my father falls asleep next to me at the car dealership
hunched like a baby in the plastic chair
his skin the olden pages of bibles and war histories
creased and ever-yellowing and tucked away in the garage
behind cases and cases of empty busch light cans
soon to make us fortunes at the bottle deposit
we wait for him to speak in bursts and glimpses
i glance and his hands are blurry and clean
clutching tissues and his own bolting head against the a.c.
while i sting against the salesman’s grinning teeth, reduced:
the tower and his little girl,
stony, eroded
to dirt and rotting pumpkins in the first and final frost
he drives us home and we don’t speak about his paper skin
bulging where oceans have crashed upon it
veins jumbled and blotted and unreadable:
devotionals stacked in the basement warped with seasons and *****
from him i learn to grow
taller, hunching, awkward in autumn-stiffened skin;
i plant tomatoes, peppers, zinnias in the icy creek and wait and wait
and wait for spring shoots
from him i learn to grow little cancers in my throat
emerging like crocuses in the silence of march
Mar 15
Mar 15, 2026 at 3:58 PM UTC
ephemeral laurels,
those lullabies of may,
became fungi while i was still asleep;
none preserved for the non-punctual
who dreamt of spring through spring–
another missed migration.
i walk along the ridge alone at noontime,
songbirds seemingly on strike against the straggler–
the prairie warblers so persistent in july
have gone, with august, silent,
nestled against the mountain walls
of cicadas’ seventeen-year symphonies,
those long encores–
i listen but do not hear.
i press my ear to the escarpment
and feel i’m missing something–
like ice ages are whirling still within the cool conglomerate
in spite of summer and sweaty palms,
like the passenger pigeons blurred
and smudged into oneness under the strata
have become,
without my knowing, the stratus clouds above–
or perhaps there is no spite in spindly evergreens
that flower for flowering’s sake;
that wilt to wilt;
that winter with or without listening.
Aug 20, 2025
Aug 20, 2025 at 12:31 PM UTC
it’s easy to miss the juncos’ slow, sudden departure in spring;
messengers from colder warming worlds
they arrive a dulling autumn:
peppering notations of life in a landscape encased,
each deep dark demitasse
brewed on increasingly tardy dawns
painting a night sky inverted
standing ankle deep in first snows
searching for leftover springs beneath the detritus
but then they finally emerge with the warblers,
orioles, robins, and buntings
and pointillism fades beneath impressionist palettes
that flash over treetops and underbrush
but the last juncos linger:
quiet familiar trills outside my window each morning
disrupting stillness till it disappears
Apr 18, 2025
Apr 18, 2025 at 6:53 PM UTC
the leaves sway and catch sunlight
and i catch both against my cheek
and chase them down to my throat,
crush them into each other into me
into chamomile: a trickling summer
i drown in sword-shorn grasses and
in return for breath they write on
my skin in languages that have never
been spoken, only sung only felt
only studied with one dirt-painted
fingertip, fine hairs punctuating
pink brown imprints of trodden earth
ants count dozens of steps, climbing
the winding train tracks (and rocks
sleeping beneath) of my wrists legs
nose and untraveled stomach, and i
let them travel; let my body be gravel
become highway become interstates to
ugly and restful towns diners hotels
and even as sunlight burns my eyes
and bobcats stalk past forests beyond
the reach of my oven-warm wind-wound
open palm, ground allows its drinks to
seep into my sweatpants desert skin
and curls: an oasis i carry on my back
Jan 26, 2025
Jan 26, 2025 at 10:56 AM UTC
i lied about the exorcism--
that neon ghost
still haunts my phone
and though all of us are silent
you sing my tinnitus till the storms get back.
you don't know it's been raining all week
because i never told you;
i'm so scared of spirits and spiders
and weathering small-talk--
your sun and my curtain-clouded bedroom.
in a sunpatch on your floor,
i dreamt of leaping off the grid
and landing back in lake hylia a hero;
now i only dream of daytime drinks,
a summer solitude as dull as the ends of my hair
'cause i can't even throw back my dad's ninety proof
without the sun in my eyes
so the truth is
between zelda and zookeeping
i've been seancing on the dusty carpet
arranging myself around album booklets and ***** shirts
and maybe i couldn't help it
maybe i lit a couple candles by your name
not thinking you'd think of me
or think to shine solar snapshots onto my pillow--
a presence to make me breathless
enough that i can't
***** them out
and they keep me up at night
Jan 26, 2025
Jan 26, 2025 at 10:48 AM UTC
got caught up talking
balked through the window and fell through the back door
umbrella still in bloom
left rings of condensation as footsteps
and also frostbite in 60 degree weather
and also footsteps for nobodies to follow
freaked out by stale nature
valley-cracked teeth
translucent petals poking through nag champa clouds
lost spider solitaire
twenty-one times in a row
lost all the gaba napping in classrooms
and spinning circles around itself
untuned cerebellum in atrophy against the spins
lost it
won an advil liqui-gel
and quickly quit:
jumped off the peak of its dose-response curve
into the pool of a hallucinogenic july
doesn’t matter:
komorebi’s turned apocalyptic;
sunset's turned subvision
now you make shadows on the mirror and wet-floor signs on the tile
get caught in spiderwebs not a foot outside your bedroom
blast faith through android speakers suffocating in her comforter
drown your plants in ***** water
never heard a silver lining
only eat up deserts
for the cacti that’ll propagate later in your throat:
a seventy-five cent zinnia’s last whiskey-driven photosynthesis
rootbound
Jan 26, 2025
Jan 26, 2025 at 10:41 AM UTC
just like that the pretty girl in my dreams
disappeared freed my sheets to let them
suffocate as usual and i stayed there
facing the ceiling with cymbals’ collisions under my pillow
and for a haze i stayed
still and subsisting on spit and spider mites
like the sea wasn’t swallowing anything
till i was ninety percent salt and crystallized
breathing out dusty alphabet soup into the aether
like anyone with a disdain for capital letters
my circle sends its love along with mutual virtue parasitism
in distress beacons pinged through a dead battery and twitching fingers
and you know it’s for the best
no falling out of bed or breakfasts till the oasis is complete
under construction in the dusty pillowcase i call home
down the street from the abandoned asylum where i learned
mouth too dry and lungs too sharp
a shriveled cactus with paper spines
Jan 26, 2025
Jan 26, 2025 at 10:33 AM UTC
imagine a mattress abandoned
on the side of i-390 on the rock salt (somehow from the sea
leaning up against that sloping cliff’s edge of land
locked up in villages unvoiced)
a makadikadi daydream–
a back against the crust of earth
as young strangers whispered and daydrank
just inside
across the crackling barrier–
distant suns stretched icicles
on eaves of barely empty buildings–
houses with no owners watched,
nestled against sidewalks coated over in warning
of a return to rest
noise-cancelled
shoe-gazing
black coffee frozen in the doorway–
against a tapestry of laughter through AM radios and portable speakers
pretending to nap
Jan 25, 2025
Jan 25, 2025 at 11:51 AM UTC
i used to write in barren singed meadows in the summertime.
i used to write about the moon
hanging shadows on and around my neck;
the cacti shriveling blisters in death valley;
imaginary summer superstorms
& neurotransmitters:
pulses and a lack thereof.
i wrote about punctuation
and the ghosts i’d talk to in circles;
sepia-stained,
i inked over them in ugly neons and called it art
and wouldn’t rest until they danced:
sparks against the tips of my fingers like
shocks against warm sheets in winter
as i wrapped myself up,
invisible and silent.
you’re not a poem
and that’s why i love you--
you make language lost
and paragraphs to abandoned sudoku puzzles
now my saccades pivot only to the blank spaces between
your words and your eyes and the cool komorebi(those leaves
bordering the sky of ghosts i disappeared so impossibly easily)
after you leave i sit and let my hands go numb
let my hands melt the iced latte you bought me
when my throat was shut and shivering
when i was quiet and charred and gaping at the window
& still waiting for icicles long sublimated to strike
but now i go to bed with the room cold
because i know it’s the only way you can fall asleep
and i’m silent on purpose so i don’t wake us up
Jan 5, 2025
Jan 5, 2025 at 2:35 PM UTC
we talked for an hour over chicken alfredo
and my fork kept clinking ringing crashing
against the edge of my bowl
like every time i tried to speak my hand
(knowing it could or should not strangle me silent)
would drown me out with metal
my night was sleepless on purpose
my eyes and throat begging
to shut in shame and respite but
i forced myself awake with every sip
(red bulls and cheap whiskey and stale banana bread)
i swallowed into grimaces
i swallowed into laughter
and my soles ached and argued
against the not-quite salted sidewalks
and the decaying skeletons of autumn
against the freezing arterial
and they all knew i could never catch up
as i ran behind shouting to wait
just a second let me reach–
for what?
for who?
the words i wasted don’t exist anymore.
now i talk over myself and my lover
and the words don’t matter;
they flow between us,
herbal tea with cream and sugar
flows between us like
sunlight pouring in through the blushing leaves
the sunset trees
that only we and the woodpeckers can touch
Oct 2, 2024
Oct 2, 2024 at 11:56 PM UTC