She wraps the word up in French,
like a foreign language leaves her
one step removed
from the vulnerable truth-
she has a love in her handsRead More »
jumping
I like to jump.
Jump is the good thing for me.Read More »
The Calm Before the Storm
It was the calm before the storm
that stole my breath
with its icy silence.
In those everlasting seconds,
instead of his raging words’ predictable humming,
the still left you wondering what would be coming.
His face wouldn’t wear its usual anger, but a death-like grief,
as though he knew what monster would soon be unleashed.
‘Don’t hold it in!’ I was dying to cry to him.
‘That makes its bursting that much more violent!’
I did what I could- I anticipated, and how I hated
the calm before the storm.
Before the calm, you could see the storm clouds brewing,
but the churn of the sky- it was so close to soothingRead More »
On Being an Ideas Person
After a month of nearly falling off the bottom of the earth,
Ma placed me in my bed, where I woke imagining
feeling wide-eyed, refreshed, wondrous of where I was-
jumping off the bed, landing in flexible splat as impossible
as the dogs I used to try to draw were ugly.
I didn’t really know how dogs’ heads or human bodies worked,
but I wanted a Lisa Frank retriever and my butt to be in the air,Read More »
Vice
You don’t know the grip of vice until it’s a noose around your heart.
Trust me- if it went around the neck,
I wouldn’t have made it this far.
…I’d have made it nowhere!
It crunches like the tiger’s jaws
that you never see-
you simply die!
Very few lightning bolts can get the sound right-Read More »
The Tag-Along
The thing about having your house burn down
in the 2K’s as a teenager
is you totally lack control. I
know; I can tell.
Because I’ve tried to find clothes
that were cute, clean, and matching,
and warm preferably,
in time to escape the fire
that’s interrupted my shower
with brisk November air.
Yes, the thing about having your house burn downRead More »
Gift (To All the Ones I’ve Left Behind)
You are in my heart, annoyingly-
a shadow,
a remnant,
a ghost I cannot truly grasp,
a crevice nothing else will fit inside.
So I write poetryRead More »
Writer’s Block
Giving Doctors “The Talk”
It is the trauma that teaches me to warn of my threshold of pain,
high as the pilot’s realm where the air is clear,
the sky is above, and the ground is clouds beneath your feet.
Threshold of pain is the title, but the real name is mask,
strong as my steel iron soul; They will both break as one.
It is the shards of my very self that I keep cutting my foot onRead More »
Same Old
He’s still got the same humour. He’s just lost his sense of it. He
tells the same jokes a fraction of the time.
He was divided from the light for so long
that it all seems heavy.
So much for his diaphragm to lift was that laugh.
He’s on the same trajectory, but he’s further along,
and every little stepRead More »
Alphabet Ravine 