Published poems

Amenorrhea, The Bitchin' Kitsch

"What would you have done with your body

if your body obliged?"

- Leila Chatti

Like a gentle dog, the membrane

waits. Waits crimson and penitent 

by the stillness of the door. Outside

she’s planted swirling sycamore legs 

to call home. Meaning, she plates the 

gray tree when I refuse to cook dinner.

I ask her to leave one day. She kisses me 

sadly and packs her bags, holds me with the 

taste of another long month. I tell her 

that I still love her but cannot live with 

her. She reminds me too much of fullness:

a shameful gnawing. Her teeth bared

but forgiving, she retreats. I watch her 

go, thinking that it might be the last time.

Then I go to bed full of lemon water 

and nothing else; I nurse on the lipstick-

stained glass she left on the counter. The 

supine moon fills my open mouth. 

A moth flies in, or maybe a dream. 

I can only think of her bringing

in the paper every morning to the

sound of All Things Considered. The street

is full of girls like us, our names versions 

of deliverance. When she finally returns

home I can’t remember if or why I missed 

her. The hours fold into our walls and

the interval between our legs. I let 

her slam the door, I feed her jubilantly

from my fingers, I let her scream try 

harder to keep me, do not lose us, care 

for yourself like you would our child. When 

I’m gone, she says, you’ll still need 

me. Like your mother, you’ll always 

wish I was untangling you.

Writing for My Brother's Catharsis, Ponder Review

Behind every body is a set of equations. You spend your twenty-first year exploring dialogues between chemicals like the chain-link fences you could never climb as a child. Now your legs are longer and the sun shrink-wraps the day above your bed. A knock at the door, a soft heartbeat in the house, the tracings of your legs under loose sheets. Description: an acknowledgement of space and its measured shaping, a kind of planned language. Space is practiced feeling: a buried Sargasso of circumlocution. 

Behind every body is a body. Behind every action is an equal and opposite reaction. Like ripping a bandaid off in both directions, or boarding a train, or telling someone that you love them. Does this mean that with the laughter of leaves comes the sorrow of air, the great shapelessness of pain? Does this mean that whenever a body creates another body the earth kneels as if ashamed? We all belong to this landscape somehow; we are all small acknowledgements of each other.

Behind every body is an echo of a place. When you are an adult, you are still a child buried under years of not being a child; you have yet to wake inside the assembly and abandon of a new season. Every night you are space and time and feeling all at once, an annular exponent. I cannot write about or for or to you without talking about how lonely a routine can feel, drifting from dose to dose. We are haunted by what we can’t have but also the emptiness of what we do have. I cannot write about you without also mentioning that sometimes I feel grateful for the miracle of people speaking to me. 

Behind every set of equations is a body. I’m not sure if this is a very good catharsis. I’ve left books on your bed hoping that you read them, I’ve borrowed your lighter and looked into your full-length mirror. I’ve felt my ache lodge itself in yours, I’ve heard sighs grapple the air between us as we eat breakfast in silence. Every dream I have about getting lost in the hallways of our old high school—unable to find a classroom, losing a name amidst a dozen others—I know you’d describe it the same way: barrelling down a sink, escaping a crumbling attic. Firing a gun across a treeless Earth and waiting for the bullet to return.