Musings Across Time

  • The house builder

        “I love you.” Her words to me—some of her last to anybody before she fell into an alive sleep, then stuttering and side-stepping into passing. She held on until she couldn’t anymore. Even though I wasn’t with her when she left, I will carry these words with me to remind myself that love…

  • And isn’t it convenient /

    to never get it right / speaking different languages and never learning / our own / well enough to learn someone else’s / I am enthralled / truly in love with / the way you say you love me / without knowing my love / without knowing / without me loving you too / and…

  • On Being a Writer.

    In an interview with Studs Terkel in December of 1961, James Baldwin is quoted saying “… education demands a certain daring, a certain independence of mind. You have to teach some people to think; and in order to teach some people to think, you have to teach them to think about everything. There mustn’t be something…

  • the year of undoing.

    the year of learning how to forget / how to be and only be / whoever it is / i’ve been / trying to be / even with all of this undoing. there are mountains of grace waiting / for me / at the bottom of my heart / waiting to be given out /…

  • This mind

    its tactful complexities come to the surface to see how much sunlight it can gather. Taking root, it convinces me that every plane I get on will only touch down in pieces, scattered across plains where nobody exists. It reminds me of how human I am when death takes someone away from their lives and…

  • To Charlotte: Part One

    The person, not the city. To be read when you’re ready, which I recognize you won’t know until you know. This is part one of the X amount of letters I’ll write you between now and forever. Spreading ashes like memories across a lifetime of lifting heavy things so Charlotte has a well-lit path to…

  • A letter to my father

    In the span of five months, a friend of mine passed away at 27 and my grandmother passed away at 93. Ever since then I’ve faced this sort of undeniable truth that we all will turn to dust at some point. All living things don’t live forever–some live longer than others, some sooner than most–and…

  • Craft practice

    Every April, the literary world turns their collective eyes to poetry in an effort to observe National Poetry Month. I, too, find myself paying extra attention to poetry during these days, even more than I usually do. Every day is another opportunity to find the words in my bones that I’ve hidden for safekeeping. It…

  • 3:01 PM

    Over the course of the last couple of months, my mother has grown weary from worry. My grandmother wasn’t doing well; she wasn’t eating and found herself in the hospital. She had some okay days, but mostly it felt like she was holding on for the sake of holding on. “You might want to come home…

  • Saying Goodbye

    Each year is an adventure of learning to say goodbye in a new way. At least for those of us who work in a profession that is predicated on pushing people to their own finish line and into the next phase of their life. Students graduate or move off-campus, peers accept jobs and leave, people uproot the…