Tag: compressed lyric
-
Ghosted
This poem began as an attempt to track how a presence moves through a house without naming the presence or the emotion behind it. Its theme is refusal—what the body won’t do, what the haunting won’t accept, and how those refusals shape the space between them.
-
The Dress
This poem began with the image of a man holding a dress in a dim room, an object behaving as both memory and disguise. Its theme is how clothing can momentarily alter the body’s outline and expose what grief refuses to say.
-
Wind
This poem began with the sensation of wind as a physical agent—something that rearranges a room without permission. I wanted to write into that pressure, letting objects register the disturbance while the human world remained unconscious.
-
Making Lemonade Street
I wrote “Making Lemonade Street” after watching a forest near my neighborhood being cleared for new housing. The poem began as a note on the phrase “the forest in front of the forest”—a doubling that felt like both description and elegy. I wanted to record the moment when the natural and the artificial overlap, when…
-
Where Are You My Friend…?
This poem emerged from walking through a heat-struck urban lot where absence felt more physical than memory. I wanted the poem to carry abandonment through objects—barbed wire, cats, asphalt—without commentary. The body persists, but only through what it touches. The theme is not grief but residue: what remains when someone doesn’t.
-
Wail
Wail began as a test of restraint. I wanted to write a death poem without ornament, without metaphor, without reaching for comfort. The whale song emerged early—strange, bodily, and distant—and I kept it because it refused explanation. The poem is about sound that leaves the body and doesn’t come back. It’s about the final sleep…