To the Mother Who Kept Her Headphones On While Her Daughter Played the Keyboard and Sang Me Songs She Made Up You are watching Netflix in the basementWhile Halley’s comet punctures the sky.You are more present somehowafter you get up and leave for the cafeteriaafter a few minutes, tossing a smile at me,grateful that your […]

Reasons She is Crying Pt 2 Words like gentle. Conversations about peoplethat are so busy tryingto feed their own needsthey cannot see anyone else’s;the moment he says,“it’s like the opposite of you.” A rose on the Valentine’s dayafter her breakup. Moments that flutter out of earshotlike a pause between words,ordinary and honest,the most beautiful combinationof […]

Winter in the New City She writes about a citythe way she wants to write about the boy.She writes “heart” so many timesits ache is implicitin her descriptions of the brutalityof East Coast winter,the skyline drawn crookedby a shaky hand. He moved a week after she got thereto the opposite coast.She writes exclamation points,questions marks,about […]

Kindergarten Lesson Plan You do not have to have a handmade heartto put on every desk in February.You do not have to subject yourselfto something less than emptywhen you look on your desk to finda single box of chalky fake writing heartsor nothing at all. You do not have to invite thirty peopleinto your small […]

Hiding Places The fingers of the fir treeI named Thomasout in the backyard. A table in the cornerwith a beer and an open tabwatching everyone watchthe people singing in the bright lights. The closet in the laundry roomsmelling my mother’s dresseslistening to footsteps thunder ondown the hallway. A screen showing mesomeone else’s story,as if it […]

Ways that Falling in Love Makes You More Creative With Language They challenge youthe way salt water challenges open sores. You work through itthe way a father works through the one weekendhis children are visiting. They are differentthe way life after a lobotomy is different. You learn independencethe way the tiny pink shoe on the sidewalkis […]

Why She is Crying When she looks at himshe sees a bright red woundhe does not seem to notice he winceswhenever he speaks he clings to her so tightly that she wonders if she made itdeeperevery time she breathed she cannot breathewithout feeling guilty she is alonewith a wailing childhe cannot see her armsare so […]

Thoughts on Silence 1. I remember reading that once you go from observing a conversation to participating in it,half of it is lost to you. The sound of your own voice ripples your vision, warps the picturebefore you. Your thoughts thicken like concrete. Certainty seduces you. You begin to forget how much you did not […]

Reasons He Thinks She is Crying She was having a nightmarebefore he woke her. She is too attached to the little boy who is sick.She wants him to be ok.She is tired. She feels too much.She thinks too much aboutwhat she is feeling.She went to a poetry reading.She still reads her ex’s blog.She looks for […]

The Unnamed I wonder if she is jealous of widows,who have a wordthat can describe the shade of lossthey have been stained. I wonder if she stands in his doorwaytrying to read it in the bars of his crib,the neatly folded shirtshe would soon outgrow, the windows fullof dusty velvet light.It is not morningbut the […]