Springtime Serotonin

Something sweet peppers the spring air like that perfect lemon tint that drapes itself over summer days, unaware of the mental dazebrought on by winter coatsthreatening to zip me out of this universe. The fuzzy buds on the trees wiggle with the breeze, another sign of spring steeping,luring the black-capped chickadees to sing of the coming sunny days the kind…

Ivory Queen

I watched  as the other asparagus shoots  sprang up toward the sun, just like all our lily cousins, plucked for their grassy inclination.  I nuzzled the earth instead deep inside its soil, befriending the worms who swam around me sightless yet they too sensed the light above. Chubby, with milky white spears, I didn’t know…

Beneath

My mind soars  over a landscape outside  and within,  my body a topographical map of freckles and stretch marks  stretching toward purpose  that can only be found  nestled in the quiet of sleeping autumn leaves  of stubborn fungi  grasping to the remnants  of warm summer days  bracing for the cold that will pluck them  from…

Among the Morning Shadows

I wish I could exist  among the morning shadows, nestled in a bed of moss guarded by mushrooms where life doesn’t keep unspooling like the slack of an anchor thrown into the ocean.

I Am

I am not  the thoughts  that parade themselves one moment and light themselves ablaze the next. I am not the painful memories  encased in a golden hue. I am not  the shame loyally waiting by my bedside each night, nor the shame that rears her head whenever I mention my allergies, nor the shame  that…

Graveyard

I keep falling in love  with a history  that doesn’t belong to me, the faces continually change  but there is always a “you” and always a “me” and so I bury this “you” and that “you” in this mental ex-friend, ex-boyfriend, ex-lover, ex-whatever graveyard  I’ve roped off in my head  courtesy of all these people…

Flocking

I find myself flocking to the inbox of someone new nearly every day— what is it about constant correspondence I crave so much? It is the skeleton of intimacy, the shavings of human interaction  and interconnectivity  and somehow I’ve duped myself  into believing  that it is enough for me. 

Elapsed

Elapsed you only really think of this word in terms of time, in terms of what is behind us and what is in front of us, but the word oozes a sense of disaster of calamity folding in on itself  over and over and over again, it pulls you apart like taffy because you are…

The Labyrinth

Most days my mind feels like the inside of a pumpkin— tangled, stringy, goopy, I wish I could just carve myself  from the inside out, scraping out every last anxious ruminating cyclical thought, but anxiety is the Minotaur and the labyrinth that imprisons it, it is the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh Hydra head when…

Fishing for Light

If I were to  as Pablo Neruda wrote, sit on the rim of my own well of darkness, fishing for light, I might see monarch butterflies emerging  from a winged skull on a 1700’s gravestone, or the girth of a 200-year-old European beech tree snaking its way up the well to greet me, or maybe…