhood of Portage Park in Chicago. One of a half-dozen or so white hydrangeas planted by me in the late 90s, I had nurtured and obsessed over them for nearly 23 years — this one is now the lone survivor in my care at my rural home in Michigan.

lilac cuttings,
rooting hormone solution,
and growing medium,
September 23, 2017
(not even one of these most precious lilac cuttings rooted and survived)
a box of hope.
autumn hydrangea & lilac cuttings,
not ideal for propagation,
but ready for transport and transplant
to Michigan

The genesis of my hydrangea devotion was not Martha Stewart’s ubiquitous “Living” magazine, also of 1990s — though she certainly named, informed, inspired and validated many a hydrangea obsession within those pages — rather, it was the nostalgic ubiquity of enormous white snowball blooms and arresting blue-purple poms on heritage shrubs that I admired, coveted, played and hid among during my childhood summers spent with my maternal grandparents in Murphysboro — a sleepy, rural town in Southern Illinois — where my maternal great, great grandmother, my great grandmother and grandmother were all born.

I was entranced by those plants each summer — yet without the language to name and fully describe them to my mother when I returned back home to the Chicago Housing Authority’s Lathrop Homes aka “the projects” – which was usually, just in the nick of time for back-to-school in late August. Interestingly, I don’t recall ever drawing a picture of hydrangeas or taking a photo of them with my hard-earned Kodak Instamatic pocket camera as a child – even though I frequently used both methods to capture/record my favorite things. //

“Nostalgia Kills”

Nostalgia makes us psychologically pine for a sweeter but largely false time in our lives — a naive, shallow or ignorant time that we prefer to, that we choose to, remember as “innocence” or romanticize, idealize or distort as the “best times of my life” or the “good ol’ days”.

Instead of thoroughly revisiting the entirety of the time, place, people or experience, nostalgia often robs — or kills — the opportunity for true introspection and material dialectics. ///

early July 2023

Nostalgia sounds like the name of the a psychological condition catalyzed by avoiding “dis-ease”

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“[S]he floats like a butterfly …”

On By ©️K.T. 2025In art, art criticism, artists, Black Artists, Black Women, Crone, Lajuana Lampkins, Mother, Muhammad Ali, Narrative, outsider art, Poem, poet, Reverence, street art, true things, women, WomenfolkLeave a comment
Muhammad Ali diptych
marker, paint, glue and chunky gold glitter
on 12”x12” square
gold metallic cardstock

These two gorgeous, requested works by the most gorgeous and extraordinary artist and person Mz. Lajuana Lampkins of Chicago.

You might find her making her art in the late night scene of her favorite spots in the Wicker Park/Bucktown neighborhoods of Chicago — or reach out to her on Instagram at Lajuana.Lampkins1 and peruse her art, her process and her community.

Lajuana Lampkins has had her art exhibited to great praise; she is a prolific and widely collected street artist; and she has edited and published a book of her late son’s essays, poetry and letters: The Collected Works of Prince Akbar AKA Jus Rhymz.

She is also a sister, aunt, friend, poet, community member and activist, writer, rapper, historian, archivist, fashionista, paralegal, social commentarian and modern philosopher — but most proudly, a mother, grandmother and great grandmother

— and to me, she epitomizes the Crone.


Champions aren’t made in the gyms. Champions are made from something they have deep inside them: a desire, a dream, a vision. They have to have last-minute stamina, they have to be a little faster, they have to have the skill and the will. But the will must be stronger than the skill.

Muhammad Ali

Mz. Lampkins works may be exhibited again in autumn 2023 in a community art show that she is hoping to create and develop —-and she aspires to publish her next non-fiction book in the nearer future.

She is also the subject of the forthcoming documentary “My Mother is An Artist” which follows Mz. Lampkins’s journey from 2019, eight years post-release from a 30 year incarceration as a wrongfully prosecuted and convicted young woman and mother —to 2023, as a working, locally-renown and yet-still-struggling artist living in these American systems of modern oppression and exploitation.

Continue reading ““[S]he floats like a butterfly …”” →

creation stories : “a nation is a massacre”

On By ©️K.T. 2025In america, art, Creation Story, Fourth of July, Genocide, Independence, Indigenous Land, Manifest Destiny, nationalism, patriotism, Poem, the homestead actLeave a comment

&

“every american flag is a warning sign”

– Demian DinéYazhi’
Demian DinéYazhi’ (Diné, born 1983)

my ancestors will not let me forget this, 2019 Neon, aluminum, insulated wiring, mechanical components 2019 Eiteljorg Fellow
Museum purchase from the Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship 2019
“every american flag is warning sign”

“This is the way settler-colonial trauma settles into the body of the colonized We unconsciously re-live the genocides and brutalities inflicted against our ancestors

The shame the rape the beatings the enslavement The white bodies with their killing machines and unholy structures of

torture and discipline

The distrust the disease the disgust the deceit the miseducation and

immoral fixations

The flamboyant uniforms

My ancestors will not let me forget this and every american flag is a warning sign

Even the one my grandfather was given as a Code Talker.”

-excerpt, “An Infected Sunrise”

by Demian DinéYazhi’

In addition to a career in visual arts, DinéYazhi' is a spoken word poet, who in the fourth grade, fell in love with writing. Exhibited at the 2019 Honolulu Biennial, my ancestors will not let me forget this, references Diné Yazhi''s childhood hometown of Gallup, New Mexico, which is less than twenty miles from Church Rock, New Mexico. United Nuclear Corporation milled uranium in Church Rock, which borders Navajo reservation trust-lands. In July 1979, its disposal pond for tailings breached its dam, causing at least eleven hundred tons of mill waste to spill into Puerco River. Today, Church Rock is the largest recorded radioactive spill in U.S. history and is an EPA Superfund site.
Eiteljorg Museum museum label

ai | nature | crone collaboration

On By ©️K.T. 2025In AI, art, Arte Agraria, Arte Bucolia, Arte Digitora, Arte Ruralia, photograph, photography, Tree, TreesLeave a comment

the macro-and-microcosmic exterior environment is suffused with art

“tree of knowledge”

local, aged, regal & lone giant oak,
surgically pruned for utility lines
foto 6.27.2023
art application AI generated image
directive input: “woman in profile with afro”
image in process
Continue reading “ai | nature | crone collaboration” →

dream phoenix

On By ©️K.T. 2025In dreams, isis, liminal, liminality, phoenix, Poem, poetry, succubus2 Comments

you think: if I just bury the bitch
one day she may raise up again //

haunt not your nightmares,
but surface in your dreams
and worse,
his

instead, you two
dismember her together
on your walks
at your coffee table
in your marital bed //
until she’s dead

you cremate her in your pristine oven
collect her charred bones,
grind them to ash with your mortar and pestle from Sur La Table
dissolve a spoonful into your wine in secret, and drink it
the rest, you feed to your lilacs //

you think: she’ll never again be whole //

yet, her linger slowly poisons you and your home

and, she waits

like Isis

to collect her relics that you thought you could transmute and possess

her essence migrating into the strands of your wiry, brittle hair

and into the fragrant beautiful blooms and heart-shaped leaves just outside your door, that school children are so tempted to pluck

one night, as you sleep,

she clips and carries them off — clumps and bouquet — in a pouch fashioned from your favorite silk dress — made from the bodies of one thousand worms — to break the curse

while his phallus pulses crimson, like a beacon, erect and dripping with life from his dreams of her

as he sleeps,

she spits in his open, parched mouth
before she soars out

leaves him with an eternal, wet, delicious taste of her

don’t you know,

Continue reading “dream phoenix” →