Poetry & Public Speaking inquiries

I offer spoken-word performances, topical speeches on imagination, ecology, and change-making, expert educational presentations, and custom public speaking.

Scroll down to listen to, read, and watch my past poetry, performances, and poetic conversations. Click below to listen to other past podcast and public broadcasting appearances.

The Sights & Sounds

CELEBRATING NATIONAL POETRY MONTH WITH RACHEL ECONOMY AND FRIENDS

A Charis Books 2021 Virtual Event
This free event was recorded and is available to watch online- a crew of amazing poets and performers, please check it out!

WATCH IT HERE

“where the wound is” - written and performed by Rachel Economy, Oakland, 2018

“Pride SF Weekend 2016” - written and recorded by Rachel Economy

“Storyteller Thumbs” - written and recorded by Rachel Economy

“Signals” - written and recorded by Rachel Economy, 2017

The Words On The Page

Summer

I want summer the way that it can be
hot and full of peaches, bright
sun-yellowed kitchens and walks
to nowhere but sitting down on the curb half
way to drink a coffee we shouldn’t 
have gotten but it was clicking with fresh ice, then
dancing madly when the jitters hit in the middle
of the fruit-heavy street. I want
lovers and cinnamon cake, I want
to move towards you when you dance and twine
around the air that you twine around, I want
knot-tying competitions from summer camp
but on the steps of my porch with the smell of
salt in our fingers from the ocean, I want
the ocean, I want
to be hurled belovedly from sea to sand by 
wave after wave, my body inside, I want
to arrive on the beach laughing and
only slightly scraped, to find 
you on a blanket laughing as
you cut open a mango, stand
and move towards me, with
sweet juice dripping from 
your perfect, outstretched hand.

From The Origins of Streams by Rachel Economy, Finishing Line Press 2021

Crevices I & II

I. Orifice 

You are a mouth. Gulp, ginger snare fire, red, blood flank, layers of inner cheek sanctum, stalagmite richness and steam. Tonsils flounder, river gone down, deep deep deep oh. You are a mouth, holy scent and hunger. Huddling, hunkering down. Holds me, whether I want or no, reaches out and grabs with that insidious, sweet heavy-sweat tongue. Did you floss today? Did you examine the crud in between the pearls? All the shit and stagnance we’ve collected here? You are a mouth. You talk a good game. You reel, you swagger and sweet talk and mean talk me in, you are a uvula circus. You pass mirrors before my eyeteeth. Our canines clash, how could you? Hammer, hammer throat, you are always hitting me over the head with horrible cages or unexpected bread. You are too sharp and too sweet and I can trust neither. On early mornings which are really late nights, I try to walk under the dark of the new moon and curse your name. You are the cave, you are the teeth, you are the sugar bumps and the salt on my burning tongue. 

II. Cave

There’s something else running. Other side of the peaches. I can almost see, far from here, just on the other side of the peaches. See it? About the shape of a bobcat. Like that one time on the deck, the hidden deck in the woods, where we lay impatient, waiting for the stars to go up so we could see just enough to spelunk down into each others voiceboxes. Throat cave jumping, looking for the origins of streams. That one time on the hidden platform and fir when you pulled up your shirt and showed me the door in your breastbone. I was distracted for a moment by the sight of your nipples but then I saw there was a sudden archway, an opening there between. And I leaned forward slow slow. And I looked through the doorway in your chest. And what looked out at me, like it might spring. Oh. Oh what looked out, was huge and feline and wild, arrogant and ruff-maned and gold. Oh what a mountain of a thing, not lion but full of bladed lips, oh g_d what terrible beauty you keep in there, beating like it’s just for the sake of your blood, like it couldn’t, if it wanted, just up and devour me whole.

Forthcoming in “Wild Gods",” an anthology from New Rivers Press.

A Home for the Seeds

 
It was as the floods were coming in and the steam burning through the windows that we gripped our spades in our teeth and climbed into the mouth of the mountain to build secret homes for the seeds.

We did not know each other, or we thought we did not. 

We had not been born in the same places. We had never spoken words the others recognized. In the flood, trying to get out of the city, we had found ourselves in a tangle of unmatched tongues and car tires spinning wretched against the finally wet, so wet, too wet soil. Cacophony. An unwieldy din.

But there was a language we held common, a thing that drove us madly into the hills soaking and coughing, our pockets full of sunflowers and fava beans. Call it the language of fertility. The rhetoric of rot. Of reimagining. Call it insanity. Call it a failure to bite down and trudge the proper path and save the proper thing. Call it disease or dis-ease or dissonance or dismantling, all.

Whatever name, we had it. We were, first and foremost, the ones who got out, some privilege and a dash of chance. And we were also ones who knew that the story of what-to-do-in-case-of-disaster was a made thing, a stitched thing, an invisible law book, something written by five-fingered-hands in one very specific language for one very specific purpose. That the disaster itself was a story too, a real thing, yes, and a real thing that had been made, a written thing. And we were the ones who knew story could, just as truly, be torn up, dug up, re-stitched, by hands, by briars, by sharks’ teeth snagging. We were the imaginers. The anxious creators, for whom no law was obvious and no story a static end. We had no set idea of how precisely to respond to a flood. We were not wed to any particular conversation with G_d about the monogamous needs of animals on large boats that wait out storms. Neither were we looking to save the microwaves.

And we were the ones who had no children. Or whose children had already gone. To the waters, to the white and hungry guns, to the longing. We were the ones who had no seeds.

So we found some. In the backs of our closets, in the corner stores standing ankle-deep in water, in the jars on the tilting kitchen shelves. And we gripped our spades in our teeth, and we looked sideways as the streets began to buckle and fold into foothills, and we saw each other limping, and rolling, and running, pockets spilling over with hard-shelled children, with descendants of future trees, and we reached out as we ran, and we gripped each other’s hands in our hands.

It was the queerest thing, like a bird in love with a sturgeon, a family of defectors, arms empty of objects and pockets emptied into soil above the water line, saving no wealth or infrastructure, saving the wrong things. A re-kindling, a re-kinning, a reckoning. 

All this dying, it has been beyond swallowing. 

All those bodies, they came home to the soil. And so we gave them children. Hard-shelled and root-bound. It was a kind of making love to the dead. We slipped seeds into their pockets. Their bodies fertile, already almost soil, meeting the beans, the walnuts, the pits we plunged into the wet ground. The rhetoric of rot. The true nature of kinship: all things becoming other things. Hidden in the mountain, learning each others’ languages, guarding, gardening, waiting for the first roots, those parts of the plants called “radical,” to unfurl their faces into the soil.

published in Dark Matter Women Witnessing and Dark Mountain

A Country Called Desire
essay / prose-poem excerpt

~
wet

Coyote calls and the rains come. They come inside her throat as a hacking howl, cough of winter crashes in. They come to the river and it becomes a cylinder of force and forgetting, where all those gold constellations of hope for a little cash wash into the canyon. Coyote doesn’t like stove fire, it burns strong and sharp, overdries her mouth. She dreams and I dream: curled into a ball or a child, we, an animal in a quilt. In the dream, the drythroat belies pain, unheard or unhinged. You come. At the door you are not strong and sharp as usual. You wear a red-dun shirt. You are a stoked warmth, an ember that will keep relighting, the tended that too can tend. I reach for you, coyote still curled inside my coughing chest, and you walk gentle to the bed and lay your length along the ridgeline of my spine. Coyote croons and whimpers, breathes again, knowing the gentleness is not truly you but her lungs clear for it and so she does not care.

Coyote wakes me up with rough wet noises in my lungs. Bronchial requiem, a cacophony of cracking and phlegm. In the wet grey morning, her teeth glint with rain. So last week you built a fire to call me home when I was stuck slip-fast in the storm, sliding off of mountains. The tenderness of this fact cracks open in me like a sweet nut but doesn’t stay. What good does it do to light something ablaze and leave it untended, dying down? Summer flamed us corn-yellow high. Now in rain we are a nothing, fizzle, you walk my face like you walk over wet leaves and smile. Coyote’s teeth go un-whetted, lately, she is looking for something rampant and overrun to try them out on.  Your calves collecting acorns look particularly firm

~

Full essay published in Animal: A Beast Of A Literary Magazine