Tag: minimalism
-
Family Tree
Family Tree began as an image of a house without windows and a river carrying away its debris. The poem explores how time erodes lineage—the way humanity sloughs into the river’s swell and becomes part of its current.
-
The Watching
I wrote My Pigeon Heart after watching a pigeon settle on the ledge of an abandoned building downtown. The image felt like a mirror — a creature surviving in ruin, indifferent to collapse. The poem’s architecture is vertical: a descent from observation to fracture. It’s about the violence of stillness, the small greatness of endurance,…
-
Each Morning Before Dawn
I wrote Each Morning Before Dawn after noticing how the small rituals of care—refilling a bird feeder, waiting for song—can reveal the violence beneath domestic calm. The poem began as a record of sound and silence, but it evolved into a meditation on expectation and dread. The mockingbird and squirrel became emblems of persistence and…
-
Stones
“Stones” emerged from a walk with my autistic brother, where the gravel beneath us felt like a ledger—each stone a record of what we’ve inherited and what we must carry. I wrote it to honor the physicality of memory and the way lineage shapes our future terrain. The poem resists sentimentality and abstraction, staying grounded…
-
Wrinkle-less
Wrinkle-less emerged from a moment of reflection on how survival—through illness, loss, and aging—leaves marks that are not always visible. I wanted to resist the cultural shorthand that equates wrinkles with wisdom, virtue or experience, and instead offer a poem where absence becomes a site of consequence. The scars, deafness, and neuropathy I reference are…