for my cousin Nadia.   Peeled back as a baby to reveal her delicate insides – heart laid bare. Someone wished upon her like a flower and...

South of close relatives, north of the minor arcana of pre-deceased coworkers, neighbors, et cetera, subset of the mammoth    ship of...

It’s New Year’s Eve, and I’m lying on the couch with my head on my boyfriend’s heart and my left hand fingering his lower lip. It’s firm...

The biggest betrayal I ever met I handled like an infant at the supermarket wailing down aisles, bawling tears of denial tearing down...

Summer is once again hot, heavy and humid. Sweat already prickles on my brow the moment I open my car door. It sweeps over me and around...

the windows of the train are cloudy: scratches and water stains blur the surface—it’s just like watching an old television, except there...

I remember buying basil with my mother. At the counter I swam in time too small for weekday nets to catch— where it’s wrists wearing...

When she taught me to swim, she said, only breathe if you absolutely have to — as if oxygen was not needed to live. I often feel like a...

The hue of her wooden frame turned cerulean after her husband left.  Blue now covers the heart’s jagged rock limbs.  She becomes a skiff...

A sigh creates St. Helens’ ash swallowing weeks old milk and grandpa’s leather recliner into the heart of a midwest false-spring...

You were God’s messenger—ethereal creation, the first lesbian I knew besides Shelly Guy, who had a butterfly tattooed on her wrist at a...

On days when I get sick of applications and working dead-end jobs I run to the lake. On my way along the hills that chart my course...