Bats see with their mouths.
The tongues of anacondas
taste the lightless deep.

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I wrote about Emily Dickinson and Miranda July’s Old Dolio for Hyperreal Film Journal…

I. The Unyielding Self

Old Dolio lurches and lunges. Green tracksuit jacket zipped to the chin, navy track pants pooling, shoulders curled forward, curtain hair obscuring her face. The main character of writer-director Miranda July’s Kajillionaire, she’s a 26-year-old woman in Los Angeles, raised by two peculiar, petty grifters who teach distance as survival. Emily Dickinson arrives here not through the film, but through the shared instinct between them. Dickinson, who hovers in her signature white dress with that slight, deliberate tilt away from the observer, was a poet in nineteenth-century Amherst who built her own solitude. Her gesture and Old Dolio’s are the same: reduce the surface available for contact. Two women, separated by centuries and circumstance, enact the same ritual: to remain nothing but themselves, no matter how lonely the weather.

READ IT ALL

There was once a woman who organized the world into what she was sure of.

This was not arrogance. It was architecture, an archway of keeping the ceiling up. She stacked certainties the way you stack good dishes: carefully, in the order you may need them. She knew the weight of particular griefs, which rooms, how someone’s voice changes when they’ve made a decision but haven’t told you yet.

Well. She had something bronzed. Kept it and called it knowledge. And there rotting beneath the coating, a feeling, dressed up in the clothes of fact.

The fire of the lantern made everything amber, warmer than it was. She’d trusted the light instead of the hour. This is a very human error, to take the shape of a thing for its content.

Outside, the world continued its unremarkable revisions. A display of oranges restacked. A word she thought she understood used in a new sentence, meaning something else entirely. The bus arrived at the corner a minute earlier than expected. Small corrections, issued without announcement.

Inside, she was holding a map of a changed place.

It’s not the unknown that undoes you. The unknown arrives as itself: strange, requiring attention, asking nothing but presence. It is the known that walks you into walls, those room you’re certain you remember. The turn you take without looking. The one you think you’ve already understood.

She laid the map flat. It was a gorgeous drawing, every wisp of graphite placed with care. No longer accurate.

So she folded it and resisted the urge to throw it away. She’d need it or something like it later. A reference, not a ruling. She opened the door without checking which one first.

The day was already in the middle of itself. Already warm where it was going to be warm. Already indifferent in the places that didn’t know her name.

She stepped into it anyway, wearing her revised certainties like a lighter coat.

What she knew now: that knowing and being right are different countries. That she had spent time in one thinking it was the other.

She walked forward into what she had not yet been wrong about.

There was still, it turned out, quite a lot of it.

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A voice clear amidst a morning of worry. Keep faith. Enjoy this, it is here to be enjoyed. Be cognizant but joyful. You are here to generate joy like an engine.

I love it when someone walks by and smells amazing. I love the snapping wholeness sound of the last few claps of an audience. I love the way the world spins as a reflective door closes. I love toddlers discovering trees. I love seeing parent and grown children who look alike walking down the street, enjoying each other.

I inch closer to something here. I free write less these days, not because I don’t write, but because there is more purposeful writing. I could not have ever imagined my life the way it is now. If you had told me in some long ago life that it was this and could be this and would be this, I would have asked how to get there and inevitably fucked it up along the way. Pinprick outcomes. A yearn for here.

We go out in the golden hour, the sky thickening with pink and blue, spinning vision under the stars.

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Scan is to skim or examine closely.
Peer is to look in or belong among.
Screen is to hide or filter into view.
Frame is to shape or accuse.
Review is to reconsider or surveil.
Hold is to keep or detain.
Reserve is restraint or stored excess.
Bound is tied or inevitable.
Fast is fixed or accelerating.
Ground is support or restriction.
Temper is to soften or harden.
Weather is to endure or be worn down.
Pause is interruption or opening.
Continue is motion or persistence.
Moment is an instant or a turning point.
Clip is attachment or removal.
Trim is refinement or reduction.
Dust is erasure or coating.
Seed is beginning or extraction.
Skin is covering or exposure.
Strike is impact or deletion.
Bolt is escape or reinforcement.
Cleave is separation or adhesion.
Give is offering or collapse.
Veil is concealment or consecration.
Oversight is vigilance or neglect.
Audit is listening or inspection.
Authorize is permission or containment.
Sanction is approval or punishment.
Execute is completion or killing.
Resign is surrender or acceptance.
Left is what remains or what's gone. 

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We used to think life could be coaxed if you assembled the right materials and watched closely enough. Semen in a glass flask. Early menstrual blood. An egg. Sometimes a chicken egg. Sometimes sweat scraped from a mare in heat. The manuals disagreed on specifics but not on structure. Seal it. Warm it. Wait. Something small might begin to move.

The homunculus wasn’t meant to be impressive. Something unfinished but functional, that was the point. A tiny helper. A body without refusal. The ingredients came from kinetic thresholds, things already in motion: heat, discharge, fertility, waste. God didn’t disappear, He hovered. The manuals read like revisions of Genesis with less poetry and more instruction.

The glass mattered. Clear walls, no hiding. Life under chronic possibility of observation. If you could see it from every angle, you could intervene. Correct the temperature. Adjust the timing. Feed it blood. Try again. Failure wasn’t failure. It was iteration. God crossing out a line and rewriting it slightly to the left.

Centuries later, the same logic shows up as architecture. A circular room. A central tower. No one knows when they’re being watched, so everyone behaves as if they are. Observation without touch. Control without force. The homunculus in the flask. The worker in the open room. The subject learning to pre-edit itself. You don’t need a floor manager. You just need glass.

I think about the mare’s sweat when rooms lose their corners. When light spreads evenly and bodies stiffen without instruction. When people speak less and document more. God revises again. Adds guidelines, removes more mystery, calls it order.

Time ferments manuals. Blood darkens and dries, the heat shifts. Something forms that wasn’t planned for. The instructions list ingredients, not consequences. Life doesn’t stay small or obedient. It develops a voice.

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Art’s embarrassing,

all this ache and spatter so

hand(g) me (by) the rags.

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There was once a woman who learned the day through her muscles first. Before thought, before sound, there was the tightening. Calves drawing up like cords pulled too far. A bright, sudden pain that said: you are made of water and salt and small electric signals that misfire.

She answered the way bodies do. Glass of water. Pinch of salt. The elastic yellow curve of a banana, starch and potassium, a simple spell.

She knew time not as a clock but as pressure. How it accumulated to stretch tissue and tendon. How living felt less like moving forward and more like being elongated, pulled into shape like taffy, the way muscles are lengthened whether they agree or not.

On the table, pigment and water repeated the lesson. The brush laid down color. The water obeyed for a moment, staying within the line, then pooled and swelled and crossed. The surface tension broke and the color formed long sloping legs, gravity teaching it how to walk. Physics had no interest in intention. Only in weight and pull and where things must go.

She thought of herself as something once grown in a tended place. Not wild, feral. A body raised with expectation of shelter. And yet here she was, learning the rules of exposure. How heat stripped moisture. How cold tightened. How endurance was not a moral quality but a chemical one.

The city rose around her in thick segments, a Kit Kat skyline, each building a dense bar of matter. Mortar still held the memory of being soft. Everything hard had once been pliable. Everything standing had once been poured.

In the ocean, there came a moment when her skin and the water matched. The nerves lost their outline. The body stopped announcing itself as separate. A hand moved through the sea and felt ghostly, as if passing through its own temperature. A seam in the world loosened.

She remembered the trout falling from the helicopter. How their bodies curved in midair, muscles firing for a medium that was not yet there. How some would land and find the current, pair off, live. How others would strike too fast, too cold, too wrong. Snowmelt does not wait for readiness. Gravity does not negotiate. The fish were suspended between elements, and then they were not.

At night, a sound sometimes tore through the trees. High. Raw. It might have been a fox. A wild pig. A woman. Only wind dragged thin through branches. The body heard it as vibration before meaning. As frequency, pressure on the ear.

She understood, in this way, that she was an arrangement of forces. Heat and cold. Hydration and depletion. Falling and landing. That to be alive was to be in negotiation with the fact of having mass.

There were hands. There was a brain. There was music moving through bone. And all of it obeyed the same laws as water crossing a line, as fish dropping through air.

The day did not ask if she was ready.

It only continued to pull.

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Under those splitting fluorescent fitting room lights, I was trying on this skinny red leather choker and in the mirror was the woman whose throat was slit in the grocery store parking lot during golden hour some summers back. The news panned over the concrete. That’s what they said later, an oil spot where her stolen car had been. We all agreed, golden hour is still broad daylight.

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Today is my 33rd newsletter, and this year, I turned 33. It feels cyclical to close on such a neat coincidence. Thank you, truly, for reading my work. Publishing something each week has been a strange and steady experience. Sometimes I’ve worked on a piece for weeks, sometimes for half an hour. Knowing you’re here reading, replying, or even just opening the email has given me a sense of purpose I’ve hoped for from my writing for a long time.

I don’t usually use this space to talk about myself so directly. Most weeks, I’m sharing work, ideas, art, or things I’m turning over in my head. This one felt a little different — a moment to say thank you to the people who’ve stuck around and given me their time. I don’t take that lightly.

What follows is a small roundup of firsts and bests from the year, not in any particular order.

2026 is the year of the beginner. The year of bending ego toward newness. The year of embracing the suck of not knowing what the heck is going on.

Firsts

Experiences: Beach camping

I went beach camping. Despite my creeping anxiety on the second night that an errant wave could rise up at any time and sweep us to sea, it was awesome. And reader, that creeping anxiety is my everyday companion, so no worries there, we’re used to shoving it aside to find the light!

As a Mid-Atlantic…

(ALSO Ryan is reading a book by Rick Rubin called The Creative Act: A Way of Being and he shared that our ol’ buddy Rick just makes up words and if he feels they should exist, he just rolls with it. This is why I love the rule of linguistics which is, essentially from me a non-linguist, if it’s used with passion, it’s linguistically correct, so why not!!! Like no wonder people think this guy is a genius, he’s making up a whole ass language as he talks to you with such confidence, it has to be impossible not to be like, huh, he just said becomank, ok so that’s new swag, meanwhile he’s just not choosing to find those exacting words in English, which we learned from a linguist friend that is what makes English so hard and the art of writing so beautiful, because we have so few words that it requires such a precise choice.)

Anyways, (this is what it’s like to chat with me IRL), waking up on the beach with coffee in hand and toes in the Gulf of Mexico, reading on the beach and dozing midday as the families piled in to enjoy, and wading out to the sea once they left and it was near dusk, cooking steak chunks on our portable propane grill, a beach fire every night with wood we brought from home, there was such a thrilling and fusing oneness that I haven’t felt since I camped with my friends over the western range and felt that the mountains would accept me, would take me, despite the brininess from the Chesapeake that still poured out of me then.

Experiences: Joy Williams

I met Joy Williams! My favorite author came to town to attend The Stars at Night, the American Short Fiction’s annual gala. I bought a pretty expensive ticket, and reader, I did not chicken out. Through the kindness of her companion, I was able to meet and ask her to sign my copy of The Visiting Privilege. Now I can never open the book again or put my greasy finger oils on it! What magic.

Places: Las Vegas

I went to Las Vegas. I… liked it! Ok, ok, ya got me. I loved it. It was our first anniversary, and Ryan rented a limo from the airport to the hotel as a surprise because I’ve never been in one. We were upgraded to a suite in the Cosmopolitan that overlooked the Caesars Palace fountain and our room had a huge bathtub, so I even got to experience my first Lush bath bombs since, probably, the age of 17 when I left for college.

Things of note: Just how expensive it is compared to the stories I have heard of yore, when free drinks at slots were the regular. Ryan surprised us with a photo shoot to commemorate our first anniversary at all the hot spots, but the best was the view from our room. We didn’t even make it to downtown, but we did visit the Sphere, and that was pretty wild.

It seems to me that Las Vegas is a place that asks for a first and requires a second visit. I’m excited to go back because I already have my future plan down pat, including more Lush bath bombs. It also was a slight bummer that our flight there was delayed by about four hours, so it really ate into our plan.

Oh! And I ate at Vanderpump à Paris because Ryan surprised me with reservations (he is really good at this!!! I don’t social media this fact about him often, but he’s so thoughtful!), we saw Blue Man Group, played the slots, ate at a danky buffet, and saw a gorgeous show that enlightened me to show culture. In a true dystopian moment, I was reading Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, on the plane and finished it while we were there.

Places: Mexico

I went to Mexico. It’s still hard to articulate just how needed and felt the trip was. We went to Mexico City, Oaxaca, San Jose del Pacifico, and Puerto Escondido. I’m still digesting the pyramids, the kindness, the art, the blending of religion and occult, and the antiquity there, but I can say it was nourishing to the marrow.

Bests

Best Book

The Secret History by Donna Tartt I devoured in eight hours straight. What a luxurious read! Mysterious, complex, executed with a literary balance of antiquity and modernity, all set in New England. This was much more fun than I thought it would be.

Best Party

Ryan and Jamey turned 39, and Jamey left for Oregon! So we threw a Birthday Goodbye Party and rented a water slide. If you have a backyard and friends that don’t have bad backs, please consider doing the same before the backs turn bad.

Best Platform

I’ve always hated Goodreads, so I was pretty happy to discover Storygraph a few years ago. I uploaded my list into Pagebound this year, and I love it. I love Storygraph’s quantitative focus, while Pagebound has more qualitative features, like discussing the book on a forum with folks just as excited as you.

Misc.

I put myself out there artistically more in nine months than I have in the last nine years. As of today, I have been happily waitlisted for an essay incubator; received a heartening personalized rejection from DIAGRAM, a place I’ve had my eye on for soooo long; had a pitch accepted by Hyperreal Film Journal; launched this weekly project of 32 and counting essays; have a collection of essays on query; drafted a new collection of short stories; started a new collection of essays; considered what social and public persona mean to my art; and finally feel ready to step into my voice.

Or my ovice, as I mistyped but in the spirit of Rick Rubin, my inner voice is my ovice now. It invokes ovaries and I like it. Thanks, Rick.

For 2026

My wishes for 2026 are to hold a published Voices Carry in my hands, finish and pitch my fiction book proposal, gain an agent, reach 100+ subscribers here, reframe the feelings of failure and humiliation to effort and joy, and start making my own clothes.

Happy New Year, friend. This week’s playlist are some of my favorite tunes for a new calendar. I know, I know, I’m getting off Spotify soon…

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel rage, give in to it.

Pull up your Facebook page and tell everyone in your periphery about your particular flavor of injustice, the slights against you of the day.

We are so smart, and not very often wrong.

And much can be bought.

Moreso, life has fury left.

Perhaps this is its way of tasting sweeter on the tongue, that sometimes something happens that widens the gap made by the rich and powerful of the world.

Mistake the open road for freedom.

Go crawl on your knees toward something.

Feel the beg leave your gums.

You will have to pay a little in this life.

How much is not up to you, but you can increase the sum.

It’s a black box on whether you can lessen it.

Anyway, whatever it is, be fearful of its scarcity.

Rage is made to be multiplied.

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There are moments when the face behaves like a separate creature. Light approaches and it withdraws, expression tight, guarding whatever small heat it has left. A camera rises and it performs a quiet vanishing act. The photograph documents the decoy, not who stepped aside.

For a long time, the world made it hard to see yourself. The first mirrors were dark glass and metal, more omen than likeness. Then somebody in Venice laid tin and mercury behind glass and the face arrived.

Crickets are also ruled by their bodies’ private decisions. Soft forms, long antennae, the unspectacular colors of living bark. In daylight, they go missing on purpose: under bark, stones, the seams of things. They loosen soil with their mandibles and throw it backwards to make a home. Stridulation: a body scraping itself into audibility, acting on an impulse older than intention.

A screen is a mirror that wants things from me. Angle, nail, jaw, hair, tone. There is the me in the room and the me on the glass and they never meet. The persona is what the face pays to be allowed inside the frame.

Only some crickets sprinkle the night with sound. A rasp here, a serration there, testing the dark for weaknesses with bodies capable of marking the air. Now and then one goes silent, quiet heavier than song. The world embeds its signals, no matter the species.

Online I chirp or hide. A post is a sound; a silence is a strategy. Crickets chirp faster when it’s warm, slower when it’s cold. Their metabolism shifts and the sound follows. My own rate change when someone turns their gaze toward me in a room. The humidity rises.

The ancient pets are omnivorous, not sentimental: seedlings, fungi, scraps of what the world leaves behind. They take what’s fallen and turn it into more of themselves. Engines of survival, writing themselves into each new patch of dirt.

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You get what you give. I am afraid to be seen. Look at this, look at that, look at this curation of facts and images and vibes and tones and scents and details and aesthetics about myself that is a thinly veiled attempt at expressing the innards of me on the outs. The way I do my makeup so it looks like there isn’t any on when there really isn’t any on because I don’t have the patience or time to learn or care, because to care about appearance is to be vain, and to have vanity is to have a platform, a way of making one’s way in the world, of putting your face on the line with your brain, of opening your mouth and standing behind it morning after morning, your opinions unfurling on the tongue and on the keys. The wanting-to-be-worthwhile sits under all of it, the desire we are never meant to admit, the seeds of envy and longing holding close the twisted ground roots near the heart.

The Year of the Snake is closing. The serpent circles and mouths its own tail, an ancient symbol whose origin scholars say is lost though it always returns to the same thing. A cycle. The earliest known ouroboros was painted in King Tutankhamun’s tomb, a loop of time set beside a boy king who lived more than a millennium before Christ. In Nordic myth, the serpent is Loki’s child whose body encircles the earth and when it releases its tail, the twilight of the gods will begin. Some say the symbol traveled from China to Alexander the Great, stripped down from the Yin Yang and carried west. Every version shedding something. Every version keeping the circle.

And all the while I am tired of being lied to by institutions, corporations, systems, and processes. Tired of speaking aloud and seeing the ad appear days later, as though coincidence has the same handwriting as surveillance. Elaborate stories built to reassure us that the algorithms are only guessing, when what they are doing is listening, pattern-seeking in the same way the human mind does, probability dressed up as prophecy.

The circle is older than me. The serpent is older than me. It tightens and turns without asking for my belief, a creature forever in motion, forever returning, forever at the center of the world.

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The hours leer at me

with mouths of screws and dog eyes

that refuse to close.

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You must come to art

who says they say

the artists cannot write

or do not spend time producing

letters from mouths the artists they

understand the cavernous poison pit

at the center of each face whose face

your face my face the artist face this lapse

in language, it is what you wish to do,

slick syllabic intent

and not enough of the right feeling flow

right format right form right of way,

so you must come to art and when art strikes,

you quiet close the gaping hole of face,

that grit in between your teeth, keep it.

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There was once a woman who woke up in the middle of the day instead of at its beginning. The day never waited for her. It was already stirring pots, warming sidewalks, humming its little electric hums. She would open her eyes and find everything in motion. This was simply how things were. Not dramatic. Just how it was.

In those days, she thought often about another woman who once said she would buy flowers herself. The sentence was small, almost forgettable, but something about it held a hinge. A door. A beginning chosen, not granted. The woman in the house thought about that. How most beginnings are not announced, but entered.

There was also a word she carried with her: ablation. To remove by heat. To touch something so closely that what is unnecessary drops away. She did not know whether she was removing what she no longer needed or burning away parts she might miss later. The story never told her which was which. She was left to find out by living.

Inside the house, she imagined gentleness. Warm brown kitchens, familiar objects that knew her hands. The kind of quiet that does not ask for anything. But the house had its own weather. Close air. A heat that made each thought feel thick enough to touch. The house was not refuge. It was where recognition took place.

Outside, the world continued without consultation. Dogs pulled at leashes. Someone stacked oranges in a grocery display. A bus exhaled at the corner. The world did not stop to see who was ready. It simply moved, like water downhill.

The woman stood between these two places: the house where she understood her thinking, and the world where she had to test it. Some days she let the world carry her. Some days she carried herself. Both were allowed.

She did not ask to be spared from choosing. She asked only to know the choosing was hers.

So each morning, she placed her hand on one door or the other. Sometimes she opened both. Sometimes she waited. Sometimes she stepped out before she was sure.

And the day continued, with or without certainty.

Which, as it turned out, was its own kind of peace.

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Does it matter if this is a book or not?

Reading “Something Bright, Then Holes.” She says she’s writing a book of blue, that she got lost in the green, the canals, the pain-body. We are always going somewhere, whether we notice or not.

Rejections don’t hurt. It’s the silence that does, the hollow where attention should be. The forgetfulness. The way the world shrugs. So of course you create for yourself, because who else could it be for. And how easy it is to not sit with myself.

No one tells you what artists do in the interim, how they fold time to survive the waiting. It’s a lie that the sentences come clean, but once you’re inside them, the voice starts moving — ready, grateful, saying yes and yes and yes.

It’s always hard, this act of showing up. There are too many books to read, too many to write. The thing I want to be a collection refuses to be one. I went to school to learn how to listen, to enter the deprivation chamber of my own voice, to call it by name. It took years to trust. Now I’m here, and I never step into the same river twice.

A time ago, I left the job that steadied me — the deadlines, the rhythm, the love of being needed. I didn’t expect the silence that followed. Maybe that’s how I know it was real. For awhile, I did what I loved. I was lucky to have it so young. I built something that held when most else fell.

“If she focuses her time on writing, she will make significant work for years to come.”

That’s what my mentor wrote in my final letter. They knew what others have since learned: I’m bright-eyed, determined, and I scare fast. Sometimes, I’ll even quit before the race begins.

I know now that success is consistency times doubt. You work until the doubt dissolves. You do it again tomorrow. You let go of the myth. You accept done, then good, then perfect. The first draft is the only real miracle — it unearths the well. Everything else swims up from the deep.

Outside, a delivery truck idles. Someone else’s order fulfilled. This world processes when I’m not in it. I gave the nine-to-five a fair shot. Sold a startup. Ticked the boxes. What’s left — do it again? The playbook’s the same. But, I’m not made for same. Maybe I’m made for different.

It felt good to be dizzy with purpose, to end a day knowing the weight of it. The startup spell makes everything urgent. Revenue or ruin. But that tea’s gone cold.

Fiction feels wrong to me — I don’t like pretending. The stories turn real anyway. Everything’s someone’s truth. By holding the truth, I’ve distorted it, my love sings in a song he wrote. We all seek something. I am trying awfully hard not to be someone who seeks, finds, and runs away.

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I just got back from two weeks in Mexico for my 33rd birthday — sun, ruins, rain. The belly button of the world, the center everything folds toward.

There’s a cleansing before everything, a tooth snagging the inside of the mouth, a thin line splitting the dark. The air stiffens. The words pile in the corner and wait for the signal.

Heat climbs the walls, presses the breath flat. The season sits on the chest. This place is held together by choke and callus, sleepwalker spittle leaking through the seams in my teeth.

Hecate rejects the predator. Don’t speak of my dogs, beast.

The voice comes from the deep, the kind without mercy, without name. Rock grinds rock. Anger hums, low and steady. Wake up, Henry. Karen’s pussy pistol incarnate. Small and sudden and precise.

I want the rough wood, not their statues. The thing that stares back. I want to walk in barefaced, let the scrape do its work.

The ache waits beneath the work. It doesn’t rise. Teeth sharpen in the dank, split open the bone.

The ground takes its bite.

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There is a sentiment in journalism school, this idea that one must knock on doors, pick up the phone, interface, Get The Story. It’s not that truth does not interest me, it’s that I don’t feel compelled like a hound to scent, to rake over the details of objective truth. There is now more than ever a blend of subjective and objective, something John D’Agata trained us for in his book on facts. Still I can hear the questions of that first journalism cohort: truth overall, in search of truth. But with editors and industries and boardrooms and stakeholders, what is and has been the truth? Who holds the multifaceted mirror we seek?

The rooster knew what it meant to announce something beautiful before it happened. Before the light cracked the trees, before heat shimmered in the soil, he crowed. A bird built to believe in mornings that hadn’t come yet.

Before weather apps and sirens, there was a call, low in the chest, ridiculous, operatic. You used to hear him in the shadows of temples, carved into Etruscan wine vessels, painted beside the moon in Vietnamese woodcuts. In Japan, his crow was said to summon the sun goddess out of her cave, pulling the world back from darkness. The French made him a national emblem, not because he was noble but because he was stubborn, noisy, insistent. Polynesians carried him across oceans beside pigs and gods. Once celestial, now a fried chicken logo.

He knows what we used to fear, to flee, to worship. He’s seen thresholds. Watched hens go broody in the dark, refusing to leave the nest even to eat. Watched humans string his kin into sculpture then prophecy then soup. He’s lived a thousand years in every direction, a survivor of what killed the dinosaurs. Chickens, and roosters among them, are older than almost everything we eat. Their calls echoed long before cathedrals, before calendars, before the scaffolding of fact. The rooster learned to live in every corner of the world.

See, there are some things you can’t go back to and some choices that when you make them, you close certain futures forever. I have ambition, or did, but it was direction I allowed myself to be pulled in, letting my waterlogged compass soak in the orange, allowing the river to overtake my boat. For a long time, and even now, I’m afraid to lay claim to or place ownership over things because they can then be lost. An item once named is an item grieved.

Marriage even feels like this. Like I have officially told the universe, this is my love, my heart outside my body, this is how you can hurt me deepest. And I wait for the hurt, the shoe, the cleaving, the absolute shattering of enjoying with gratitude what today is and knowing a day may come where things could be different, harder, a loss entirely. But I have to shake it off. There is abundance here, joy here, wonder still to be felt. To live in scarcity is to invite more of it. These are the stakes of life.

The rooster’s body requires the fiction of light. Somewhere in his genome, in that spiral of jungle and smoke and domesticated violence, he remembers what it means to be depended on. Ornamental and sacrificial and revoked. He rises, scratches, sings. I think of all the prophets we mocked long before we were hungry enough to eat them.

The rooster doesn’t apologize for what comes next. Maybe this clawed descendant of a time when it only ever rained is the only one who knows what morning means.

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you blink slow like you already know the light’s changed. i tell you anyway. it’s done. the miracle act, the long-game joke, the crowd work that stopped working. i want the morning cold on my arms like it used to be, before the sky got trained to behave. this eternal thing, this long hallway you parked me in. i never got to choose the body. you just dropped in, ascended out, left the meat sweating under robes and light. and i kept showing up for the tricks, coins in fish guts, teeth in bread, always a crowd and never a reason. they look through us like storefront glass, like we’re old sales they walked past twice. you watched the rot same as me, mildew on the offering plates, hands turning soft at the altar. you told me even fire forgets where it started. and i believed you. do we leave quiet, like fog peeling off a lake, or loud, like the glass breaking before the scream. not asking for much. just the scene where i don’t get written out. i want the last word, even if it’s just me mouthing it in the dark.

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