winter
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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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PS. She has vegetarian options
People like to talk about the excellent food in Chicago: the Michelin Starred and Beard Awarded, the authentic or the creative spin on a classic, the immigrant communities making the city a home with generational recipes for walls and flavors for foundations. When my friends visit, I flex my city by taking them to some… Continue reading
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If You Only Looked at Headlines
you might think everywhere has lost all its humanity and we have forsaken one another, but in the last five minutes alone I watched two women who don’t know each other hype each other up by the Dunkin pick-up counter: hair compliments, outfit compliments galore and another lady has whipped out her phone to show… Continue reading
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Macro Photography of Magnolias Gives me Visions
Winter is like childbirth. When it’s over, you emerge on the other side and immediately forget the brutality you survived. Look at all this new life, this breath-catching softness, all these shades of pink. How beautiful this chaos, how noble to be gathering and cradling these bundles all aflame with promise and new. Surely this… Continue reading
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Little Calculus
It’s 18 degrees and I’m standing at the southbound X9 Bus stop. Can’t feel my fingers, can’t feel my toes. North and southbound lanes are on a red light. I see my bus, stopped four vehicles away. I can walk to it and get out of the cold. The east and westbound lanes on a… Continue reading
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90 Proof Sky
Drink this sunset with me.I know it’s not much;winter has drained most of the colorsthe reds are weaker and there’sa tone of finality in the blueslike barbed wire. But sip on the song of this waning lightanyway, a toast and a funeral forthe warmth we used to have in abundanceand the intensity we had co-optedfor… Continue reading
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After the Polar Vortex
The city broke its fever shedding the sweat-stained spell of restless sleep and coming back into itself the river tore asunder its stifled shifting, roars choked by murderous hands of ice prison of stars cauldron of last breaths visible from space, more ominous than premonitions of Armageddon. The bullet, it only grazed us. Humanity crosses… Continue reading
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Twenty-seven Below
Don’t go to sleep. Put your ear to that heartbeat but don’t lose yours, please be vigilant about that river wind. Your attention so arrested by the slow-motion spectacle, ice crystals on her lashes, galaxies trapped and humming inside a pane of glass under the bridge, your commonplace hungers and miseries brittle on each suspended… Continue reading
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Vacant, Celestial
It’s almost two-dimensional, that winter sky before a snowfall. Sheet of stifled light hangs over our heads, paper tacked onto a gray ceiling, a lonely page asking for a poem. It forfeits all other possibilities in favor of one; it mourns in its sleep, the cold more an insinuation than memory. Those icy hands have previously… Continue reading
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The Last Days of Winter
I have to stop looking for that rendition cross-shaped shadow cast on bare brick, reclaimed architecture changing as the light changes. I have to stop falling for that peripheral purpose enigmas that don’t take root and actually say something even if it means defending a flaw I would like to pretend isn’t there. I have… Continue reading
Rampant & Golden 