I see you in our living room, lying still on the couch. My voice ringing out through the silence, my guitar vibrating in my shaking hands as I sing about amazing grace, tears rolling down my cheeks. 

there is no joy of newness in ashes.
no beauty in watching the world burn.

But you and I, we wrote ourselves into a romcom script / And in the climax of the film / The scene got clipped.

mother tells me
it’s a Navajo tradition
hair is memory
hair is nizhóní

My dad says, Nature Always Wins.
And he only says this when there’s silence

She remembers the sound of tiny, rushing feet,
Of laughter in the halls
Every tear shed, every prayer before bed

The people we ate dinner with were not always lost. In fact, some of them were the most grounded people I’ve ever met, ones who knew exactly what it was that led them to our table, and leaving, where they were meant to go.

It would never be the same, and haranguing me about dystopian clichés in the way that used to lead to a deeper shared intimacy fell flat. We no longer spoke the same language, and we realized it in a way that hurt and healed at the same time.

One day she’ll see her tortoise, and travel the world, and swim with sea creatures, and draw them all, but she doesn’t need me to wish that for her.

Grief always has a recognizable element to it, whether it be heard in a voice or seen in a face, the tragedy having either already happened or about to happen; we are held hostage by it, unable to free ourselves from its implacable bonds, whether for days, months or even untold years.

deprive him of things
that make him long
for his bed's bosom
at the death of day.

I pry the nails out of my ears
Toss them aside next to me
Extinguishing all his love
Like a finished cigarette

How do I tell you, without making you fear,
How my past thoughts were drenched in red
And defined by a whistling sound?

You learn to sip love that you
poured yourself.
You learn to paint eyes every time
you feel unseen.

I often wonder if birds pass on tales to their young,
and I wonder how they end.

We laughed at them, and while some laughter is deserved, none of it should come from a place of comfort. They are going to fight harder than ever to bring him back and we need to fight harder than ever to keep him down.

As I have aged foolishly in vanity, I once believed in a promise of love so ferocious and true that I could travel to the corners of the globe and it could still find me.

My mother asked me what I wanted for Christmas one year. I asked her to please stop calling me fat.

I was seven when I made
Kelly ask Skipper, “Where’s Daddy?”
to which Skipper sighed and said, “He
lost himself, sweetheart.”

The lingerie of a woman my mother would label a ‘whore.’
“Well worn,” she’d say, if it lay on a rack in the consignment shop, and smirk.