wind raw as a newborn’s wet cry pierces my skin, an icy breath that pools between my vertebrae, slinks into my cells

I was introduced to creative writing by my mother as a kid. She is a fan of poetry and as soon as I learned to read and write she taught me to pen my own pieces…

wiping throat to ear // I was identifying things – father, fog, / the swan – by the act of negating

My mother and I scrape edges / of a flayed pomegranate, searching / for its stars

Each of us has our own / approach to lay the dead’s right / distal phalanges into the mass / graves some call our mausoleum

There is an image of a snake up on the screen. / It is consuming a four-legged creature

He lives / in the rhythm / 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and…

We spent years alone / selecting the correct glassware.

As if it holds something contagious, / the room is sealed with tape, and Dad gives me / a mask.

burn the pink petals within the / clouds as paws made of wood / and velvet tongues lick / whiskers on my face

i play you like a prayer; / sparse cries thrown / in eclipsed desires

I don’t remember if it was something that happened to me / Or just everything happening all around me 

Now extinct, the Susquehannock were a river people of unclear origin. They were said to have told European settlers that they came from a river far to the east…

I took a bite of the sun once / let it collapse inside // a celestial unbecoming: 

Under the Uhaul Ramp / Jaya had driven her car, and suffered a massive concussion

mold and softness / green, pliable like becoming / something else, like / like the / juice collecting under this tree

You kiss the woman with her head all cratered in / don’t worry, she says, I’m waning but catch me next week 

Life flows like water along fiction rendered into fact

Once upon a time, a lady cardinal found lodged in the fresh spring grass, a torn crumpled paper bit, the right bit to cornerstone a snug spring nest.

i printed my lover’s eyebrows / on paper inserts that accompany / things that keep other things / from dying