Category Archives: The Human Experience

“We should hold each other more while we are still alive, even if it hurts. People really die of loneliness, skin hunger the doctors call it. In a study on love, baby monkeys were given a choice between a wire mother with milk & a wool mother with none. Like them, I would choose toContinue reading “Holdfast”

On a cold Saturday in late March, I wake with words sprawling, tottering themselves into a poem off of my lips. I move quickly to write it all down. Hours later, I’ve scribbled on the backs of several old papers: a restaurant napkin, a movie pass, the comic section of the local newspaper, a notebookContinue reading “The order of things”

Since I moved to Indiana, life has been small musings between heartbreaks. And this is largely what growing up has been for me. The moving and the wishing people were here that cannot be and the election and the disasters that we become when we are hurt but trying to love people. The war withContinue reading “Break, breaking”

“What is home but a book we write, then read again & again, each time dog-earing  different pages. In the morning I wake in time to pencil the sun high. How fragile it is, the world—” -Maggie Smith, Poet When you meet several loves of your life, you don’t always know it. You don’t alwaysContinue reading “On Friendship”

You ever had a perfect day? A laugh-filled, legs-hurting, heart-expanding day full of walks and talks and sights kind of day. Memories in the making, best friend to your right, sky blue with clouds pillow fighting as they pass through one another. A sun tan in-the-making, the trees scattering across the horizon, the water slappingContinue reading “Home”

I always tell people that the week after school ends each spring is the saddest week. It feels much like mourning the loss of someone, only they aren’t gone forever. Just for now. This year is no different. I’m learning how to say goodbye in what feels like several languages I haven’t fully learned. Looking back,Continue reading “In closing”

I’ll admit it: the moment the needled etched the first line into my skin, I panicked. Before I could yank my arm back in protest, three more lines scratched across my skin, each slightly longer than the last. When the man carving into me took a small break, I marveled at my own changing. Ink-dippedContinue reading “A year backwards, light becoming”

When I was a boy, I would take 45 minute showers. Something about the hot water hitting me that made me savor that kind of warmth as if it were the last time. I would spend 35 of those minutes covering my ears and slowly walking through the water—back and forth and back again—simulating aContinue reading “Arriving.”

I wonder how many minutes I’ve spent mourning in advance all the things that I’ve yet to experience—how death has left a profound impact on me, how it will again, how trees are rooted but lose to the elements every year at the same time. We see the weeping coming and we prepare our shieldsContinue reading “Now and Not Yet”

The air was simple and pulsing, so much so that it wasn’t. Not really. It may have just been my mind—prone to seeing commotion in all things, easily identifying chaos at the brim of every step—tricking me into believing air could have a heartbeat. That it could take up a life in showing people whatContinue reading “On Stillness.”