writer. editor.
The day after Christmas, I loaded up a rental car and drove back home, alone. Not Ohio home, but original home: the place that bore me, that contains just over a third of my life’s memories.
It’s normal, around each holiday, each milestone, each moment we are expected to come together with family, to remember those who are no longer staunchly in the land of the living.
"All I wanted was for the summer — that terrible season of loss — to end."
Love and thankfulness start in the kitchen. The Italian parsley drying on the sink. A half lemon left over from dressing the food. A bulb of garlic, inquiring eyes, and finally, a beautiful bird prepared by my mother.
I had to call our mother To tell her you died. She wasn’t responding to my texts or calls So I had to call the nursing home where she worked And have the nurse’s desk page her. What’s going on, she asked immediately. I told her to sit down. She said Just tell me. I said [...]
I never realized how much we take the absence of pain for granted. Instead, we cite boredom, general malaise, and complaint rather than sheer gratitude for the stardust shooting through our bodies, for those perfect moments when speck and cell align, humming, harmonious. We've got to be grateful at the cellular level. We've got to [...]
"Awake, I think how nice it would be to fall asleep in your bed, to sink in to your cool, grey sheets. The music surrounds me, brings me up. It brings me out of shelter, it breaks something. I open my ribcage like a cabinet, I offer you my heart. Kiss me hard before you go it [...]
maybe it was just one last story, the greatest: life. welcome. nobody knows evidence was destroyed -- no fear, no shame. volcanic vents and unbroken thread nearly 4 billion years old discern day from night. oh, the things molecules do. NOTE: The "COSMOS" poems are a true experiment. They're iterations of previous "found text" poems I [...]
There are few places where the past seems alive and well, where I am confronted with the characteristics of age, items attesting to the inevitability of decay everywhere I turn. But age isn’t a bad thing. It didn’t only mean death, though some days it does. It meant a history. That’s what we heard, my [...]
So, a thing happened, and it's a thing I've had my eye on since I was 18 years old. I won the Ohioana Walter Rumsey Marvin Grant, which is an annual writing award given to a writer age 30 or under who hasn't published a book yet. https://www.facebook.com/Ohioana/photos/a.378711712794.158803.25305117794/10155110366302795/?type=3&theater Here's the full text of the Ohioana [...]
