Like water, the brothers uncles cousins now slip through my fingers. And where they fall is someplace dark. I cannot quite see to the bottom of them. I try to peer through all of their existence at my feet, to grasp at understanding, but my gazing comes up dry. To really understand them, the dead …
Continue reading Hide and Seek
Tonight, I take a bath. Because the drain is broken still, a bath is its own labor. When I am done, I have to haul the water from the tub inside a bucket—trip after trip—until the tub sits empty. I have to weigh the cost. Tonight, it is worth it. Tonight, I take a bath …
I try to think back on when I first fell in love with water—fell in love with storms. I think it was, perhaps, the whimsey that my father breathed into the lore—the way he made rain seem like magic. How he never made us come inside once it’d begun. With water, I have a strange …
I feel it there, between my heart and ribs, Along that thin strip of flesh. A crack upon the sternum Words And how they rest there in the shallow scoop of skin A clavicle. Words and how they rest there Fingers how they hover on an iliac Scapulae and how the feathers bleed when they …
Continue reading Unbreak the Son: a poem
This song feels like rain washing away your heartaches. Vibe with it. There is a meditation we do called heart breaths, my therapist and I. In it, I am meant to gather all the love around me in the air, and envision it as a color. All the energy inside my body I see I …
Continue reading Hearing Color
My cousin told me once that when she was trying to quit smoking, she buried her tobacco. She walked all along down the beach until she found a place within the sand and she buried it. If I remember right, she rolled one last cigarette before she nested the loose shreds of leaves into the …
Today, I placed my forehead on the keyboard and typed the letter j a hundred times. With my nose. The tip of it. Something soothing in the motion. I never loved the letter j and yet here I am, a stream of jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjs across the page. I was supposed to water my grandmother’s roses today, …
Continue reading A Haunted House and Dying
At the grocery store this week, a woman dropped a box of blueberries. They went everywhere. She was too old to pick them up, and people up and down the aisles just stopped and stared. I just stopped and stared. Her trembling voice, shouting “Cleanup—I need a cleanup!” Embarrassed. Close to tears. Fucking blueberries. All …
Continue reading Feeling Blue[berries]
The Wild Heart of Life 