Roots VIII — It is your roots that astonish me, the places underground that I can’t see. How your shoots press down darkly where worms glide like fish. I can’t see the mystery, the life that is brewing. …

At the Center — My circles, I am circling back and back, back to the place of fire. But I can’t get to it; you must help me. Your cool soft hands once told me stories of the fire, guiding gently, gilded in peonies, scented like gold. How did you know the secrets before anyone…

Poetry — Where did beauty go? I cannot write about silkened blades of flickering grass; it’s all elusive, shimmering way over there in a cloud of heat, miles down the curled lip of highway that I am traveling on. I didn’t make this choice. I try to choose beauty, I do, but…

*Trigger warning: Themes of family dysfunction, abuse, abandonment, and depression* — The house, it’s a black-and-white prison, trying to hold the girl in with its haunting, its ghosts, its fractured windows; daylight is promised, but it never comes. It never comes, so the girl jumps out the window, defying the odds, she falls heavily into the bushes below. …

A Prose Poem — I am the dank, like cracks in sidewalks after it rains, like an ancient root cellar still fetid from rotting vegetables. The spiders there are kissing; you don’t know this, but they are. They are kissing me back into existence. Now I am walking along your shelled beach. It is…

*Trigger warning: Themes of childhood trauma* I am in the back seat of your car, windows rolled down, air streaming like hot liquid onto my face. We pass cornfields, so many, they punctuate my mind, rows of swooshing leaves, rows of guardians too soon passed. I am an avid reader…

Speaking the Language of Love — I knew I had to write about you; my words are in the air like your petals, drifting down, each one a burning star, a shadowed moon — whose moon? Whose star are you releasing into the wind? Has it had time? …