A WILLOWS LOST LOVE

bereavement is so sleeveless, cut with shagged scissors 
purgatory made us sisters,                        held hand in 
                                                                       swollen lymph glands,     
maybe PTSD is just another autoimmune disease

When I was younger I had this ritual encompassing the weeping tree
Every year I would cut it, and every year it would get shorter as I grew.
We moved when I was 13, and I had to say goodbye to the tree,
sometimes I see it as my entrance into depression and loss,
as if the tree punished me for moving on, not taking care of it anymore

They planted her in other people,    I know her heart is
out there         is it yearning for me like she did?
Sown, sewn inside somebody and stirring squirming 
coursing through their bloodstream, rooting into her soul
or are souls just a fever dream?

I am but a cutting in her world; plunged deep into 
far-stretching waters.            An etching of a pink peony
Just for you and me 
carved upon that willow tree

I’ll remember you, if you remember me too

CONCUSSED

Everything in my life happens in pairs; I’m sitting here now facing a concussion much like the concussion I faced three years ago. 

I just possess so much of this urgency. I want to tell you about my body and what it's like coexisting with it. How so much of my daily existence is listening to how different muscles, nerves, and organs settle within me. The fact that anybody had to write an embodied theory is absurd to me because every single moment of my life has been so deeply embodied. But at the same time, I don’t want to bore you with my suffering. The piling on of suffering is gaining a growing numbness of apathy as our daily lives are a constant witnessing of so much of it. There is an urgency for that too. 

I’m drawing an outline of my body as I sit within different spaces. My edge extends beyond my physical form, radiating outwards and inwards simultaneously. Noticing how my body is in contact with things around me; creating edges and negative spaces. This outline is messy but it embraces all. For it is as much of a part of me as my own skin. 

I shouldn’t be looking at a screen, it vibrates and fucking hurts.

Brainrot, (2025), fifthwheel press, Baltimore, USA

CONTENT

balanced, but is it not more like void? 

the days here are smeared with one hand 
and held in the other               clenched
I kiss each knuckle, remembering its name
a bottom lip that bounces over one by one
in its own rhythm, monosyllabic and grazed.

hardwood floors make great back supports
it’s a shame my mind’s still trying to contort
the sun is my cradle now; glowing edges and
rubbed energy between my palms
just friction? but friction is energy anyway

maybe this void is the happiness they spoke of

Ginsberg Prize for Poetry, (2021) Baltimore, USA

DEFICIENCY

Behind closed eyes is this forever-stretching carved spinal wall;
A manufactured urban sprawl upheld by my own often misplaced strength
She will always have taken more from me than anybody could dream of taking
This body, this mind, this child; all me, all hers, all ours

The greatest truth my mother told me was that we will always know our body
better than anybody else, that we are sensitive to its changes, its wants and its
truths - that is our magic power 

She reminds me of when I have not made time for that painful comment to wash
through me in its flushed bell curve in gunky swollen inner ears, a missed glass of
water in the tiniest of pressure in my right kidney, aches when I haven’t paused to
hear the struggles of my instep in a few hours, reflux when I squish my pride back
down inside my intestines, not letting it swell in my chest 

You will grieve that for me, You call that wanting of attention, a need to be
different. You call me fussy or intolerant. You see an illness as something I should
want to have an answer for, something that makes me deficient 

I feel this condition as a rooted understanding I have built with my form

A game of give-and-take, a marriage 

INTIMATE

You fill a lung and a half if I breathe for long enough. Maybe more if you can reel it out like a line of cranial nerves. I can’t exhale until you do. Yet you’re insipid, I don’t even scream anymore. You allude to the irretrievable moments. You leave my liver cold, rotting in a plastic bag. Your fingers abate, not even managing a knot in my intestines. You abandon an eyelash on the pillow. And the phone rings. I pick up and recall you left my tongue in the fridge. The receiver is my eye reminding me to taste what is left. But the gastric acid doesn't even pass my knees on their way to my lips. You watch. Your body lying still, encased in my stomach. It is my turn now. I rupture your capillaries and tie you up in your own arteries. I hold your ear in my hand. It is face down, re-reading the future of my palms. Apparently, it is still critical as you wail through your spine. Maybe I can conceal it in your skin. But I am pretty sure this surgery is completely irreversible. 

MY ANTI-ATIVAN ANTI_ANXIETY
 

                        Mediated medication releases the snakes in my stomach
Swirling out through my gullet into this world dissolved in a headache 
I keep leaving all these thoughts unsolved, letting them dissipate 
But they always manage to germinate; Ativan makes me procrastinate
my anxiety.

do we ever get that break they talk about? I’ve been searching for it since
I was thirteen. That serene is a smokescreen covered in Vaseline
I’m those musty middays, enshrouded in the clouds, never allowing
myself to emit rays. And half a tab will just put me in that daze
I’m never letting go of.

ON CONTACT
 

I often find that loving and caring for somebody makes me feel the most within the curatorial. These moments of contact we’ve been sharing, the collision an our gravitas, it's all within exhibition. Paul O'Neill's wallpaper hitting painting contact has nothing on that pause you take before you kiss me. And I thought O’Neill’s theory was revolutionary. The physicality of how objects feel so light without that contact, wall, painting, two bodies colliding. It’s intimate. Honestly, it’s kind of sexual. I’m not sure if O’Neill would love that, but when you're in love you relate everything to that feeling. The closeness.

TACHYPSYCHIA
 

I’ve been colliding with every hour, my face against the clock
It’s only 7:30, yet somehow it’s been 3 am for days
The twilight seeping into my mind, filling it with haze
creating this ceiling above my head, that follows me out the door 

I can’t recollect half of a single second of any given year
all my moments puckered and memories agape 
everything woven into my newest type of restraint 
trying to capture me within the every now and then 

I just want to know who she was

THAMES WATER
 

I've been laying myself to rest in this bathtub coffin
I wake up in your love but by the 4 pm sunset our futures seep back in
You can measure my depression by the extent of my water bill

Are we supposed to know what the self encompasses? I’ve been trying
to work this out for a while now. Is it just my head or is it my heart too?
My body always feels like this extra limb, it’s kind of dead
Weight.

I want to worship my nothingness, I’m so tired of being caught up in this glow,
It used to be a womb, warm and empowered,

Now I’m being devoured on the daily.

THE DAY AFTER I EXPERIENCED YOUR ABSENCE FOR THE FIRST TIME


It’s so cliché.
I’ve been in love with her for quite some time now. I don’t when it started,
I only just noticed.                                                    I think she crept up on me.
I like her more than myself, she feels more real perhaps genuine
                                                                                                                   Approachable

I want her

Interlacing my connections between the child and this space I reside in now; attentive to her needs, this petty nostalgia crawls between my skin and skull
perceptive to her limbs again, somehow beyond mundane in their sensibility
still shedding the membrane of deep aching pain, I want to invite her in
push her through and into my preview, an unapproachable aura I cling to
In noticing the absence in the steps, contact, weight
an intimate divorce grips my hands, crescent moon nail marks left in palms
I can’t comfort her loss, forever entangled in her tenancy with the past

WHEN ASTERS BLOOM

For autumn to be already taking
a cautionary step
in my direction,

An algid September delivers a prediction of the perilous.
Petals of the Aster bow down to remind me of their protection 
yet they coalesce before my finger tips can sense their patience.
Persistence; the stranger that clings too hard to our coexistence,
that disclosed fragrance is what I must yield to, 
            and I have tried.
I’d like to testify to their outreaching hands; 
  I’m terrified.
Oh Aster, can’t you be a docile sprawl as you once were before
The uncertainties net outwards as complex as the fronds,
twisting in ways I can only aspire to control.
The doubt hyper lapses from a seed into breaking the soil
fracturing through my heels, entwining my ankles in their coils.