Tag: speculative elegy
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Birds and Milkweed
Birds and Milkweeds emerged from a moment of listening—pressing my ear to my wife’s chest and imagining wings. The poem enacts the illusion of flight that love offers, and the beauty that remains after we fall. Butterflies and milkweed form a memento mori—not of grief, but of transformation. I wanted to write a poem that…
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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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Blue Mercy
“Blue Mercy” began as a quiet observation—a fly, a door, a gesture. But beneath its domestic stillness, I found a philosophical hinge: mercy as both restraint and release. The poem is an allegory of consequence, where the blue swatter becomes a symbol of ethical tension—between intervention and surrender, between light and disappearance. My wife’s presence,…
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Aural Shelf
Aural Shelf emerged from my evolving relationship with reading as both ritual and mutation. As my eyesight weakened, I began experiencing books through audio, digital, and tactile formats simultaneously. This poem is a speculative elegy for the decay of traditional literary forms—and a celebration of their metamorphosis into hybrid experiences. It’s also a personal archive:…