Tag: compression
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The Lantern’s Vigil
This poem began as a study of ritual and light—how grief moves through objects without naming itself. I wanted the river to do the speaking, to let the lanterns fail quietly and completely.
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A Child’s Toys
I wrote A Child’s Toys after passing an encampment beneath an overpass where discarded playthings mirrored the fragility of shelter. The poem traces how innocence collapses into survival, how the compass of childhood still spins in ruin.
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Expulsion
I wrote Expulsion after realizing how exile can happen inside the body itself—how being torn from one’s own ground feels both violent and necessary. The poem’s theme is rupture as transformation: the moment when pain becomes the only proof of change.
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Morning Origami
I wrote Morning Origami out of the daily ceremony of chronic pain — the body folding itself under invisible pressure. The poem enacts that ritual as a dialogue between sky and flesh, where endurance becomes a kind of devotion.
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Plagiarism
This poem began as a meditation on how renewal can feel like duplication rather than change. Its theme is the tension between natural recurrence and human fatigue—the way life reissues itself even when we wish it wouldn’t.
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Vestige
I wrote Vestige out of the memory of my mother’s rituals—how care and vigilance could harden into preservation. The poem began with the image of towels draped over thorns, a gesture that felt both protective and sacrificial. I wanted to explore how domestic acts—counting, tending, washing—become ceremonies of control and grief. The poem’s tone is…