Girl Forgive Yourself

(four attempts) 1 These days, I am away from home. They call it “house-sitting” because houses are like babies: they need care, they absorb what happens around them, they can burden. I am trying to construct a theory of homespace....

Two Howling Poems

I know / what I don’t know. I know / my lack of knowing is its own kind / of camouflage Irrelevant Animals for crisi lee When they get together, the sky turnsmatchbook, green & blue with mad- ness. Random...

Good Grief

Grief and joy are born of the same materials. The one needs the same stuff as the other. I open my journal to a new page. Today is my mother’s birthday. Today I learn additional details about my dear friend’s...

13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT A POEM

1. Some things can only be achieved through failure. This requires a reconceptualization of what it means to succeed: being comfortable with the presence of the one, and with the absence of the other one. 1.1 Sometimes it’s the words...

Three Poems

Girls are / after all / relational. Clicking on each poem below will pull up a PDF of the full text of the poem Digital art “Girl in Snow” by Ali Battey

ATTENTION, MADNESS

When a receiving public does not value nuance or context, a person’s complexity can be boiled down to their most readily visible, most extreme, and most obvious parts. The “limit” of you becomes the all of you…we fail to consider...

Introducing: Uncommon Sense

A column that celebrates intuition, emotion, and sensitivity as important forms of knowledge. When I first sat down to write an introduction to my column, “Uncommon Sense,” I became immediately nervous. Why? Maybe I was worried about accidentally placing limitations...

Two Bug Poems

Ways in which I am unlike a bug I do not breed rapidly. At the end of the day, I still haven’t learned to fly: neither truly, nor directly. I have no prehistoric emergency parachute to speak of. Try as...

July 26-28

Poems from Planets and Other Circumstances, a manuscript in progress.

Everything Can’t Be An Essay

Language is the same thing as paint. Sometimes you use it to communicate an easy message, easily. You don’t even need to describe what you’ve done because it’s right there in the picture, in the sentence. And sometimes you must...