inspiration
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Some Friendships are Poems that Write Themselves
You gave me three books one day after confirming the day before that I was a big reader. One was a recently popular book that I’d been meaning to get but hadn’t yet. One was a book I’d never heard of and would never have gotten but turned out to be lovely, a prize to… Continue reading
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The Silence After Your Read this Poem is Political
Ignoring your symptoms and coming to work because a paycheck that’s eight hours short won’t let you replace your shoes with cracked soles for another month is political. The number of PTO hours you’re allowed is political. Whether it takes two months or three of missed rent before you’re living in the street is political.… Continue reading
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Warmth is Adjacent to Beauty
In the winter, moments worthy of pause are so scarce, I train myself to be more discerning at spotting miracles. Today, someone has replaced with red roses yesterday’s white chrysanthemums in the Lebanese restaurant I pass each day to go to work. Maybe they get their flowers from the florists across the street. (The one… Continue reading
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Grow Wings, I Dare You
Yearn harder than you’ve ever yearned. Dismantle your comfort down to its marrowless bones then tell these bubble-wrapped days their hours are numbered. The new green and terracotta continent of your next lives awaits. Your vision board on the wall is holding you back, darling; that wall shouldn’t even exist. The manicured still life quality… Continue reading
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TIL there are 28 unique versions of My Favorite Things from John Coltrane
What poem do you write when the muse won’t sit next to you no matter how nicely you ask? If you were a chef on your day off and a guest dropped in with no advanced notice and you had to whip something up, what would you serve? What images, what metaphors, what messages are… Continue reading
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Vulnerability
How much more freely and more often would we create if we could always be this, a tad too honest and a tad too hopeful for the tastes of the world, showing up for the parts of ourselves that are insecure or bothered or unfinished, the canvas jarred by interruptions, the language naked with need.… Continue reading
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These Living Languages
Our languages are hanging around Gen Z and the millennial great-grandchildren of Shakespeare who wait on tables and be on their phones on cigarette breaks, captioning memes. These attention-conscious hungry languages snacking on worlds, digesting the human experience, growing like weeds passing words among them like joints mixing and matching outfits to walk the ramps… Continue reading
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Nine of Clubs
The Oracle’s loyalty is with the truth.If you ask her about the future,she will speak in riddles.There’s a difference betweencasually dangling a prophecy forthe consumption of the insatiableand dropping the full weight of a futurelike it has already happened—like anything you do will onlypush along the inevitable.That thin line is the canvasof the lost but… Continue reading
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I’ll memorize the city for a sonnet
Until a friend suggested to me,“It’s probably your autism that makesyou feel you can only write in veryspecific places,” I’ve always thoughtmy muse was a former roommatewho’d moved out and is living in thesame city, but enough distanceaway as to require deliberatelydecided visits. I know what my musewould call home: she’s always wherepeople are, people… Continue reading
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June Does Not Inherit the Dregs of April
You are worthy as a poem any day, even on nights when only beautiful poems are born, you can be a poem. The map of your mind rhymes with the forbidden verses that haunt Rumi’s dreams and twist Sylvia’s into handprints of fire. You don’t get to gatekeep your own heart in its yearning to… Continue reading
Rampant & Golden 