Treatment Resistant Depression
Grass is yellow and sodden. There are memos. I do not receive these. There is a way of doing things that I am not doing. Bowling attracts the wrong crowd. Squirrels are bad actors. When they eat birdseed, they revel in theft. The public is not to be trusted. Candles smell like cologne. They are labelled vanilla. Bowlers bowl with… Read more →
be the moon
The first big love and second big love of my life were both named after the moon. This has always made sense to me because I am the sun: I am hotheaded, I am warm (both figuratively and literally), I am the center of my own universe. This has always made sense to me because in high school, we learned… Read more →
Circular reasoning
I learned your language by its edges first: the crescents of your fingernails, the smooth nook of your earlobes. You practice entangling promises in the kitchen vents, dropping words like dimes into the mouth of a milk jar, no longer hers or mine without inverted light to claim it. Your face along the sidewalk cracks resist the truth of mirrors,… Read more →
The Sky Is Also a Machine
Little engine inside each leaf, the cloud a sharp feather straight to the moon. Each day returns to itself in search of safety. Animal tracks circle the sidewalk. I carry my green panic like a wardrobe stuffed with dirty dishes. I crawl back to bed. Let the animals sign my name with their soft paws.
May Meditation
The pre-summer air has a smell: reminiscent of singed clothes from a basement dryer. If heat has a feel, I cannot sense it today. For now, I am done feeling my mind busy with the truth serum of unadulterated observation removed from the catalyst of change.
Days Shade a Small Room
Where needles test the body’s currents. Without reason many degrees colder. A curtain pulled to barely block— no part hidden now, the holding organ a nest. Closer to bowl, bones curved to carry. Impulse like a lung expanding. Far away a promise of cloud against anything blue. The ocean knocks on a door at the bottom.
Second Coming
After Mahmoud Darwish our names will not dissipate : we will become air your lungs turn you breathless churn you to produce a feral pulp : activate our water spirits whiteness reckoned we create a Final Passage : our future
Waiting Outside the Ketamine Clinic at Overlake Medical Center
Spring is a brave knot of daffodils and one flowering cherry in a parking lot where I watch patients make their way across the pavement in a cold splatter of rain, gait careful as a cup too full, caregiver gentle at the elbow. But you, my son, are like vapor when you appear at the glass doors, black hood drawn… Read more →
Autumn Zuihitsu
The mythology of our autumn minds, scatter-shot and red-leafy and uplifted, we rely on the black roots winding and stretching from our windows that remind us when leaves should shudder, tumble, tell. We rely so much on every single face but ours. So many smatterings of colors. * I care so much for you. You are a sliver of moon/pie,… Read more →