Published by Heartwood INSTRUCTIONS FOR HOW TO LIVE MY LIFE if I should die. Use resistance as formaldehyde. Refuse to accept the fact of change. Reserve the right to refuse, and refuse the right to be reserved. Stop eating when you’re upset. Burn off the rest in punishing workouts. When you hear about emotional eating or exercise addiction, don’t identify. React to every word or change like it’s a harpoon. Pump your cortisol day and night ruminating on safety. When you hav

First featured in the Doubleback Review Clay When we played all those blue games near the highway, Mom didn’t stop us at first, though cars flowed like the creek behind our house. When we knocked over her favorite pot of daisies on our rush after a runaway soccer ball, then Mom dashed, overtook us. Cars stopped, had to claw their way through a snagging siren. Maybe this moment was the moment, friends suggest years later, that I got my guardian angel. Maybe. The stream still

First featured in the Gyroscope Review Love In The Injustice Age (published in the Fall Issue of Shantih Journal [Oct. 6, 2018]) is when you know someone so well you could be her scream. Tia and I, we have caught a glimpse of our extinction; we are hunting it down. We build peace with justice, Tia and I. She cracks jokes like belts and I dig like an insult and the scant trees seize in the wind. We make this ditch with pick axes and fear and sick hope and just us. We are

First Published in Moist Poetry Journal With the Wash on Our Hip We are bigger when we’re born, but the past is not a prologue. When we first get into the world, every last thing is otherworldly. Makes you wonder where we came from. But then, maybe before we get to the middle of our allotted time, with our hair in knots and the wash on our hip, and a permanent ache in our joints, this all becomes it all: it’s our kids turn to momentarily wild-eye the world. Makes us be

First Published in Moist Poetry Journal Healing is So Small The ocean is a seed on a low, coughing land and what does that mean what does that mean for us who are the salt of the earth? I know what it means for those who are the light – show the way, not yourself – but do those who are the salt preserve or dissolve?

First Published in Roi Fientantor Gaffes Will Be The Glory To err is human, to something is divine. I could Google it. But I have a problem with the whole setup. Pit human against divine, it’s obvious: humans lose every time. But where it goes from there—I’ve had enough. The planet would be better without us. Machines can do everything better than humans. Humans are only special in how much we suck. What happened? Why do so many of us hate us enough to believe the world wou

Originally Published in the Bacopa Literary Review " Oh. There Is No Going Back " came to me in an instant, nearly whole, on the day in April 2021 when I realized that we as a society are never going back to normal. I had long since stopped wiping down every screen and surface with hydrogen peroxide and I wasn't washing my hands raw every 12 hours anymore like I had the previous year, but I had truly thought that the end of this would at least be in view by the second Easter