Big New Day. May of 2014, summer stretching herself sleepily across the Midwest. I’m pacing my apartment, pulling things down from the walls and bundling them in boxes. Two years rose and fell, graduate school already blurring at my fingertips, a Polaroid shaken perhaps too emphatically. Now I’m here, hands shaking, heartbeat a steady thrum, learning again to breathe.

Against the wall, my CD player occupies the bookshelf alone, pouring music like sunlight into the cluttered apartment. The playlist is hopeful, heart first, a series of anthems about the magic that just might come if we’re brave enough to be seen. Brave by Sara Bareilles, Luck by the American Authors, Pumpin Blood by NONONO, Something I Need by OneRepublic, Invisible by Hunter Hayes, This is the New Year by A Great Big World. I tiptoe around a maze of my own creation, bobbing my head all the while, every last lyric like a love letter to this, the age of learning to want out loud.

Continue reading “sunday post: soundtracks.” →

nowhere town, i
have the habit of
showing up to you
broken and hopeful,
suitcases bursting at
the seams, seven hundred
stories in every corner

nobody tells you
this about the spots
you mark as ‘home’ onto
the maplines: this is
the soil that will
cradle you in your
days of breaking, and
these are the skies
that will whisper you
back together

I love you. Here, now, this very second. I know, I know –– there are a million metrics, a multitude of ways we convince ourselves we’re not measuring up, but you’ve got no argument to make here. Right now, as you are, I love you.

_\.. /

Continue reading “i love you.” →

the white rose,
evoking innocence, charm, purity

It took months for me to feel clean again.

That’s the trick to love –– we spend years figuring out how to stand tall in ourselves, training our hands self-sufficient, learning to grin at the hard-won person staring from the mirror, and a single human stumbles along and shatters the whole illusion.

Continue reading “sunday post: roses.” →

grab the sink by both sides
and glance up, try not to
laugh or cry or take hold of
whatever ropes we reach for
in these moments, facing
our naked selves

and what if they’re right, the
ones who left, saw
our shaking, blistering
brokenness, ran, what if
all these fragments won’t
ever come together, no
matter our frantic
rearranging

what if they’re
right, voices that chase
us down in the darkness,
outrun them all day and
find them curled up
against us on
the sofa

what if they’re
right, drowning out
all the i love yous and
the friends who insist we’ve
got something worth
sticking around
for, what if we got it
all wrong when we
imagined things revealed
in the light, hidden
away in the dark

January in New York City, and the sun showed up and washed gold over everything. I’m standing in my apartment, palms at the edges of my window, peering not out but straight down. A hundred feet below, men are at work pulling down the scaffolding.

Steel beams punctuating the sidewalk, green panels linked and reinforced with wooden planks, scaffolds across the city signal humankind’s ongoing effort to hold its own in the fight against nature. For sidewalk travelers, however, scaffolding is a strange nuisance, narrowing the sidewalk and shrinking an often-claustrophobic city. When, at last, a project is completed and scaffolding disappears, city blocks are washed brand new. The time has come, finally, for the scaffolding in front of my building to come down.

Continue reading “sunday post: small rescue.” →

Hey. I’m not sure where to begin. I feel fragile, writing this, writing to you. It’s been a fragile few weeks, like all my bones are made out of glass, and I’ve been walking around with them, breathing and bracing and waiting to shatter and fall apart. But I’m here, and I’m healing, and I’m writing you a letter.

You asked me if I had any questions, and of course I do. On the night you left, they ripped themselves loose from me, involuntary. Roars against the tile, “why’d you go, why’d you go?”

Continue reading “tuesday post: third draft.” →

sketch myself down, roots
dug deep into Indiana
soil, brothers and sisters
fighting invisible
bad guys in the backyard,
whisking through cornfields
as fast as our legs would
carry us

etched into my sides are
scars and stories, so
careful with my steps
and reckless in my
loving, names carved
down to the muscle,
ancient aches in the
rainfall

and the branches,
deciduous, find them
clinging to yesterday’s
hopes, let them
go, fall free, farewell dances,
empty limbs reaching
in spite of their shivering

The sun stretches itself up over the horizon, pouring its earliest rays across the Kokiri Forest. The Deku Tree, revered guardian of these woods and the children who inhabit them, implores Navi the fairy to seek out Link, the boy without a fairy, and to bring him with haste. Footsteps away, in the hollow of a tree, the boy sleeps alone, his past a mystery, his destiny about to unfold before him.

Continue reading “sunday post: video games.” →

i woke to find my sternum, cracked
to fragments across my comforter, and
out spilled the everything, all the aches
i’d unwittingly tucked into hard-to-reach
dresser drawers, not just sorrow, but
joy, and hope, and burgeoning love,
all of it spilling, all of it
aching just the same, i

choked back tears as i
ran by the water
because i thought of
my sister, of how i’ve loved
her with such peculiar clarity,
the way she’s made my heart
see the same color in every
chapter of my life, i

felt my palms go gentle
at the coffeeshop, the
silver-haired girl not
waiting for coffee after all, just
being with her friend
at work, and the
homeless man sitting
outside, reaching to pet
a dog, reaching for
the only eyes for miles
willing to settle on him, i

glanced down and saw this
heart, for all its wide-eyed
optimism, its defiant
bravado, and discovered it
again to be tender, love
letter etched softly into
a napkin, handprint
against the skin of
someone we can’t bear
to lose