Poetry

This is a selection of original poems that will be updated relatively infrequently. If you want to read more of my work as I write it, you can take a gander at my blog. Thank you for spending some time with me in my little corner of the internet. ♡

All works on this page are openly licensed via CC BY-NC-ND.

Paracosmist

They say my body was not designed for this world,
so I built a new place to live.

While they’re sleeping, I reach in and enter it, this new world,
mysterious and perfect. It feels like sinking into a golden sea

or becoming song, a plume of lavender smoke.

Here there is Turkish tile-work and whispering walls,
underground cisterns lit red from below, silk brocade in the dark.

On the beach, I am cocooned in honey, bare and shell-less.

A mother takes my body and lets the sea eat me alive,
her braid a line of sea-grass, her flesh a resonant warmth
as she feeds me to the dark water.

There I discover a new language, but the words are mine.
I think them without thinking.

I’m floating through a glass-still ocean with floating leaves. There are
beautiful creatures swimming in the dim water.

And what is this feeling, this heaviness, these hollows where no sound can escape?

And what is this arch, these columns, these tendrils of fog,
and what is this night, this air, this realm of the unreal?

I am looking down on a tree, its white roots reaching toward me,
its bark decorated with dark ribbons swirling up from the abyss.

Here there are things not called by names;
here there is nothing but silence. I feel it bubbling in the earth.
There are pulsing galaxies, inscrutable as my own soul.
How much more beautiful this world is, how much more alive!

They say my body can’t possibly go on like this,
and I look down at my empty shell. I will come back,
but for now I will fall into the darkness, the most infinite sea.

The Geode

She used to wear a cracked-open geode
on a chain around her neck,

and when she was nervous she’d
work her finger into its opening.

I loved that little cavern,
iridescent and pulsating, and wanted so much

to be drawn inside.
I could almost feel

the flicker of the jagged guts
shining as she drew her soft

fingertip across each fractal surface.
To enter her tiny personal cave

brought her comfort, she said,
the way a kitten feels comfort when hoisted into

the small cave of her mother’s mouth.

I wanted her to enter the cave in me,
to cry stalagmites and laugh stalactites and

knock down a wall here and there
so we could venture further in

until the whole thing rumbled
like a stomach and cracked at the seams

and crumbled over us, laughing naked in the daylight
at how silly we were to think a cave

is any kind of home.

Ten Commandments for the Blooming Rose

Jewelry

Here is some of the jewelry I've made as I am learning how to work with metal. I will post some pieces here, but there will be more (even some for sale!) on my jewelry website when I get that going. ♡︎

This is a spectrolite armband set in sterling silver.