Old Wish
Give me yourself in fragments like I imagine hiccups would if they could love and talk sweetly. Completeness circa incomplete things, my mother, and the grass too far from the sprinkler. Give me yourself in broken bits. Fragment as in okay. As in clouds broken off from the source— venturing off to burst on their […]
Memory Like an Echo
I want you to feel better: the malleability of memory making grief so perplexing, an utterly strange pause— how is mourning possible when memory is contrived from past plus desire? I am missing being sure, or what it felt like to weep and know exactly why. Exactly where? Maybe memory has its own body, […]
Summer Ephemera
I didn’t think I would miss it. The way the sky crumples in the summer leaving the hawks and butterflies sprawling for their bedrooms. The lovely taken out of heat, the sky one big muscle, cramping and cramping until we feed it everyone we know who is remarkable— the dandelions, my father, new history. It’s […]
crying in the thompson memorial library basement
learning to let go feels like crying in the library plump, ripe, drops run down my face competing to see who can fall on my paper the fastest; I am lost in the race like a millipede racing against bunnies unmoored, like a captain forced to let go of the wheel or sudden […]
Dull Stars
evening shadows burn, fading to cinder or ash when night comes; those that remain, they are stars, dying too; the pinpricks of dull light so numerous: shadows of the night of the mind.
rain / 20
i wake up 20 feeling like my insides are being stapled shut not sewn—i know the difference this time feels rougher, faster and with less precision running out of time or my intestines will fall out careful stitching versus quicker stapling my stomach has not been cared for in some time but i am […]
A Hospital Neighbor
My dad calls the woman in the room across the way Nancy Reagan. He says that’s who she looks like, but I don’t know. My bed doesn’t face her way. I can only imagine her. I see her window reflected onto mine. Someone has hung three brightly colored pictures: lilies, a butterfly, what looks like […]
When I Dream, I Visit the Ghosts of My Ancestors
I visit the ghosts of all the women who were deemed mad before me. Tonight, I am awake in a field in Arkansas, breathing in the heavy air of late summer. Daylilies and patches of crabgrass are growing at the rims of my ankles. They are dancing the jitterbug with one another, smiling […]
A Year Without Denial
I. I look up to the sun and see the sun. I have decided to stop wishing for the world to be more than it is. I traveled across the continent to take a pilgrimage, to walk over the mountains in my bare feet. I had hoped that it would teach me something about divinity. […]
A Day Without Definition
Rain poured out over the glen— as mist engulfed the green landscape, I wondered what language the land thinks in. Wild rivers, cradled valleys, aching hillsides— what are they thinking as they see us here? Does the earth have a word for the rain? Maybe I am too anthropocentric, maybe the land has […]
