For My Friend On His Birthday A decade later, I am still making your scrapbook illustrated by high school memories and the stories you tell me. I flip through, watch you turn from a smoking rocket schoolboy to a buzzed head and brittle armor to a corduroy garden feminist to a color-outside-the-lines academic to international […]

The Phoenix Lab The tried electrodes, but they were incinerated along with the feathers. The MRI and x-ray attempts proved useless as well – if the bird wasn’t moving, it was starting to smoke, and had to be removed. They swabbed and poked in between combustions – a tricky task, since there was no rhythm […]

Gaia The earth feels sad. It has been hard to see her shape-shifting goddesses go, watch the solitary, able-bodied, jealous gods take their place in the hearts of her children. Look at them, so determined to prove themselves independent, unrelated, even, to her. The Greek myths rewritten to describe gods being born out of Zeus’ […]

New Father The wonder in his face is hard to get used to. He was never an expressive man, his favorite jokes marked only by a curt rush of air through his nostrils, above lips pressed formally together, never loose enough for a grin to escape. Now, the word delight is fully realized in how […]

“Time for you to go out to the places you will be from” – “Closing Time” by Semisonic (written by Dan Wilson about the birth of his daughter.) The drive home from the hospital is a shared experience of new parents, The abrupt re-entrance into the churning, unpredictable world After days of soft whiteness, scheduled […]

Birthplaces Shame was at your big sister’s 7th birthday party, When the colors and lights and noise turned you wild, high, And when the giant pink expanse of cake appeared before her, Dotted with the red melting candles, Your breath exploded out of your lips And swept out the flames, Her eyes open before the […]

The Ocean “And the ones who can know you so well Are the ones that can swallow you whole.” – Dar Williams There is a nostalgia bigger than the sky itself when I step towards the surf, an impossible longing pushing me forward, cuffs pants shirt soaked, each wave a visual echo, a sweeping gesture […]

In Between Lives Heaven is the basement of a friend’s house down the street and everybody is their invincible and arguably most attractive early-20’s self, and there are vaguely exotic-looking tapestries on the walls with flower and water patterns you just stand and look at in between conversations. You are in the strangest kind of […]

Etiquette Last week, a mother told me, the only people present at her daughter’s birth were her husband and her midwife. “I didn’t want my mother or anyone there, because… all the sounds you make…” She smiled and looked away, looking embarrassed. The mysterious, primal memory looked strangely anachronistic at the kitchen table with red […]

Love Letter to Earth Little dear one sweet whirl of atoms most precious mystery unchain yourself from the sorrow they have woven into you the violence, the erratic shifts and movements of your tiniest parts there is no peace but this flow of unknown current remember always everything is traumatic to a water droplet step […]