Make a scene when you are young
and you are already good at making scenes.
I have been making scenes since I was seven.
My mother's Merit Ultra Light 100s on the deck,
early spring sun going down,
my sneakers and my fingers making sure.
She was mad about the drive.
I was mad about everything else.
We did not discuss the difference.
I picked tobacco from under my nails.
She breathed through it.
I was waiting for her to notice.
She didn't.
I intend to die making a scene.
I intend to be lowered into the earth mid-sentence,
comma still pending,
everyone waiting,
mouths slightly open,
for the rest of it.
There is no rest of it.
That was the scene.
I hope you were watching.
Apr 14
Apr 14, 2026 at 4:00 AM UTC
I haven’t spilled my guts on the sidewalk
or keyed poems into mirrors.
no one asks what I’m learning anymore,
which is good, because I would lie.
(newborn horse hooves, the ocean's doldrums,
scratched cd liner notes, New York City housing project gardens,
Taylor Swift, punctuation, how to hold a pen,
the starlings that come to my windowsill and leave
without telling me anything, how to wait
without being chosen.
this is what I'm learning.
nobody asked. I wouldn’t know how to explain
my new eyes.
my militia-mouth.
even if they did.)
winter drags and I'm breaking in boots again.
I’m getting closer to a window
and I might be smiling.
Apr 10
Apr 10, 2026 at 4:50 AM UTC
I Have Been Issued A Body And I Have Several Complaints
I have been issued a body and she is a catastrophe
in the most gorgeous sense of that word
she runs hot she runs loud she runs into furniture
in the dark and then stands there in the dark
holding her shin saying
okay okay okay
like she can bargain with the coffee table
like the coffee table has a complaints department
like anything in this life has a complaints department
I have looked
there isn’t one
nobody told me it would feel like this
I don’t think I am handling this well
I have filed the forms in my spleen
which is already backed up
which is operating at significant capacity
which is mostly just
a filing cabinet for feelings
that arrived without return addresses
and I did not know where else to put them.
My nervous system is a telephone switchboard
operated by a very small woman
who has been awake since 1997
and is doing her absolute best
but cannot stop routing everything
through the grief department
the grief department
which is just
a room
with a window
and no curtains
and the light comes in
at every angle
all the time
and the woman in there
has stopped asking
for curtains
I don’t think this is fixable
I have a ribcage that keeps the receipts
for every time I said
I am fine, I am good, I am doing really well actually
and the receipts are
very long
and the font is very small
and they curl off the counter
like ticker tape
at a parade for something
nobody was supposed to survive
I have a mouth that opens
to say one thing
and produces
an entirely different thing
at a volume that surprises everyone
including me
and I am always in there
somewhere
trying to say
the right thing
at the right time
with the right face on
but the mouth has its own
agenda
the mouth is a union worker
the mouth has filed its own grievances
the mouth went to a meeting
and decided independently
to say the truest thing
at the absolute worst moment
and then just
stand there
glowing
proud of itself
absolutely ruinous
completely correct.
My kneecaps are the most optimistic
part of me
they keep proposing
that we kneel
for things
that do not deserve
a kneeling
they keep bending toward
every beautiful disaster
like a plant toward
bad weather
like they think the bad weather
is the sun
like they were not there
the last time
like they never got the memo
that we are not doing that anymore
we are not kneeling
we are standing
upright
feet flat
chin up
both eyes open
except sometimes
in October
when the light does that thing
it does in October
and the kneecaps
get involved again
before I can stop them
and I am down there
in the gold of it
in the specific ache of it
holding my own ribcage
like a thing I caught
and cannot keep
and cannot
put down.
And it is embarrassing
and it is involuntary
and it is mine
whether or not I agree to it
the whole disastrous
receipts-in-the-spleen
mouth-with-an-agenda
optimistic-kneecap
thin-skinned
loud-voiced
hot-running
coffee-table-finding
mine.
Apr 4
Apr 4, 2026 at 3:21 AM UTC
There is a quality of light in late October
that the body recognizes
before the mind does,
a thinning, a specific gold
that falls across linoleum
and window ledges
and the backs of hands
held still for a moment
over a sink,
and something ancient in the sternum
stirs,
the way a dog lifts its head
in the direction of a sound
no human caught,
the way a wound knows weather.
I have stood in that light
a hundred Octobers
and felt the same vast ache
move through me
like a ship through fog,
dragging a sound behind it
that my body mistook for memory,
unhurried, enormous,
unconcerned
with whether I am ready
or finished
or pretending to be.
I have rehearsed forgetting this.
The Greeks had a word for it.
Several, probably.
They were always naming the unnameable,
pressing syllables against the dark
like a hand against a wound.
They believed naming something
made it smaller.
I suspect it did not help.
I don't have their word.
I have the light.
I have the sternum.
I have the standing at the sink,
holding the last of the day
like a mouth holding water
it won’t swallow.
I have, also, my phone,
which I picked up
in the middle of all that vastness
because your name came up
as a Suggested Contact
in my Venmo app,
which means the algorithm
knows I owe you something,
or you owe me something,
or we owe each other
a reckoning
and
it’s trying to process it
as a transaction,
which means even now
we are being calculated
into something that can be settled,
flattened
into a number
I could press my thumb against
and make disappear.
Seven dollars.
Suggested.
For what.
I stood in the October light
with the Greeks and my sternum
and the ancient ache
and a push notification
that said
you two have history,
as if that were the smallest part of it.
I remember it differently
depending on who I need to be,
I edited it
until I could live with it,
And yes.
I had almost
let the fog take it,
which is the closest
I’ve come to calling it peace.
Apr 4
Apr 4, 2026 at 3:02 AM UTC
First read:
soulmates.
Second read:
weather.
Back then the shouting sounded like fire.
Now it sounds like wind
moving through a house
that never learned to close.
Somewhere in the book she says
I am Heathcliff.
People call that romance.
Listen again.
It isn’t love.
It’s recognition
with the lights off.
Two storms
standing very still
realizing
the sky
is coming
from inside the room.
Mar 14
Mar 14, 2026 at 6:59 AM UTC
I kept praying to a god I was older than.
I couldn’t tell if I was lonely
or just in a poem again.
And still I was kneeling to something
that never knelt back.
God sent the dog.
Or maybe He was the dog.
I haven’t decided which makes more sense.
Both feel like the universe testing
how much of me it meant to take.
Everyone says I am lucky.
No one says
what for.
I guess the bar for luck is
outliving a moment
that never unclenched.
Some nights the girl who didn’t survive
sits at the edge of my bed
asking if I remember the eyes,
the silence,
the moment the world chose me
and I didn’t choose back.
She wants to know why I keep pretending
that we didn’t switch places.
There is a version of this story
where I die.
Everyone bitten carries that version.
I lived.
The dog didn’t.
Some days survival tastes like theft.
Some nights the scar glows red
like a blood moon,
like memory is a tide
I never learned to swim,
just doggy-paddle and tread-dread
through looping summers and scar tissue,
and the water still rises
even when I don’t.
Trauma is a trapdoor disguised as a second.
One moment you are bending down.
The next you are breathing
around a memory
with its jaw still locked.
Sudden light looks too much like teeth
learning my name,
and my skin tightens
like it remembers being held
by something holy and hungry.
People call it healing
only because they stopped looking.
But me and the dog know
it is a debt.
Every night I pay it
by touching the quiet,
by choosing myself again
to stay alive
in the house the fear built
with nothing but my shaking hands
and the leash
I brought
to a knife fight.
Nov 25, 2025
Nov 25, 2025 at 10:36 AM UTC
They said I drowned,
but the truth is softer:
I laid myself down like an offering.
I spit river into their open mouths.
I bit the lilies in half.
Silk turned cathedral.
I let my dress balloon with river light.
The earth had nowhere else for me.
If you pressed your ear to the surface,
you would have heard me humming.
They didn’t write that part.
When they pulled me out,
I still had violets in my teeth.
I still had the nerve to look alive.
If ruin was the crown they gave me,
I wore it dripping.
I wore it bright.
You think you know the story:
girl, river, grief.
But the water was warm that day.
The sky was a soft ache.
I was tired of carrying everyone else’s ending.
So I wrote my own.
Not drowned.
Not tragic.
Not accepting their ending.
Sep 11, 2025
Sep 11, 2025 at 3:04 PM UTC
In Đà Nẵng my friends cradled me like a child.
We screamed Taylor bridges,
tequila-toasted in bars until the lights blurred.
A single candle in the bathroom
danced warm sighs through open windows,
and all felt calm.
I grew new muscles balancing on a motorcycle,
sometimes gripping Harry’s jacket,
sometimes throwing my weight into the wind.
The city flared neon and gasoline in stuttered traffic,
but along the coast
he drove so fast the vibrations in my chest harmonized.
I pictured my bones becoming butterflies if I let go.
I had entered the Year of the Dragon on a futon,
swayed to half-sleep by a hundred chanting voices
from the temple next door.
I did not dream of dragons.
I only learned to breathe fire.
At midnight Bailey stood at an ancestral altar,
kumquat branches, apricot blossoms, red envelopes, wine,
burning full sticks of incense,
and smoking half a pack of Esse Lights.
This is how the year turns over safely.
Tết is not about faith; it’s about continuity.
The Year of the Snake slid in with new bones and old habits.
It hissed that suffering could be scripture
until letters slithered free from the page
and coiled like cold jewelry around my wrist.
I didn’t make it for Tết that year
no silk áo dài, blood orange, too big
for a body that learned shrinking
before it learned staying.
That was the shedding.
Salt water peeling old skin away,
songs shouted so loud they drowned the ache,
poems that did not start tragic,
nights when my body finally kept time with the moon.
At home the water did not move.
At home the dog’s teeth found my hope.
A terrified mouth rerouted rivers
through my soft parts.
A jewel carved from my nose.
Six punctures blooming across my arms like altars.
In Vietnamese stories the snake waits beneath the water
to claim whoever dares the bank.
I wonder if I was chosen the moment
I opened my mouth in those bars,
when I leaned into the bike’s curve
as if danger could be a swan song.
Now I lie awake at hours unnamed,
tracing scars that hiss answers back.
Something from Vietnam keeps breathing through me,
the candle’s heat, the coast’s long nerve,
voices braided into salt and night,
and I cannot tell if they are echoes
or fangs testing the dark.
They say snakes shed to grow,
but no one warns you how thin the new skin feels,
how everything burns against it,
how you mistake survival for prophecy.
I touch the scar and wonder
if I am still that girl clinging to the bike,
or if the snake has already swallowed me,
patient, sleepless,
feeding on my own venom.
Sep 11, 2025
Sep 11, 2025 at 1:24 PM UTC
I wasn’t holy,
but I wore rings like relics,
my hands glowing with faint outlines
as if someone bit away the gold.
I smoked cloves behind the theater
like I was auditioning for my own myth,
my knees pressed into asphalt prayers,
asking God for a role bigger than
girl storing apocalypse in composition notebooks.
Every boy was a borrowed psalm,
every kiss a hymn half-remembered.
I prayed by spilling myself on sidewalks,
by getting too loud in stairwells,
by falling down and calling it confession.
When they said, be careful,
I heard, be catastrophic.
When they said, be real,
I heard, be ruinous.
When they said, play nice,
I heard, play God.
When they said, repent,
I heard, revolt.
So I tried.
And every bruise became scripture
when the spotlight hit wrong.
And every scar became testimony
when no one believed me.
And every silence turned gospel
because scripture doesn’t stay quiet either.
Sep 1, 2025
Sep 1, 2025 at 1:45 AM UTC
Last night I dreamed
I was holding the world again.
Not the globe from elementary school,
the real thing,
with oceans sloshing against my collarbone
and earthquakes chewing up my wrists.
The therapist asked,
“Does it feel heavy?”
and I laughed,
because no one ever asks Atlas
if he’s tired.
Somewhere,
you were packing a suitcase
with the same precision
you once used on my heart.
Fold, tuck, close.
Disaster, neatly zipped.
I told the therapist
I wanted to set the world down,
but I was afraid
it would roll off the table
and break something important.
Like your posh espresso machine,
my mother’s knees,
the sky.
So instead I balance it,
smiling like it doesn’t ache,
the way women carry grocery bags
or families carry secrets:
both arms shaking,
waiting for something to finally drop,
pretending they didn’t hear it shatter.
Everyone insisting it’s just the weather.
Aug 19, 2025
Aug 19, 2025 at 9:11 AM UTC