When September light touches the sky, it also warms her heart to a tranquil gratitude. Here in the hands that hold her heart, she has found her semblance of heaven.

all those times of sitting still, they were not for nothing. roots have started to grow even in gaping spaces that needed to be filled. and, as suspected, the world truly has more to offer. more than those rainclouds that follow some of you around, i would say. i am about to huddle in one corner to start reading research papers. but I think of cozying up to something else beyond figures and texts like maybe slinking away into the black and white box of jules et jim.

i love you.

hello, 2008.

This long silence, I assure you dear reader, is not the offspring of banality. There are many stories to share, ones with plots like “a cat trampling over piles of soiled shirts and keeping guard as I clean toilet bowls” or “obnoxious street rockers yodeling or something to that effect in alleyways along my daily walking path” or "the sound of a page turning in interview rooms decorated with banana-shaped lamps and San Francisco's skyline" or “customers who get fidgety over skincare and makeup screening questions, and then ask about Kimora Lee's new perfume”. How odd.

I have been collecting experiences. Someday, I hope they will be beautiful things on our walls.

her ailment

published at Literary Tonic

days apologize for asphyxiating silences
borne from pain, bore data
plots like constellations
or vultures circling above, waiting
for those roots to grow
into that fine network of fibers and vessels
as intricate as bodies of research one reads
for love of the other, skimmed
if not.

and evenings fold her lungs
revealing seams of a quiet ache
like loneliness
no one understands, no one wants

to understand.

I have been asking myself lately what might be the best career for a woman like me. Apart from having a way with pigeons, I do have a talent for sitting still.

I turn thirtyone in one day.

Felix

always, there is something to see
and someone to stare back at my glare
what now is what she says
and if I can learn her tongue
I would manage a bad joke
somewhere between the spilled milk
and bowl of tuna fish to make her guffaw
with her sides jiggling as though she was watching
one of her favorite films

always, there is something to remember
her lard-filled refrigerator and lines upon lines
of medication that crowd her kitchen counter
or how the milkman rings thrice every week
and maybe once or twice when her brother visits
and she cries on her thighs, but this is not something
I want to remember

always, there is something to hear
when she reads to me from across the room
and her words bounce through the windows
where her neighbors hear from the other side
all these intimate details known to one and the other
but never their names

always, there is something to smell
spool of yarn unrolling, burning
wood in her father’s house by the sea
filled with coffeepots and tin cans
like her knick knacks that echo out
to subtly guide me of this
this smell all too human

the house

published at BluePrintReview

six p.m. and the light snakes its way to open spaces. rust. sediment in grasses that do not grow. moths humming on loose window panes where the night creeps in. in here, they say, in here. darkness is chewed beneath the hardwood floors, splinters. like the a e i o u are slightly off on furniture marks. discontent is worn like pendants by porcelain dolls with black holes for eyes. six and i am counting three cracked plates in the pantry and three syllables unfurling from my mouth. all the commotion gathered along the bones of bruised bedspreads. it is there. every sink is rinsed clean with immaculate black oil.

outside, the streetlamps are flickering. silence among the soundless petrified blooms.

Black Angel, Iowa City

happy october!