I press into the mirror, but there’s a gap between my fingertip and its reflection. I guess it’s the glass covering the polished silver-skin, like a window between me and the otherside. Invisible, impenetrable. Ignorable and imminent. I heard if you saw yourself on the street, you wouldn’t recognize the bend of your jaw, the …
Drought
There’s a pit I used to fill with notes, songs and pictures of us together. Abundantly, they’d fall from my fingertips. Every time my mouth opened, blessings poured out in your name and the pit overflowed into an oasis of our own creation. There’d be days I’d toil for words; days my arms would go …
What to Do When the Sky is Falling
I'm not sure what it is about this past month, but every possible disaster (and slight inconvenience, to boot) decided to sound off sequentially. Work problems? Here! Relationship issues? Present! Looming uncertainty about my future? Reporting for duty! And just when I've identified the latest crisis and processed what it means to me; another one …
Why I left Church (for now): Thoughts on Unworthiness
I’ve been thinking a lot about “unworthiness” lately. It’s a simple enough concept that likes to burrow deep in every part of your identity. Slap the words, “not good enough” in front of all my hats and you get the idea. Not a good enough wife. Not a good enough Daughter or sister. Friend. Worker. …
Continue reading "Why I left Church (for now): Thoughts on Unworthiness"
Speak Easy to the New Decade
“The roaring twenties,” she chimes to no one as her words hover like magnolia soap bubbles. Her dark bob is like patent leather, her eyelashes, Iver Johnson handlebars, and her face, with its silver-lining cheekbones, soft-focus foundation and locomotive-kohl window sills, is as full as a marble moon. Her porcelain legs are kicked over the …
When it’s Okay for Dreams to Die: A Journey through “It’s a Wonderful Life”
“It’s a Wonderful Life” remains as relevant as ever even as it comes up on 73 years. Every year when Christmas is well underway, I rewatch it and feel something new, which isn’t something I can say about any other movie. Part of it is me getting older, but I would say most of it's …
Continue reading "When it’s Okay for Dreams to Die: A Journey through “It’s a Wonderful Life”"
late night thoughts
At the end of the day, when the living room lights are long since asleep, when the candied orange streetlight peers through the blinds and gushes over the static-washed room, when the covers lean over the edge of the bed, would I say it was worth it? I think so.
How Skeletons Dream in Song
I’m thinking about the fiberglass threads of my bones. How they’re spun like sugar silk, bunched up like spaghetti knots. How they compose the beams and buttresses of my cathedral. How they’re pulled beyond the point of snapping. And I’m thinking about how those strings are being plucked flat by too many hands. About the round …
From Stardust to Stardust
I read somewhere that we’re made of stardust; that the far corners of the dead cosmos climb into our lungs when we breathe in for the first time, and nest inside our wire-frames every time after. Carbon, they call it. And our bones radiate the stuff long after our meat has grown stale and our …
Loveliness
A bloom of ladybugs is called a loveliness, I think as a tear streaks across my face like a firework scream in the open, July sky. A loveliness. My mom bought a swarm of them once. Let them loose on a golden chain tree bejeweled with aphids. Turned the right way, those green lice hummed …