No matter what the weather,  there’s always a chill in the air. No warm welcome eases the frosty blast of unspoken disappointment    that hovers above me like a shimmering sword. Conversations are fencing rounds, with a jab here and lunge there. Despite my attempts to parry the barbed observation or pointed question about the state […]

they say grief is the price of love, as if there’s a penalty for loving, as if it breaks rules or laws or expectations . it’s a laugh, really, what they say about grief, what they think they know about love; it’s their rules that have a cost—the rules written on their face as they […]

Here’s what I have learned. The holes don’t go away, but something else moves in. You’ve been hollowed out, a cracked oak yanked wide open by unyielding, unforgiving hands, They don’t care what they break as they scoop out the most precious, spongy part of you and squeeze. As the footsteps fade, and the ache […]

Remember the times your dad poked fun at you by imitating that silly cartoon and asking if you wanted to be a boy. Remember the times you felt more connected to your boy stuffed animals and had more fun voicing toys that were boys. Remember the times you only wrote stories from the perspective of […]

Maybe after all is said and done we’ll sit down, for a cup of tea and laugh and cry, about what could have been to talk about how in my moonless plight you would sometimes, loan me your star, for the night. . We trusted so firmly in the cloudless sky and moved, into paper […]

the world is on fire and my mother is planting tomatoes   we sit down to dinner—like a proper family my mother says, even though we are mismatched, even though my so-called brother is rarely proper; my step-dad turns on the tv news scoops up beans, meat, corn while catastrophes blare from across the room, […]

Content warning: This poem contains discussions of risky behavior that could be upsetting for someone with a history of self-harm. . I tried skipping half the chapters in that book but I still couldn’t get through it and eventually you took out the bookmark and said, “You don’t have to do this, I’m making the […]