Thoughts

Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, As Usual

We’ve had a very rainy few days late this summer. But I can’t deny I love rainy days in the summer, most especially when I can spend some portion of them wandering around the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, which is inevitably almost completely abandoned on such days. This Sunday, I spent a little over two hours there in the rain, at least an hour of which I was barefoot, my toes squishing in the mud, my feet sliding over wet grasses, and my heels holding up the flow of the stream that gurgles down through the lower meadows. Almost as much time was spent sitting quietly around the Japanese pond, with the ripples and bubbles of thousands of rain drops marking its surface, and the intermittent koi leaping from below.

“I hope I have made it clear that the work is about perfection as we are aware of it in our minds but that the paintings are very far from being perfect – completely removed in fact – even as we ourselves are.”
-Agnes Martin, excerpted from “Notes,” in Writings (Cantz, 1992)

By Alexis

Alexis Clements is a writer and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. Her creative work has been published, produced, and screened in venues across the US, Europe, and South America. Her feature-length documentary film, All We’ve Got, premiered in the fall of 2019 in New York City and has since screened around the US and internationally. Her play Unknown also premiered in October 2019 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Other plays of hers have been produced, published, and anthologized across the US and the UK over the past two decades. Her prose writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Guardian, Bitch Magazine, American Theatre, The Brooklyn Rail, and Nature, among others, and she is a regular contributor to Hyperallergic. In addition to her writing and filmmaking, she is currently serving on the Executive Board of CLAGS, the Center for LGBTQ Studies at the City University of New York (CUNY), as a Coordinator at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and a co-founder of Little Rainbows, a queer story time for children and their caretakers.

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