When youth was moth, love flowed over us in prismatic waves—systems of romance.

Then came the phoenix of your heart, and everything was a ceiling. I moved clockwise past infinite shadow and onto your wall.

Sorry to wake you. [...] I forgot to tell you something. [...] I'm like the sun or perhaps the moon. And there are times when I know I'll make you sad.

Distant polyglot in its timbres, its psychological profile, and its pulse, it could not sound less like a soundtrack for a search. More like a Middle Eastern funeral.

Stemmed from a shared anxiety over self-definition in an indefinite world, and each of them has searched for answers in the amorphous space between where “you” end and “I” begin.

By turns, august and sweet—revealed a complex stillness, a set of detached passions attempting to rebuild themselves, a desensitized state searching for soul.

I have loved you into oblivion and now move into thin air. Please remember me as a time of day. As long as you can hold your breath, we'll always be together.

If I could blow him
out of my nose in a sneeze. Be taken
as the leaves in a breeze. If I
could bury this sickness

of sobs and heaves. Cool the fever
with a wipe of my sleeve. Melt his memory
like Fontina cheese. Ice it down
a few degrees. This rash is tighter

than my jeans. It’s spreading like
acne in teens. Splitting my sides at
the seams. If I could unplug this noisy
machine making me wriggle in high-

pitching screams. Stop it from hanging
over me like the eaves. If only I could. But I can't!
So, it breeds.

The Lilac trees were bushes then
In the front yard of where I grew up.
Their perfume filled the small front room
Of the tiny little house we lived in.

Across the yard were Holly trees
One for each of us three kids
Who loved to push each other
Laughing, onto their sharp leaves.

Three Lilacs and three Holly trees
All planted by my mother
And all of them were tiny shrubs
Just like her little children.

The kids and bushes grew in sync
As days and years meandered by
Until the kids were grown and gone
And left the bushes growing there

To mark the passing of the days
That added up to childhoods filled
With  perfume in the afternoons
And sometimes thorns into the fingers.
ljm

She was sewn from a stream
of significant disasters,
but she has taken charge of the tide.
Directing the course of the storm,
she became one with the fiercest gyre.
The lightning, the moment
through the raging sea,
the season of her storm is done.
The smell of the after-rain,
the calmness of the shores mended the remnants.
A rainbow of colors and vibrance, the abundance of black clouds is gone.
The beautiful sky,  
a magical release
from these painful bonds.
Courage and kindness,
gratitude and strength,
the real treasures are now found.

even a moment of it
fills the dry corners of the soul
with light, peace
and gentleness