poetry – Why Pears

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…

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 …

Weightless

I’m starting to feel my toes again the feeling has returned to my ankles my shins my knees snaking its way around my waist, my ass up the middle of my back tracing my spine vertebrate by vertebrate, and occasionally gets stuck like an ascending wooden rollercoaster, jolting and threatening to dump me out of…

Beauty From Just Being

I am infinite though my body will come to rot, press your hand against my skin, feel 300 years worth of strength of stories of sheer existence coursing through this bark to let you know it is okay to be torn open just as it is okay to grow, it is part of growing. You…