Asking by Lasell Jaretzki Bartlett
My favorite letter, you asked? That’s easy. It’s Y.
Because Y stands for you and youth, for yearning and yielding.
With best friends and pajama parties, Y is bubbly, it’s silly.
With mothers and lovers and down-filled bedcovers, it’s yummy with chummy, with comfy, with cozy.
It’s ghastly and ghostly when someone is dying, becoming untethered from the Y of immortality.
Y bares itself boldly with every very, every many, every always.
Although there is no Y in no, not, never, it comes with each and every yes.
Now I look deeper, and find Y waiting, at the start of each annoying inquiry.
Why is the sky blue, I asked.
Why must we put the mayo in the fridge?
Why did you schedule my tonsil surgery for the day Peter Pan first aired on TV?
Why did you sell Thunder, our Labrador retriever? I thought he was mine.
Why did you start loving Jim when you and Dad had vowed to live as husband and wife, happily ever after?
Now you ask, why Y?
Because my Y is for you, now quirky and crinkly.
And for me.
Despite injury and uncertainty, I am sticky with loyalty.
Artist’s Statement
I am fascinated by the rawness of our mammalian experiences. I write to draw myself out of dreamy shock, making sense of what’s hiding within, cuddling with the intolerable. And maybe soften the sorrows of others through sharing.
Lasell Jaretzki Bartlett explores the embodied edges between living and dying as horsewoman, author, and somatic therapist. She is dedicated to accompanying people as they befriend the internalized landscapes of their relationships. Familiar with death and near death, she coexists with grief and hope, embracing moments of connection amidst the messiness of life.
Her writings have been published in The Natural Horse Magazine, Mark Rashid’s A Journey To Softness, What She Wrote: An Anthology of Women’s Voices, MicroLit Almanac, and We Had To Be: An Anthology by Breast Cancer Survivors, Previvors, Thrivers, & their Families. She’s completed her memoir about horses and therapeutic riding.
Lasell lives on a small farm in rural Virginia with two horses, seven sheep, three donkeys, eight goats, forty-one guineas, two cats, three dogs, and her bestest ever human friend.