on someone’s grandma calling me a gold digger
I’m stuffing my satchel,
slinging it over my shoulder
and tying my shoes
in preparation to finally
start my worldwide journey
of finding where rich people get the audacity.
I’m stuffing my satchel,
slinging it over my shoulder
and tying my shoes
in preparation to finally
start my worldwide journey
of finding where rich people get the audacity.
I can coax out of the deep freeze of memory
boutique Hotel Búðir, a cove with large rocks,
bobs of seaweed, gulls crying happily
above the Icelandic coast, black church glazed
by midnight sun, a pier from which one
could stand and look out on an indifferent sea,
feel the wind blowing in from America, traces
of felled redwood, modified wheat, city exhaust,
salt from trolling nets hung up
after a bust season now tattered by rot,
self subsumed in the present unfamiliar moment,
a glacier suspended on a mountain side,
as if all clocks had agreed
to stop ruining everything.
I’ve always been more of a daddy’s girl
Playing Bambi beneath the couch cushions
Or running from a giant thumping up the stairs
Watching the rain from the garage
Squeals and laughter
Wishing on stars
If I still believed in fairytales
Like father-daughter dances at weddings
I would wish for him
This piece is an ode
to trinkets I longed to buy:
From the wire devil
fiddling on a Georgian stump
to that brooch of pumpkin pie.
Always looked up to my dad for his take charge attitude, caring, sense of humor making me feel safe. Later in my teens I would argue with him but as a child he hung the moon. Mom let me pick out my own gift one Father’s Day to give him. I chose a pink and black striped bowtie not realizing he never wore bowties, just the long straight ties with his suits as he went to work in a 24-story building as an electrical engineer. I was so thrilled to wrap the plastic box that held the tie as Mom watched. He smiled and hugged me when I gifted it to him. It wasn’t till many years later I saw the bowtie in its plastic case on his dresser never worn but saved just the same.
Bowties can be a
Whimsical sign of a man’s
Character & compassion.
a symphony
What Asks to Be Saved
I open the workshop as if unbandaging a wound—
slow, careful, bracing for what’s still tender.
Plaster dust rises in the half‑light,
settling on everything I meant to mend.
On the table, another porcelain girl waits in her box—
fractures threading her face
like a map I’ve traced too many times.
I tell myself to walk back out into the morning,
but the clean split through her cheek
pulls me forward before I can turn.
My hands move before I agree to anything.
I’ve sworn I’m finished with this work,
yet they keep arriving—
swaddled in tissue,
their silence already tugging at the part of me
that never learned to refuse.
Her face loosens under my touch—
a seam giving way,
a fault line bright as a thin blade of light.
Damage repeats itself with such fluency
I barely need to look
to know where the next fracture runs—
and still, I can’t set her down
she looks at me the way no one else does—
as if I might know how to save her.
