Monthly Archives: August 2020

The pallor of your skin—speckled eggshell, loose baby teeth,as white as the lies you’d leave on my lips.Soaked in moonlight, you appeared to mean unreal specter though I bathed delicatelyin your heat, night after night. A strange thingit is, to be desperate and drowning in the ivoryof someone else’s desire. I wanted to paint youwithContinue reading “Polychromasia”

I like to imagine you reading my poetry. It’s almost sadistic, how desperately I wish to witness your pupils nervously flitting from line to line, configuring words into something resembling meaning, occasionally stumbling upon a memory of ours and swallowing hard. I play the reverie over and over in my mind. A blink. A clearingContinue reading “GREAT DANES AND TEA BAGS”

I store every small life I’ve lived inside of me like a nesting doll,layer by layer, each a dreamy variation of the next. Outermost:linen sheets, the warm glow of summer painting my bare back,patchouli and vetiver on my wrists. This is the one I wear now. Crack me open. Peer in. You’ll find a starryContinue reading “Nesting Doll”

That I have learned to accept that good things exist although I know that in your head I am a cyniccursing our old friends and letting go of the wheelforcing fate to pick what comes next. And I knowthat whiplash and fury are the images of me you’ve keptand that you remember the ease ofContinue reading “I Am Writing to Tell You”

because I have seen the cool blue of your mountainsand heard the voices of your children rising to meet them. It almost feels like enough until I let the soles of my feet sink sufficiently into your soiland feel myself become an intruder of a deeper, untold story. Sometimes I swear I can still hearContinue reading “I Will Not Give Up on You, America”

In your last message, you mentioned a brand new record by an artist you’d been getting into recently.  I think you’d really enjoy it, you wrote. You should listen. It’s just a really transitory part of her life.  And so I did. But I didn’t like it.  Maybe that’s just who we are now: twoContinue reading “Did You Feel the Rift?”

You’re tethered to every part of me,  invisible umbilical cord. I can’t get rid of you.  I brush my teeth at noon and you’re there, too— laughing through toothpaste foam and hogging the sink like it’s all yours, only yours. I trudge home under the glow  of our flickering street lights and remember arguing withContinue reading “CLOSER THAN FLESH”

[a poem in two voices] Sunday morning, evergreen forests, sacred scripture. [I wish I had been given the chance to meet you before I did.] The first warm day of spring, tender peaches, ivory linen. [If only I had known you as a small, wandering child.] Crisply folded origami flowers, Christmas Eve, candle wax. [YouContinue reading “I LOVE YOU LIKE”

arewinding roads,proof of survival,scars from won battles,fresh paint on canvas,free tattoos,sudden lightning,evidence of outgrowing,poetic transformation,stories worth telling,the body’s way of healing,of making space for more,the meaning of resilience,unfinished timelines,backyard creeks,cirrus clouds,billowing smoke,shed feathers,scenic routes,flyaway hairs,wear and tear,graffiti murals,delicate boldness,torn veils,the aftermath of motion,rips in the fabric of the universe,a child’s cursive,shooting stars,the constellationsI follow home.

for Andrew Our first month, I wrote thirty poems about him. Eyes— deep sea blue, opalescent, kaleidoscope-like and dangerous. Laugh— orchestral, intoxicating, the kind you’d play forever on a turntable if you could loop it on a vinyl. I wrote them consecutively. On gum wrappers, unused fast food napkins I’d saved for later, the backsContinue reading “Fumbling With the Fabric”