Category Archives: Poetry

the room becomes a shrinking glass house (we both bleed in these sheets)

you toss your matches into the dry brush of midnightand ask me why the air is turning to smokewhen i hand you a cup of cooling wateryou tell me i am trying to drown youyou turn my softest stillness into a rusted cageand call me a warden for staying near the doori am trying to […]

marginalia

others spill into the river without looking downthey trace no path they simply entera stumble becomes a low sweet soundthe world keeps opening for them like a door with no lock i once let myself be carried toobefore i learned what the current takes i held your hand when you were still learning to walki […]

the lens and the lantern

when you look for the lantern in somebody else’s handsyou spend your whole life chasing shadows in the darkbegging a single person to hold up the skyand calling them the sun while you freeze in the mudyou swear the magic lives only in their lungsand without them the room flattens into salt and dustyou sit […]

living in the wake of other people’s reasons

i am trying to assemble my hands in a dark room full of argumentswatching them stack their clean choices like clear glass on a high shelfthey possess such precise proofs for why they had to bruise mesuch seamless explanations for the hunger that made them take everythingand i am left holding the fractured pieces of […]

tendrils of compassion

we are fragile vessels    passing light between us        hand to hand            heart to heart rejection once a shield    now dissolved into understanding        each gesture of kindness            a quantum entanglement of souls we do not simply give    we become the giving        expanding like cosmic breath            soft and infinite wounded parts of ourselves    recognize wounded parts in others        and in that recognition            healing blooms love is not a transaction    but […]

frosting the oil spill

shaving oil on my shins looks like a slick little river or a sunlit oil slick on a plastic toy boat in a steamy porcelain pond i balance on one foot like a sleepy bird sliding a four blade razor through gold listening to the subtle quiet scritch of steel shearing away yesterday there is […]

litany for two shadows

i stand in the corridor with wet handswatching two connections bend toward each otheri kept their names under my tongue like saltbelieving love could expand without a ceilingi built a small sanctuary out of our freedomonly to watch them step inside without me the shame is a cold needle under the skinwhen i see them […]

the fly that stayed for tea

first a single fly in the kitchenknocking against the window like it wants to tell you somethingbuzzing by the peaches going soft and sweet on the counteryou laugh, swat at it with a rolled up flyersummer coming in through a door someone forgot to close then you find where it startedunder the sink, in the […]

the line moves like a heartbeat / i can’t slow down

bowl in my handsbefore i know what i wanta boy asks me somethingand his mouth is a shapei cannot turn into soundthe noise is a hundred handspressing on my chestsomewhere behind the registera blender screamsand i am already gonealready somewhere smallerthan this room rice or greens he asks again louderlike volume is the sameas being […]

beware of the big butt biting bass

beware of the big butt biting bassdeep in the water it’s felt on your assit nibbles the edges of very old fearsand washes away all the rust of the years once the dark surface pulled down from belowa lungful of shadows a cold undertowso you built up a castle of dry dusty stonesafe on the […]