In the hush between midnight’s breath and dawn’s soft sigh is that empty, trembling moment when the world forgets its noise and leaves hearts to thud alone in the dark. I breathe your name here, quietly, as though the letters might shatter glass if spoken too loud. Everywhere, I carry you: you are the skin…
in praise of my destroyer
to my palimpsest life – know that I take you with me everywhere. you are the skin beneath my fingertips, the song on the wind on its way to me. like a box of matches you, my muse, lies in wait for the fire that will come. my muse, you are the singe upon the tongue,…
Shy girl, you are the one that I want
Hiding where only the shy can find me. What shy eyes say that words can’t. Those are the words she longs for. Words like “stay”. Words like “yes, I do.” Words that mean, “You’re beautiful”, without ever needing to say so. Those words. Words that hide in a cup of peppermint tea, a glass of…
Your body over mine nullifies all things.
Helen, I miss you with the intensity of all things blinding and comforting, searing and hypnotic at once and I impatiently await your return. Will you take me within you again? Will you allow me the retreat of your arms? Will you allow me room in the apartments of your heart where you treasure all…
Absence is a living thing
I spoke to somebody about you today. I said your name out loud after months. Those letters in my mouth… and my tongue slipped and sought greedily at the familiar shapes. Betrayed by my own mouth, my own tongue a traitor. And that set of sounds which make your name reminded me of what it…
You are my city of joy
I write this on a Friday night and my mind tells me she will be beautiful. Beauty that so disconcerted me I had to look away. She will be among people. They will look at her and want to be her. They will look at her and adore her. They will look at her when…
Please read Orbital
“One day in the next five hundred billion years, while the probes complete one full circuit of the Milky Way, maybe they’ll stumble upon intelligent life. In forty thousand years or so, when the two probes sail close enough to a planetary system, maybe just maybe one of these plants will be home to some…
Choke
Too much love and too much pain – both are corrosive. Rust engulfs my bones. Like a tuberculosis, it runs its clammy hands over my shoulders and ribs, greedy fingers reaching for the things that keep me alive. Liver, kidneys, lungs, heart, you. And now, the same things I am willing to die. Please die. Just…
“What cannot be said will be wept”
Mama, you went like a hurricane. Sudden and swept off your feet. Died the way you wanted – far from supine and dumb on a bed wasting away. Mama, you were a blaze of lightning. You couldn’t be ignored. Rooms lit up when you entered. And when you left for the last time, you took…
Book Review: Liars by Sarah Manguso
This book reads so convincingly like an autobiography but surprisingly, it’s not. It is a story of a woman, an artist married to a gaslighting emotionally abusive/unavailable man. It’s a trope we are all familiar with but Sara Manguso manages very successfully to entice, incite, and provoke reactions that you felt you were well above…
between desire and disaster 