Latest Poems
A Missionary’s Lament
Stories from all over the world hold that wayfarers, especially sailors, often got tattoos of swallows. It was, after all, the swooping swallows against the blue sky they would see well before they could see familiar shores. Swallows meant they were home. When I got my first tattoo, I already had a foot in Costa Rica and Georgia. I was coming to terms with the hard truth that having made a home in two countries meant I’d never “come home” without leaving another.
Heaven
Why does heaven feel closer in the woods? I ask that as if I do not know the answer. Maybe I simply want to tell myself why. The sky is closer up here in this tree, and the forest is where I pour myself out, always hoping, always asking to be filled back up—but not with what I had before. Never what I had before.
Wind and Rain
“Tell me, Wind,” said Rain, “you who catches me in your cool embrace, what it means to wander, to wander the world, to want no direction.”
Student
I learned to bury myself in exams and exhaustion, in pink highlighters and black thoughts, in study guides and late nights, in straight As and tangled headphones. I learned everything I was supposed to be, and everything I wasn’t; I learned that I could live my best life and still see pieces of my worst.
Coronation
The moon burned red in the deep, dark pool. The stars gazed down in awe as the maid strode down the ancient path, her fate engraved by law.
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