“For a moment, I expected the impossible. And then it happened.” Where are you? Wild winds whipping up against a desolate landscape. Cold skies and a raging heart. You have been uprooted. Torn from the comfort of the ordinary, you have been exposed. But do not go blind, little dove. Look around you. The …
There are still things inside the world to bring astonishment. The first sip from a cup of coffee in the morning, while you watch the dayglow filter through the window. The way that someone asks how are you and they really mean it. The eggs that I collect, each morning, from my chickens. The weight …
The way the calls come late at night, and the way that you don’t sleep. Lie staring at the ceiling; know that you must leave town in the morning. The way you need to buy an apple pie for the drive. Let it sit upon your lap the whole way home. You don’t even like …
You want to rip your hair out, over and over again. You want to tear at it until your mind grows quiet with exhaustion. Until your scalp, with a suddenness now feeling cold and empty, grows tired. You want to cry them back to life, as if your tears have hidden power in their flowing. …
Continue reading Boys don’t cry
I remember the back of my uncle’s head. The smell of the cigarette he smokes, wafting through the window. His red neck in the driver’s seat my knees brushed up against the back. Going somewhere, as a family. I am starting to make promises to God and placing strange things that I find upon the …
It feels strange, to wake up in a world without them. A sudden stark realization that they are, simply put, no longer there. And yet, we transition. This is the work of the mourners—to ease themselves back into life. The men continue on, their emotions dragging them so deeply that they touch the bottom. The …
Continue reading Water Weavers
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
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 …
The Wild Heart of Life 