Tag: ritual
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The Empty Chair
This poem originated from the ritual of watching films with someone I loved, and the chair she occupied became a consecrated site after her passing. Each line mimics a film frame rate—24 letters per line—so the poem itself becomes a reel of memory. Commas and dashes act as cuts, splicing grief into cinematic rhythm. The…
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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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Sightlines
Sightlines” emerged from a moment of ritual clarity—when my aging eyes, no longer tasked with precision, began to see through blur into beauty. The poem honors the body’s quiet adaptations and the mind’s compensatory grace. It’s a minimalist elegy for vision, a philosophical gesture toward perception as ritual. I wanted to write something that doesn’t…
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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…
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A Proper Fold
A Proper Fold emerged from my ongoing exploration of ritual as both inheritance and resistance. I wanted to write a poem that honored the quiet violence of conformity—how grief, gender, and legacy get folded into gesture. The speaker is a 4-F child shaped by military precision and familial duty, yet excluded from the honors that…
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Sunset Visit
“Sunset Visit” emerged during a twilight walk through a cemetery near my childhood home. I was struck not by grief, but by the contrast between the quiet of the dead and the noisy solitude each visitor carried—thoughts, regrets, memories. The poem began as a study in light and stone, but deepened into a meditation on…
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Photo Stop
This poem began as a meditation on gesture—specifically, the act of photographing something not to share, but to preserve a private emotional truth. I was thinking about how grief often manifests in small, unceremonious rituals: lifting a phone, deleting and retaking an image, placing it back in a purse chosen for protection rather than style.…
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When the city leaves you—
When the City Leaves You is a poem about the aftermath of abandonment—personal, civic, and emotional. It unfolds in fragments, each stanza a vignette of silence, gesture, or failed connection. The speaker moves through a landscape of urban decay and quiet witnessing, encountering figures who reflect their own disorientation. The poem resists resolution, instead dignifying…
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Flash Flood
Flash Flood is a poem of witness—set in the Tennessee hills during a sudden flood—and traces the unraveling of lineage, memory, and land. The poem honors the quiet promise to stay, even when everything is being undone.
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Arguing with the Dead
Arguing With the DeadBegin by calling her by name,not the one etched on the granite monument in front of you,not the one printed on the birth certificate—that temporary name another motherwas forced to dream upin the haze of post-labor fade,in the ecstasy of seeing youfor the first time—something that grew for nine monthsinside this other,and…
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Prayers Between Us
I do my laundryin the rhythm of my mother’s prayers—each crease a rosary,folding divineto divine.I count the timesher perils met mine—with hands that trembledat my fever,hands burntin a kitchenunseen,List the register of her and mine shared frailties:the way we flinched at sudden joy, unsure it would stay,All the letters written to my heart—the notes she…
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You
You Sometimes in my dreams I touch the body of another woman— not my mother, or my wife, not anyone I’ve known or seen. She’s a woman of first times and seasons natural and unnatural, who tells me ghost stories filled with un-lived truths that arise not from soil and sky, stories seen in a…
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There Is a Disco Ball Shimmering
There is a Disco Ball shimmering🌸Pink on softened blood still wet with arrival—dancing in the cradle of mother’s first touch—both she and midwife weepingin the baptism of first scream.🍊Orange in jitters across lunch trays,school desks, scraped knees.The ball tells him— “Learn from this”—then spins awaywhen he shines too clever.💜 Purple that aches on the letter…
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Supermoon
My wife was still doing her hair and makeup before our meal at Cocina Abierta—a seven-course tasting circled in red weeks ago—a promise we weren’t sure we’d keep.So my brother and I filled the hour wandering the narrow streets of the city rooted in my mother’s heart and past, San Juan—where I’ve paused—for now—before our…
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I Had To Stop Writing My Poem
I had to stop writing my poem to do more important things.The washing machine buzzed—whining again for someoneto shift the wet clothesto the dryer.An hour later, midwaythrough the third stanzaof the love poem to my wife,the dryer complained— there’s a load now dry, waiting to be folded.I dug the mix out: half hers, half mine—mostly…
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Shoelace Ritual with Fog Milk and Hemlock Pocket
Shoelace Ritual with Fog Milk and Hemlock PocketSometimes I dream:That I was trying to walk the crosswalk and my shoelaces turned into tiny serpents that tried to bind my ankles to the white lines.I tried to unlace them, leave them in the street, but each knot undid re-knotted into more vipersstreaming confetti fire from their…
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Opening the Package
I love the quiet delight that blooms as I unwrap a gift folded with care— how they showed me, instinctively, without words, the furoshiki way: the offering poised with symmetry at each perfect corner, beginning with the triangle (near your beating heart), guiding it to center. then echo outwards (the symmetry in silence); gathering each…