Tag: object-driven lyric
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Settling
I wrote Settling from the memory of watching mothers place their newborns into cribs for the first time—the motion was exact, almost ritual. The poem examines how objects record tenderness through weight and release rather than emotion.
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Large Language Questions
I wrote Large Language Questions while testing how grammar itself can fracture under pressure. Each question turns syntax into a physical object—hinge, blade, lock—so that language becomes a machine grinding against desire.
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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.
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Smitten
This poem began as an attempt to strip the forge down to its procedural essentials — heat, pressure, marking — and let the body register the transformation without emotional naming. I’m interested in how objects enact change, how the smallest indentation becomes a record of force.
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The Thing Is
wrote The Thing Is after watching ash fall from a burned letter and realizing how grief behaves like sediment — heavy, particulate, and impossible to swallow. The poem explores how matter carries emotion when language refuses to.
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Buying Sumo Oranges at Pike Place Market, Seattle
I wrote Buying Sumo Oranges at Pike Place Market, Seattle after watching the market’s light flatten fruit into objects of weight and memory. The poem examines how consumption and absence coexist—how touch and taste replace speech when grief becomes physical.
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Elegy for a Future Death
Elegy for a Future Death began as a refusal. I wanted to write an elegy that didn’t console, didn’t mythologize, didn’t reach for metaphor. The poem strips away atmosphere and sentiment, leaving only the physical residue of absence: chain, pan, towel, nail. It’s a lyric of erosion—of what remains when return is no longer possible.…
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After the Movie
“After the Movie” emerged from the residue of a theater’s disassembly—the rupture of communal silence into the flicker of screens and the crackle of wrappers. I wanted to capture the moment when the film ends but its emotional architecture lingers in the objects and gestures left behind.