it takes me all day
to finish a bowl of soup-
it is cold and sits on my desk,
i chip away at it until it's gone

i feel like i'm holding
a pile of Lego bricks,
sorting them by color
instead of connecting their parts

my eyes wander to
only what interests me,
and i tend to move by
either branching or spiraling

my feet are running on hot pavement
and i'm exhausted,
by the time i look around,
i'm in the same place

I fit into a shell
whose size
lays in the palm
of your hand

I curl my body so it’s
matching the hollowed spiral
and is pressing gently against
the cool, smooth barriers

The noises are muffled
and the air inside here
is how I imagine it feels
to fly through the clouds.

On my journey to my grandmother’s, the landscape holds my attention with subtleties.
Muted hues of soft lavender, pale brown, and ashy green painted outside the dashboard. Everything peeking out from a gentle coat of dust.
Yellow weeds and thistles dot the golden hills.

This corner of the country feels like a cherished family heirloom. The color palette resonates with my only sense of familiarity. Maybe it is my fixation on the colors themselves that buffer any sense of grief I carry towards instability.  None of us in my family have claimed permanency in structure. Yet, my grandmother’s home is a sanctuary.

the plural of grief is grief,

in our lives, we busy ourselves
accumulating various assorted
grief, some physical, most mental,
those stories when retold, first
make you groan out loud,
every-one asks
what’s a matter, no spilling beans,
you shake ‘em away with
a smile and a “just life”
and it gets
dropped

if you’re so young, that you haven't
started a career of serious collecting,
the objects that will decorate every
place, in every state, wherever the
airy transplants, you won’t be
surprised, thinking you “forgot” to
pack them, for they travel light,
though, they weigh more than any
hope chest of unworn garments that
will never be discarded,
even when
hope is so long gone,
it is still an
unrecognizable

And yet,
the plural of grief is grief

and there is a singular story,
a lost love, a guilt for letting
someone get lost, leaving them
unknowing that if you could,
you’d whisper shouts of reconciliation
for days, to cain assuage the years
when they lay unspoke,
brike broke inside a human chest
of petty
grievances

I have one,
midst all my knowns, which
even not even now, even
in my truth serum poetry
that will not be confessed,
lest you’d beg me to
never write again,
move on to parts unknown,
let that gory story abide in your own,
in your windowless palace,
with your
other locked up secret treasures
wrapped
in black
tissue paper

my own chosen grief,

unspoken, unwritten,
and resting restrained upon an
invisible line
that lives on my tongue,
it is fresh, imaged, just
a hasty taste away, when it
resurfaces at its own chosen
speed, its own chosen need
to be rebreathed, when least
desired, least required,
**in other
words,
when it chooses to emerge,
& it chooses you,
at the precise right
always the wrongest
time & place

Two poets, each with a distinct soul, shape similar sentiments in different forms. He dreams in paragraphs, broad and expansive, like clouds stretching across an endless sky. His words dive deep, exploring the hidden caverns of life’s stories. She, in contrast, dreams in lines, each one crashing with the precision of a wave. Every word is chosen with care, her stanzas offering brief yet vivid glimpses of a heartbeat. Her verses flow like a gentle whisper, artfully capturing emotions on display. Their forms may be distinct, yet their themes converge: love, loss, and longing, woven into words. They share their work openly, baring their hearts in a space where emotions find resonance. Each sentence pulses with passion, laughter, and stolen glances, their connection sparked from the very beginning. Together, they transform the stillness of night into shared moments, each word a bridge into the other’s world. As they read each other’s lines, each word becomes a cherished fragment. Their hearts, poured onto the page, collide and merge within the ink of their souls. Two poets, entwined, seek to understand the intricate design of love, its gentle, complex beauty. Each line written, every paragraph crafted, reveals their shared exploration through the labyrinth of love and uncertainty. Hand in hand beneath the starlit sky, they craft a story uniquely theirs, blending two beautiful voices into one. Who could have foreseen it? A poet of paragraphs, a poet of lines, falling in love with a beauty all their own.

Being a mother to you
Is being a mother to me.
And that little girl is
so thankful for you.

When I kiss your cheeks,
When I hold you in the middle of the night.
When I dry your tears,
When I make you laugh,
When I watch you at the playground,
When I hold your hand,
That little girl heals more than anything else that's tried to heal her.

Inside us,
beneath the skin and the noise,
there's a child, eyes wide and open,
heart like fragile ink, waiting.

A child who needs no grand gesture,
no castles of promise or kingdoms of light,
just a sliver of softness, a single thread
to pull them into knowing
they belong.

They dwell in hidden pages,
the ones we often turn past too quickly,
marked by forgotten sighs,
footnotes of wonder, edged in longing.

They don't ask for much, really,
just a place in the margins,
a place in the prose where silence listens
and understanding holds them close.

Each of us,
a story unwinding,
scrawled on the chapters of bone and breath,
our pages turning, child, dreamer, seeker,
hoping someone will see
the ink stains beneath
and understand.