Poetry
The Southern Bells
This poem began as a letter from a grandmother to her grandchild. It warns of uncontrollable wickedness and gifts them wisdom for how to survive despite it.
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Poetry
Poetry
Ensabled Night
The opening line is my riff on Bach’s chorale prelude “Come, Sweet Death,” one of his most profound. The foxfur wings I feel come from Well’s “In the Avu Observatory,” a surrealistic short story where an astronomer in the islands of Indonesia is attacked by a large flying bat-creature.
Poetry
The Let Go
I wrote this to explore how we change in a relationship, how it isn’t always healthy or best for us—or necessarily consensual. We give pieces of ourselves away, we have pieces taken, we cut ourselves down to nothing in the name of love, and it is both a horror and a revelation.
Poetry
The Mourning of Sam Lillow, the Gardener
I used to have this illustrated version of Beauty and the Beast when I was little, which more often than not I used to retrace the drawings than reread the story, but I do remember it was my favourite version of the tale because it reserved several beautiful pages for the scene with the rose theft.
Poetry
In Our Bodies, There Is Heat
I was inspired by my body, and bodies in general. What it means for a body to exist in spaces that find it unworthy, unholy. And how sometimes, we also have to carry our ancestry, our birthplace, in these very bodies. So we have bodies weighted with history and ancestry, but still found sacrilegious. How does one reconcile that?
Poetry
dread
Some time ago, I woke from a dream in which I had gone missing. Over the course of the ensuing sunlit hours, I could not rid myself of the overwhelming feeling that everyone around me was somehow overlooking my presence.
Poetry
Awakening
Fairy tales approach revenge in such interesting ways—there is often a sense of catharsis and ordering the universe in these acts, especially since they tend to appear at the story’s conclusion. I wanted to write a horror poem with a sense of ambiguity about what happened so that the focus becomes the process of self-creation through revenge.
Poetry
when you see the dead
I’ve often worked in natural history collections where it was my job to convert roadkill into museum specimens. So everyone who knew me (my sister, romantic partner, friends) would enthusiastically text me about dead animals they found!
Poetry
A Trick of the Night’s Hunger
he poem was inspired by the unending struggle of the world and its continuous demand in our blood, where we must keep striving to stay afloat. In the last part of the poem, I demonstrated how at that point I was okay with much the world has to offer me, and was willing to not keep spending my blood.
Poetry
Tropical Fish
“Tropical Fish” is a relic from my childhood and mostly true. I had an aquarium in my bedroom, and my dad and I spent a lot of time staring at those fish.
