July/August 2020

Writers these days seem to fall into two camps with regard to writing during the pandemic: paralysis or extreme productivity

Consider his laughter, the sound of explosion / the slivers of lizard that land in his hair.

When you could not describe pain, you screamed / until I felt it. Your eyes like a cat’s saucer, licked / clean.

Love has small hands, a voracious mouth

Abandoning all pragmatism, we packed up our things, broke the contract on a house we were set to buy elsewhere, and moved to the beach.

Control, or rather the pursuit of it, is on my mind as I scrub the kitchen and bathroom counters today…

how a bird carries in its being nest / carries tree carries light into blue into sky, every name for home

In my experience, the maternal-child relationship distills the truth of human relationships in general: they are messy and complicated at the same time as being incredibly rewarding.

I write not for the people I love or for any abstract public or judge, but for myself

My love surrounds, infiltrates, permeates. It needs no witnessing to be understood as utterly true, self-evident. Like gravity.

Some people do not like olives. They just don’t. And nothing is going to change that, no matter how needy and worthy those olives are.