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 …
Even though I won’t ever see them again, I still carry them. Inside and outside On the lining of my heart And the edges of my brain Beneath my fingernails Or hanging from an eyelash. They saturate my writing and my words Sloping from an s, or cradled in a y. Sometimes, they are even …
Continue reading About the body
I spend nights alone, in a hotel room. Sometimes in a cabin in the mountains. The cabin in the mountains, they’ve done up so that it’s covered in deer prints and wolf prints and bear prints and plaid. Enamel crockery. Indoor hanging vines. Big picture window, so I can stand naked and cry before the …
Continue reading The right amount of sadness
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
An aunt of mine makes quilts, for every generation of the family. When we are young, she shows us ours—the patches for each sibling. I remember being worried that my brother, newly born, did not have a square. Worried he had been forgotten in the weaving all together of a family. I watch the grown …
Continue reading Patchwork Girl
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
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 