poetry – Why Pears

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…

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 …