Monthly Archives: September 2020

to the way your clothes smell after a full day:sweat, almond-scented body wash, detergent— to the way you cannot sleep without twitching— to the pale white scar on your left eyebrow fromfalling out of bed as a hyperactive three-year-old— to your middle-child mind— to the way you sing in falsetto to make me laughand theContinue reading “A LOVE LETTER”

I like to go for walks around the manmade pond near my apartment complex and take low-quality pictures of the massive weeping willow that looms over the asphalt bike path. I do this solely for the purpose of curating evidence in my camera roll that I am, in fact, still alive. Sometimes I forget. IContinue reading “Names and Trees and Variations of God”

Certain scents— magnolia, freshly washed linen, dish soap bubbles in the sink— are thieves of peace. My first love’s coconut deodorant, tasteless cafeteria food from the hospice where I watched my grandma shrink from the cancer that killed her, the bedsheets of a boy who just wanted an excuse to wash them. When love fadesContinue reading “FRAGRANT FLASHBACKS”

if I would meet you under the stars in the garden behind that one historical building where we danced to Sinatra and then cried about the unfair likelihood of a future without each other, I wouldn’t even let you finish your sentence. I’d already be there, a bottle of cheap white wine purchased hastily fromContinue reading “Hypothetically, If You Were To Ask Me”

acts of convincing fiction / your beehive heart / sinking into fabric / atoms collapsing and reconfiguring / brooding as you do / the body is a story worth telling / stardust palms and metallic fibers / come to me now / trace your origin / brush the earth from your knees / dear ophelia:

Plants, half-alive, guard my bedroom like soldiers on my apartment windowsill. I have short hair now and wear extra-large sweaters because they’re comfier  than the kind in my actual size and I have given up on giving up my comfort for anyone. An abbreviated list of recent obsessions: a full moon on a cloudless night,Continue reading “A Miniature Portrait of 20”

Well, I’ll tell them, sometimes you wake up and twist your ankle on the way downstairsbefore a very important meeting, and later you find out it is shatteredin four different places, and even though you have big things to doyou must sit very still and wait for them to fuse again. Sometimes you wake upContinue reading “When My Kids Ask Me Why I Write”

I was banking on forever. Carving pumpkins with you the day after Halloween,pulps already rotting, you’d stick your slender fingersinto that cavernous decay and laugh like a serial killer. I secretly loved it, watching your jack-o’-lantern smileflicker through slime-covered hands. Stupid kid, you.Sometimes I loved you so much I wanted to hurt you. I knowContinue reading “To Tell You The Truth”

will always bring back visions of my body, nearly nineteen,  crumpled like an old shirt in the corner of a dorm room  belonging to a boy I thought loved me. Poor girl, if only  I could scoop her up from the cold tile and feed her bowls of her mother’s homemade chicken noodle soup, ifContinue reading “September, In My Head”

Like that one time my friends and I ordered a pepperoni pizza so grotesquely large it couldn’t fit through the apartment door horizontally and how the slices were bigger than two of our heads stacked on top of each other. I have found that there are perks to the apocalypse and sometimes they look likeContinue reading “There Were Good Things, Too”