i live two lives
(one beside the other)

one life for the world
(one in my mind)

i always say I’m fine
(i’m falling apart)

i smile and joke along
(i’m crying)

i play well with others
(i just want to be alone)

i do what is expected
(i’m so tired of trying)

i check every box on the list
(i’m shaking inside)

i keep showing up as myself
(but I don’t know who that is anymore)

i put on this costume daily
(i am running out of me)

(i don’t recognize my voice
and it is fading)

Nib on paper whispers
With movement of my hand
Ink left behind to pool
Along my words then dry
Story unfolding fast
Faster than I can write
Story forming better—
Then comes dry-formed scratches
I sigh as ink runs out

Paper towels and faucet
I fill the reservoir
Shake fast and shake it hard
Inject glass of water
Like spooked and fleeing squid
Then disassemble pen
Gold nib and feed and cap
Scuffs from pocket travel
All left to soak a while

Gently I assemble
All but my hands are clean
Boxes of ink jars clink
This is the hardest part
Green and black and purple
Red, brown, and autumn orange
I love them equally
But one catches my eye
Royal blue speaks to me

Dipped below the ink line
Rush of pressured vacuum
A sudden flash of ink
Pen weighted in my grip
Back to starving story
Nib on paper whispers
With movement of my hand
Story unfolding fast
Faster than I can write

Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor
Self-Subduing and Repressing Implement

Four months before our wedding
he told me he couldn’t do it
unless I got my shit together.
(he may have used nicer words; I don’t know; I was drunk)

and thus I spent the entirety of our marriage (except for the 1st, planned, pregnancy)
on a drug that took deliberate aim
at my overly-emotional
emotions.

For sixteen years
I warily observed an existence
that didn’t require a box of tissues at a movie (happy or sad),
that didn’t include yelling matches with strangers in a bar over a baseball game,
that was so very balanced
and so very dulled.
Like watching life through a closed window,
when my grandma died
I felt the tears somewhere behind the pharmaceutical barricade
but they never broke loose.

Mere months before the demise of my marriage,
I ended my time on SSRIs
and then upended
everything.
I spent the early months retraining in feeling:
scream-crying along with Taylor Swift lyrics;
burying grief under a smile for my children;
soaring with pride and bliss as I wandered down new paths;
setting free the deluge of unnamed emotions that had never dissipated,
but was simply penned in
by the pills.

I still run from it sometimes
but as you kiss my forehead and tease, “So emo…”
I let myself get carried away again
in this tide I once knew
and it feels
like coming home.

6/9/26

Jimmy’d pop out the kickstand on his yellow bike
and stand in the intersection directing traffic,
his blue ball cap pulled low shading soda bottle eyeglasses.
Above his head the traffic light kept its separate rhythm.  

Folks who didn’t know him, at first and from a distance
thought he was a kid. In a way, he was –
a perpetual ten-year-old leaving the group home each morning
to cruise the streets on his bicycle,
no fancy gears, a kid’s bike.

The police department tolerated Jimmy
as he tucked his hand-made parking tickets
beneath windshield wipers of vehicles
threaded along Main and Washington.
“He ain’t hurtin’ nothin’.”  

I volunteered at the soup kitchen,
and the group home called regularly
reminding us not to feed diabetic Jimmy.
He took our rejection well
as long as he could sit down with his coffee.

Then he’d mooch off the trays of others.
“You want that chocolate cake?” he’d ask.
“Naw, Jimmy, you can have it.”
“How ‘bout them corn muffins?”
“Take ’em, Jimmy.”  

When Jimmy died
Shelbyville lost one of its flavors.
We missed the orange flag flapping above his bicycle
as he patrolled our streets.
Edgar, the Vietnam vet, and Booger Bill
with his wad of dollars stuffed
in the pockets of his flapping overcoat
momentarily kept us from becoming
any other small town in Kentucky.  

Now, they too are gone.

        Be sure to live in vain dear. I wish I had.
        Emily Dickinson

A birthday comes but once a year.
Today— mine brings the zinnia’s first bouquet:
Queen lime red, Sahara cherry,
salmon, and yellow flame.

Never true blues, yet who needs them
against an azure sky?
And though clouds blur this morning,
they embrace the heavens still. 

I blow a kiss to Mother Earth—
the one who whispered to Emily D
to live in wonder, as I do here,
in dirt and nature.
The rest is passing mist.

A chipped shoulder can be covered up
if you always let the straps of your bag sit in the crook.
The volume of the handles will balance out the missing piece.
And if you wear a jacket to cover up,
that will fill the gap even more.
Thick sweaters do the job too.
Just cover and fill.
Cover and fill.
Something can always make up for 
the bitty missing piece.
Even if it’s not so small,
you can always find something big enough
to make up for what went: 
what is not there to keep you as warm
as the sweaters you always wear now.

Always in June, I go looking
for a piece to slot in, power the circuit
make something of this endless current
find a way out and a way in
a way closer, a way over
take something, break something
run out screaming.

So this morning, I pour over the cards,
Do what you do.

VI. THE LOVERS.
XIII. DEATH.

So hard to find joy without mess
because there is a hare in me
that wants to wake up in a strange den
knowing nobody but my friends
knowing nothing of the passage of time
but for the sun sweeping across the sky
the cold blue moon, the things we get up to
the harsh neon, the pocket dimension, the emperor’s new clothes
It is like there is never enough information but always too much
Can I draw another?

IV. THE EMPEROR, reversed.

I’ll put on my shoes first
go for a walk, grow giddy
of all the stunts I’ll try
when I get the time.

In the holler where the laurel grows,
And the creek sings low through mossy stones,
There lives a kind of mountain spell
No book has learned and none can tell.

It rides the mist at break of day,
When ridgelines fade to shades of gray,
And hangs like silver on the pines
Where old-time whispers cross the vines.

The granny woman knows its name,
Though she won’t speak it just the same.
She gathers roots by moonlit glow,
Where bloodroot and wild ginseng grow.

The whip-poor-will calls after dark,
A hidden song, a mountain mark.
The owls reply from hemlock shade,
As ancient bargains still are made.

Some say the magic’s in the land—
In weathered rock and calloused hands.
In miners’ lamps and blackened coal,
In hymns that soothe a weary soul.

Some find it dancing in the fire,
That crackling, amber mountain choir,
Where stories passed from kin to kin
Keep all the old worlds living in.

It lingers where the cardinals fly,
Like scarlet sparks beneath the sky,
And follows every winding road
The mountain people call their own.

For Appalachian magic’s not
The kind that’s learned or sold or bought.
It’s faith and memory intertwined,
A stubborn heart, a steady mind.

It’s knowing spring will find the hills
Though winter tests them as it will;
And trusting roots buried deep below
Will bloom again when warm winds blow.

So if you wander through these lands,
Listen close and understand:
The oldest magic you’ll ever know
Lives in the mountains’ quiet glow.

A labyrinth of stone and gloom,
where shadows whisper, softly loom.
Bioluminescent fungi, glowing like stars,
unfurling, bright and slow.
The eerie light, a guiding thread
through winding paths
where fears are fed.
The air is thick, with secrets spun,
in this dark cradle, time comes undone.
Yet in the dark, I find a spark,
a flicker bright, igniting the dark.
Though lost I roam, I’m not alone,
the glowing mushrooms call me home.