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.

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…

You Are

You are the smell of a hundred years of pine trees whose needles lay muddled  by the feet of hikers on an early summer’s morning. You are the grace of a lily pad floating atop a corner of the lake with her roots in place to prevent her from drifting away. You are the resilience…

Everlasting

I am everlasting, even after this body dies its nutrients will rise  giving life back to the soil, to the cracks where wild flowers grow—  this I know. I am uncertain  of the future in a lot of ways  but this was the life  and the body I was given  so as long as I …

Bees

Have you ever tried  to shake out laundry  drying on a line  of any bees that might have made your jeans  a temporary home? That is what it feels like trying to empty out my head before bed— just trying to free these bees before they sting me  in my sleep.