Tag: emotional compression
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The Purple Glass
The Purple Glass” began with an object my mother once handed me—useless, she said, but beautiful. The poem traces how that uselessness became memory’s last vessel, holding what language can’t restore.
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Rest Stop
Rest Stop” began as a memory fragment—an actual roadside pause that became a corridor for grief. I wanted the poem to resist sentimentality and instead let the environment carry the emotional weight. Every sound, every object, every interruption is doing the work of memory and refusal. The poem is about the failure to name, the…
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TICONDEROGA
TICONDEROGA began as a meditation on the physical relationship between body and object—specifically, the pencil as a site of memory, refusal, and violence. I wanted to write a poem that treated the pencil as a forensic artifact. The bite marks, the flaking paint, the taste of wood—all of these are real, bodily details. The poem…