Tag: emotional resonance
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Reverb
Reverb” emerged from a moment of quiet recognition—when I realized I was speaking in my mother’s cadence, carrying her grief as if it were my own. The poem is built as a series of couplets that echo generational sorrow without resolving it. I wanted the rhythm to waver, to enact the instability of grief itself.…
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This Should Not Be
This Should Not Be” emerged from a moment of ethical rupture—the unbearable knowledge that someone I loved lived in terror until her death. The poem is not a lament but a ritualized protest. I wanted to write something that refused sentimentality and instead enacted consequence. The repetition of “inscrutable” is deliberate—it marks her being trapped…
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Author Notes
“Author Notes” emerged from a refusal of wanting to answer the the question game—If you were an animal, which would you be? It demands a transformation I do not want to indulge in. It neglects experience and demands transformation. Instead I indulged with the possibilities of Harold’s Purple Crayon. I imagined writing it with my…
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Finalities
Finalities emerged from a moment of ritual clarity after my mother’s passing. I wanted to honor not just her memory, but the gestures others made to restore her—clipping her hair, dressing her in youth, renaming her Elsi. It stages mourning as a quiet choreography of speculative grace. It’s about the transformation of a woman into…
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The Patterns of Water
The Patterns of Water” emerged from a memory that felt both sacred and procedural—a maternal baptism not of faith, but of consequence. I wanted to honor the ritual of care without sentimentality, to trace the gesture of cleansing as a symbolic tether between vulnerability and becoming. The poem is built on repetition, foam, and the…
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Ghosting
“Ghosting” emerged from the quiet aftermath of survival—after cancer, after loss, after the rituals that remain. It’s a poem about haunting not as horror, but as intimacy: the idea that love, memory, and consequence linger in objects, gestures, and the dog’s bark. I wrote it as a speculative elegy, imagining my own absence as a…
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Six Hours of Silence— And Then
Six Hours of Silence—And Then” emerged from a moment of quiet observation during a layover — the kind of liminal space where strangers share time without speaking. I was struck by how intimacy can flicker and vanish in seconds, how the ache of almost-connection lingers longer than we expect. The poem is built around that…
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The Wind that Speaks Between Us
The Wind that Speaks Between Us“The wind is a warning,” I tell the child.“No, it’s a game,” she says to me.I watch her chase the breeze barefoot across the hills.She laughs as its breath scatters the field to dandelion puffs.In the fluff, it whispers secrets only children can hear.She doesn’t see all the other things…
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Vessels
VesselsThe pots remembered emptiness,remembered the ache of hunger,how they were born to forestall famine,to be filled and filled again,to feed mother, father, the children.not this silent, stew-less simmer.When the kitchen faucet dripped out of rhythm,the backsplash tile sprinkled dustonto the dirty water,onto the tarnished coreof the lonely pans sitting stagnant in the sink,they almost felt…
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The Art that Stayed
I was expecting giants—brushstrokes that shaped history, colors that conquered time. But the walls whispered absence, their icons carried elsewhere, lent to hands that bear their weight. Only the quiet ones remained, anchored in the still air, aching to be adopted, longing for eyes to grant them meaning, a gaze that wholly loves their frail…