SELECTED WRITINGS

"In one reality, I am the blood of my ancestry, generation after generation of silent female suffering, woman after woman bearing the furry infestation of weeds spread so thick and far, no sperm could carve its way to the promised land of the aching womb buried behind it. In the other, I am unworthy of motherhood, as every woman in my family conceives, and conceives, and conceives, and those who don’t splinter, forgotten, from the family tree. To call it destiny might feel worse, but is there any difference?"

"In the many years I’ve been myself, I’ve contemplated the taste and shape of survival. The many uses of a human mouth. How a whisper and a scream can sound exactly the same given the right temperature. It’s been months since the Last Man and I haven’t craved sex, just filling. There is no escape from this body, with both its magic and tragedy bearing the truth of so much male memory. If I could count my pulse like rings in a tree, I might discover there’s no one left."

"know if you are a daughter, or a son instead, or a bottled beam of light, you may shatter-crack this world into submission. know you may revel in its mediocrity. know you are not broken even when you think you are. know someday you will love another. know some days you will wake up with your skin burning, clawing for escape. know your own heart houses many dangers & will birth galaxies. know you are the burgeoning inside."

"And I’ve convinced myself I am a list of holes. Crouched in child’s pose, my butterfly lungs don’t trust color. This, the year of the gorilla screaming flesh shredded and guts thrown far, my life motto comes wholesale from an overpriced pillow: stay wild, like these heart wounds aren’t sink holes like these caters grown cavernous aren’t ringing. Is there a way to love without breaking your own heart? I don’t know, but I’m guilty"

"It is American to dream / for some it comes easy / blue hair girls with red-eyed boys / everybody has a story that’ll stop your tongue from beating / everybody wants to be seen trying / but today I remind you of the only woman who ever loved you / & manifest that every passing storm is a hurricane / & bury the bodies of earthlings too joyful to run from all the screaming"

"Maybe this is a poem about letting in and out, maybe this is a poem about before the earth grew moldy with people there was a patch of bright expanding I’ve been tangled in the rot or rivers run dry from exhaustion I’ve been the river running from"

"On the day I was born, I sprouted seed in a bed of magma, tore through bedrock and ascended, blistered, through the ocean floor, floated weightless to the top, and ambled into being. Years later, miles away, I was pushed through floorboards, unfurled through a spool of carpet fiber, and resurrected a pulsing wound, naming each vibration a miracle."

"I’ve always taken sacrifice way too far. This is probably the only thing Jesus and I have in common, minus the long hair and parading through life with a gaggle of broken men following close behind. There is no good reason I have heard for why Jesus, in all of his wonder and glory, had to bleed in agony, like some deer hanging in a hillbilly garage, draining his insides out, hemorrhaging brightness and suffering—a bizarre prize for existing. It’s a little heavy-handed, if you ask me. But then for two-thousand years, everything I wrote was about sacrifice and the noble act of carving into my bloodied self, ripping myself limb from limb, and dismembering my spirit for a glimpse of belonging, so what do I know anyway."

"On a Tuesday morning I stained my underwear a streak of rust no one could explain to me quite like Adrienne. You leak because girls leak when they want babies. I was ten and I didn’t want babies, and I didn’t quite understand how wanting babies could explain the way I leaked, but I understood that being a girl child meant something special was happening to me and everyone else was too afraid to tell me what that was. I could sense the earthly wisdom of fifteen-year-old Adrienne who knew so much I never would, who experienced the world through splintered perception I envied for the purity of it. I was ten but I could recognize the dewy majesty within her, the pungent ache of her hunger when she grinned at Robert, the pharmacy tech, each week my mother took us to pick up Adrienne’s prescriptions at Walgreens, all running out at different times throughout the month. To our mother, nothing Adrienne did amounted to anything other than disappointment. She was something to be maintained. Controlled. No one was prepared for the fury within to take hold of her body like disease."