Is that Orion and why is he aiming at the moon
What does he see in the sky that I don’t
I walk alone at night up orchard hill, around the back
The sky is starry and the woods seem quiet
I can even see which stars are redder and which bluer
The bluest light is the university blue light system
They wait ominously in the dark down my path
They say you are supposed to be able to see a blue light no matter where on campus you’re standing
There’s no life in the blue lights
Is that Orion, and why has he moved from his perch?
Is the earth just a big marble?
I lay on the hill after walking home from my theatre tech rehearsal
When I stepped out from the curtains the industrial lights of the newly opened school building were bright in my eyes
I settled easily into the night on my walk home
From the blackouts of the theatre transitions
The starry speckle of the light board
The moonlight of the ellipsoidal lamps on actors’ faces
Maybe Orion came to watch
The night sky is just one big blackout
And when it’s dark you remember that everything is just a tech rehearsal
Where has Orion gone?
Why is the sky cloudy?
Will he ever catch the moon?
No
Even his own stars are light years apart
I cannot see up tonight without the stick and poke of snowflakes on my face and in my eyes
Clouds to snow back to the ground
The sky hitchhikes inside on my eyelashes
I walk inside my dorm building
Lights up.
Aug 3, 2025
Aug 3, 2025 at 8:50 PM UTC
Punk kids, instead of having choreography or jumping up and down with hands in the air,
Punk kids knock, bounce and rattle against each other like broken glass in a bag or pin ***** in the most complicated machine,
I hate loud noise but I love loud music as long as I have my headphones
Back and forth, headbanging until the noise from our heads comes out those ringing ears
Nervous tics to music
Stress made into a party
Rocking out, rocking ourselves forward and back
Just like I do when I'm overwhelmed
Catching or reaching a hand to anyone who knocks themself down
Loose limbs and heads slack
Hands and feet across the crowd are literally twitching,
It's a monster mash looking, skeleton disco.
Some kids look possessed but they're okay with that
No one's worst demons can get in because the venue's at full capacity,
The window-watchers chase any evil spirits into the snow,
Fear and worry leave for one set because they can't stand the racket,
The rest of the day got lost in all the cables and pedals,
I bounce against kids in chains and band t shirts,
Hardly need to use my eyes,
My shoes are covered in Doc Marten footprints and people shove me and I shove them right back and I don't need to say anything in the huge mess that is the mosh pit
The room is full of people moving like zombies on a sugar high whose brains are being eaten by the music,
For a while, we let that happen.
When the final set ends
My neck and feet are sore like the speakers and amps were a workout you can buy from Guitar Center,
Headbanging is my favorite kind of cardio,
And moshing is my favorite catharsis.
The silence is everywhere as the punks exit the Scene.
I hardly know any of these people by name.
But we just performed one strange, scene kid dance
For the night to watch
When I go to bed my legs spasm
I think because
they are still dancing
Mar 26, 2022
Mar 26, 2022 at 12:16 AM UTC
My breathless mind runs in circles
I bike laps around the roof of the parking garage as the sun goes down
It’s too loud for a quiet town
The clouds look back at me colored like a Renaissance painting
The concrete frame’s got pain and no window pane
I play gunshots or fireworks
And ride home to my white suburbia perks
Is this my first Renaissance?
I hope not the last
I’m overwhelmed by the ambiance
The ground pushes back and the concrete slips
And I’m too out of breath to reach the city’s loudest taunts
The steeples rebuild and the plywood sits
The streetlights blink and the tree trunk rips
The train comes north at an alarming sound
And I pray to any God that there's no body on the ground.
Feb 26, 2022
Feb 26, 2022 at 12:41 AM UTC
I can’t say that we go anywhere when we’re gone
That said, have you ever stood somewhere where everything washes up? Everything lost, everything left, everything broken
The ocean is not endless, no
Endless means forgotten
The ocean is everything
When something falls in, it rides the currents for as long as it takes to get somewhere.
Somewhere might be sinking, or in a fish’s gut, on the great Pacific garbage patch or on a little island
If you want to know how to get there I’ll ask you if you know the neighbors
Everything washes up there
Everything lost, everything left, everything lingering
Lobster pots
Shredded lines (the ocean holds all barriers)
Broken buoys (everything that floats, floats forever)
Seagull bones
Cans and bottles
Even rudders
There are stories of how tractor beach got its name:
There was once a whole tractor that washed up on its shores
Gears, wheels, engine, rusted metal (all things lost are not all things forgotten).
Pieces of it are long since buried in the rocks and mussel shells
But the ocean has parts of it somewhere
The ocean has parts of us, somewhere.
The ocean has parts of the seagulls and their wiry legs
Or the murky tidepools (even when we are left behind we are still ocean).
If planets were marbles the earth would be the only blue sphere in the whole pile
The ocean is the universe’s blue moon
One day a tractor came through one of its portals to an island
Heaven is a doubt, but perhaps heaven is Tractor Beach: a place where everything washes up. Where the egrets perch dreamlike above beach roses and sumacs. Where gulls kneel by broken eggs in nests of rocks. Where trash is treasure is the legend of a tractor in tide. A legend of escape, a place to float away, and a view like no other. What else could we need after life?
Sep 19, 2021
Sep 19, 2021 at 8:48 PM UTC
Hell is shaped for the hand of a wishful, foolish painter
Its caverns wait for us to paint over the mistakes again
And again
And again the walls become crude and rough under the layers of our harm.
I was on the brick and cobblestones one afternoon, among groups of wishful oppressors, their hands clenched in dried paint. They ask how to scrub it off. They’ve heard “Black Lives Matter” but they don’t know where, or when.
It’s here, and now, and everywhere, and always.
Hell is shaped like my young metatarsals, creaking and aching under some unrealized purpose.
Hell is shaped like a ladder that my ancestors soaked in lighter fluid
And waited for everyone else to scramble up.
Hell is shaped like venom tongues and weapons alchemied in colonialism’s genocide. It’s also shaped like disposable responsibility and eyes that stray from the fire and like greed in the flag with nails in the palm.
I was brought up in a stolen, and false, but beautiful and loving safety. I would give my sense of direction to let someone else’s baby have a memory of swimming the meters from one parent to the other in the shallows if the ocean– so small, so humbled, but so, so safe.
I was in a park when I had to write a lawyer’s defense fund number on my forearm. A cop car trailed our peaceful protest like an unwanted lantern. I am grateful, but maybe not well-deserved, to say that is the most scared I’ve ever been.
Hell is shaped like too-loose strings on an old guitar. No matter the harmonic chord, there will always be dissonance in the punishment of created evils.
I was not raised to believe in hell. I’ve been told by the outlying sign that it waits for me. I still think it is a metaphor. I wave my rainbow flag and breathe through my white skin. I am kneeling to be knighted by my moms and waiting to pull up those lying down. But I can’t reach for Dominique or Layla or Brayla or Tony or Muhlaysia or any of the names I’ve been burdened to forget because they are not here. I can’t reach for Michael, or Emmitt, or Breonna, or George, Ahmaud, Daunte, Eric, Sandra, Toyin, Trayvon, Elijah, or Moses.
Hell is shaped like a twisted funeral florist. It makes me want to scream, “God, let me have enough arms and energy to hold as many flowers as I can”, because I need to give them out while everyone is still here.
Apr 15, 2021
Apr 15, 2021 at 11:00 PM UTC
Me especially. And when my floorboards creak under the weight of late nights
I will be on the second deck looking down at the storm
Can't say when, but you'll find my hands shaking like bees' wings instead of like pollen in the wind
When I was six years old I cried when the butterflies wouldn't land on me in the garden.
But I've been waiting so patiently for them
They once burst out of me
And one day I will surprise myself
And join them.
Mar 12, 2021
Mar 12, 2021 at 4:06 PM UTC
When we write stories about an apocalypse, it is usually because we are living through one.
No zombies this time
But someone had to light the first match
And someone has to raise earth
From its flattened ashes.
When the destroyers,
the children of dissatisfaction grieve this place,
will it feel sorry for us?
When the world starts over, who will hold its calloused tongue until its first word is something greater
than “more”
and its first taste is something more limitless
than sky
Jan 14, 2021
Jan 14, 2021 at 2:35 PM UTC
My fingers are really good at lying
I wave at people I don’t want to see
My fingers make art when I totally don’t know what I’m doing, and
What am I doing with 10 chicken bones on these limp noodle arms?
Klutz that I am,
I can button as many shirts and jackets over this heartbeat sound booth, but it won’t matter
My fingers will struggle with the the buttons in their awkward glory
Half my button up shirts have buttons in my left hand, for someone else to fasten
Leftover from some medieval fever dream where maids dressed their mistresses, facing buttons and more buttons on their right side
My favorite jacket’s a worn denim cocoon. The buttons are on the right. They are meant for the glorified capable, the mask-less masculine, and history may tell me they are not meant for these skinny digit fingers in their awkward glory
They’re not meant for these limp arms.
Anyway, I’m trying to be ambidextrous with buttons.
I’m sort of ambidextrous already.
I’m ambidextrous like a strong willed crybaby
I’m ambidextrous like an overstimulated introvert listening to post rock and folk metal.
I’m ambidextrous like I’m holding the scientific method in my skinny digit fingers and then going home and painting an abstract picture about it.
I’m ambidextrous like how I hate being laughed at but I don’t want to be taken too seriously.
I’m ambidextrous, like In class, half my notes stream out of my right side brain, all doodles and song lyrics and wanderings, half my right brain, straight lines descending into messy pen scribbles.
My left hand is not good at keeping up. I don’t write well, but I still consider myself ambidextrous. I’ll get there
I’ll be doing buttons with my left, drawing with the side my heart is on
I’ll be crying to punk, I’ll be head banging to classical, I’ll be signing “I love you” with my weak hand,
I’ll be trying to get the knots out of both shoulders and both ventricles,
My heart is too in reach, it must be these bony little fingers.
May 4, 2020
May 4, 2020 at 11:54 AM UTC
Did he drown?
Did he hit the ground?
Did he take flight again
Like a goose gone south for longer
Than a winters night?
Daedalus should’ve done a practice flight
Did he laugh?
Did he throw his head back?
Did he let himself fall
And with a smile on his face
Feel peaceful fright?
Needing less discipline to fall than to take flight
Did he make it up as he went?
His finale waiting for the sun’s repent?
Did Daedalus drop his maps and designs
Did even the sea reach out from the benign
To say, the sun shines awfully bright
You should’ve done a practice flight
Sep 22, 2019
Sep 22, 2019 at 12:21 AM UTC
We’re a little higher than a landed aircraft
A little further down than when they let you take your seat belts off in the plane
A few sleeps from when gravity gets tire and gives up.
Aren’t there further galaxies?
And layers of atmosphere buried between two vastly different zeniths?
Or can’t we fly, walking through yellowed grass?
Our shadows climbing above our furthest imaginings?
There’s yet fog to be cleared
Summer days to rise and fall
Rockets will crash and burn miles from their destinations
With no one to clean up the dust
And yet hands can fit together like scissor handles
Bare toes curl the ground like the earth’s first wheels
****** smoke and shadow descend eyes and ears
Until we remember only as much as our skin knows the wind
We won’t remember in September, and watching idly is forgiven
But at one moment, these things meant something-
Hands in hands and feet brushing dried out growth
Waiting
Apr 29, 2019
Apr 29, 2019 at 7:59 PM UTC