free verse I’m doing the thing I didn’t want to do again. I’m caught up in the web of flashing lies again. Pocket-sized slot machine resting by my bedside, I think it’s time to cut the power cord. A stiff neck and a broken spirit, this game is rigged —…

haiku I never knew how to take care of rose bushes, but now I’m learning. And, by the way, a rose can just be a rose with no greater meaning, it can just exist. All of its complexities are visually apparent. Isn’t it comforting to know that, to share a world…

One morning, I left the house in my cable-knit cap and boots, and by the time I came home, summer was seeping in through the floorboards and through the attic window. Nothing had been maintained — not the yard, not my legs or toenails, not the screen doors or storm windows, though the heat’s arrival shouldn’t…

I had a dream that a great brown bird, like an eagle or an overgrown mourning dove, flew above our neighborhood in long sweeping ovals as a homing pigeon does. “How does it feel,” I asked him, “to fly?” He said nothing, only landed softly upon the grass and covered my…

It’s trite, sometimes, what I write about, and my fear is that my words can’t stand on their own two legs without an Instagram filter, a middle school thesaurus makeover, or cheap theatrics. I am still the Valkyrie of the words spoken in my home and in my mind, but the outside world…