Meet me at the Chapel baby,
You'll be borrowed, I'll be blue.
Pay every priest in county,
Let me spend my forever with you.

we wake well
in the early hours

i sit
in a steady hive

of light
where stillness

is the reward
the chipmunks rest

beside me
and care not

that i exist
a carolina wren explores

the cold ashes
in the hearth

of my brother’s backyard fireplace
never knowing

that i am sitting right here
a tiny red spider knits

between the leaves
of the hydrangeas

oblivious of me
or the machine pushing

through the blue silk
of the sky

is there any greater truth in life?
is there anything better than the industry of each day?
when you leave, will i miss you?

Pull me through the winds,
Strip the velvet clean.
Tie me to the evening
Where you know the sun won’t lean.

Hollowed out my seasons,
Left the orchard bare.
Begging, “Love me like the shadows
Fading in the air.”

Pressed me to the heather,
Root my tongue to stone,
Watch the river splinter,
Pull apart the bone.

You stitched my name to thunder,
Even wrote it in the blue.
Shielding all and every echo
Until there’s only you.

Whatever you are,
I must be too.

Last night I dreamt I was in Carolina,
the trees all twisted to the coast.
The ocean sat steady and
the roads were never ending.
“I’m only back for six months,”
dream Carly said.
“No,”
an unmarked face and outstretched hand replied,
“you’re here to stay.”
With salt on my breath I tried to say it wasn’t so
but Fate just smiled and walked away.
Orange light broke through a canopy
as I desperately tried to follow,
but the shadow faded into
the steam of endless summer…  
I couldn’t understand why I was back.
Clarity blurred and the landscape was a hill, a tree, a flower, a beach.
A bridge into sand stretched ahead,
bricks to a river beside,
and columns upon columns
upon porches upon porches.
“I have to get back!”
dream Carly screams,
but Carolina just shrugged.

when Evangeline tells you that you’re dead to her,
you feel as if you are chained to a sinking ship,
permanently trapped at the bottom of the ocean,
and drowning has never seemed so sweet.
as she leaves,
you realise that this is the closest blessing you will ever receive
from a god that you don’t believe in anymore.
because if she didn’t walk away,
you would drag her down to hell with you
before you’d even consider letting her go

Some days, it’s a hunger
a deep pull from the stomach,
not for food, not for water,
but for something unnamed,
something just out of reach.

It’s in the way the morning air feels electric,
like possibility itself,
how the sun spills over cracked sidewalks,
touching everything,
saying, Look. Be here. Want more.

It’s in the ache of laughter
that lasts too long,
in the way music grips the ribs
and shakes loose something tender.
It’s the way fingers linger
when hands almost meet.

And yes, some days, the hunger fades,
buried under the weight of routine,
but then
a scent, a sound, a sudden rush of memory
and there it is again,
the pull, the ache, the craving
for more of this,
this fragile, fleeting, impossible thing.

This life.

The warm light of afternoon
brings a blur to our harsh wrinkles.
Like a line drawing drafted over and over
after several mistakes.

The blemishes of us bleed and clot like brush strokes
on the painting of a landscape
Fleeting blues, searing orange,
the vista of our bends and breaks.

We sit together, as close as we can,
my nose in the cavity of your neck.
My surplus in the caves you carry,
your tears, lakes in my overbite.

I'll hold your hand holding mine holding yours,
breathe in your breath out.
If nobody is whole you can be my left foot,
and I can be your right.

Do not pity the
flower that has
died, it will bloom
once more, as an
ephemeral moment in life
you held dearly, in truth,
you were unaware of
how it always
returned.

She comes
when the feast is over—
not to take,
but to finish
what rot has begun.

The bones,
long stripped of love,
call her.
They do not mourn
the absence of meat.
They beg
to be remembered.

Yes,
her wings are tarred
with blame,
her beak cracked
on shame's old fruit—
but who else
dares clean
what grief leaves behind?

The lambs
cannot stomach endings.
The lions
forget to bury.

She is
the silence
after screaming,
the undertaker
no one thanks.

They say she poisons.
But poison too
is medicine
in the right dose,
at the right time.

Let her purge
what clings.
Let her feed
on what must not follow.

Not cursed—
essential.
Not cruel—
cleansing.

She weeps,
yes.
But only for the living
who hoard their dead.