Selected poems ⟢
My poetry and collage work are grounded in grief, cycles, pain, the underworld, and the female body.
For me, creating is a way to alchemize grief and pain into meaning, connection, and clarity. My writing is deeply influenced by my experience with intense pelvic pain, the cyclicality of life, and the women in my family.
My work has appeared in Cordella magazine, Luna Luna Magazine, Bitch Magazine, the Lit Exhibit, and the anthology I AM STRENGTH, among other places.
Below are a selection of pieces.
“For each of us as women, there is a dark place within, where hidden and growing our true spirit rises…these places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through that darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and feeling. The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white not surface; it is dark, it is ancient, it is deep.”
~ Audre Lorde
Grandmother & Granddaughter
at the Lit Exhibit in Brooklyn, NY, 2019
Ten Moons & Other Poems
in Cordella Magazine
Wet Soil
Pond muck and blood rot
at the bottom of it: pain and love
and chaos and creation and disorder
and underneath it all, more love.
This soil is tenacious and pungent
home to wild parsnips and orphaned ducklings
covered in wet, sea grass, dewy earth,
rich silica worms, furled lotus.
Wet soil buried deep, blackberry brambles,
fertile mother–shard and sliver I dig for bones.
Blood dripping, skin starved, alone,
I lay out to bake in the fevered heat.
My body bare earth and scorched dirt. Dew
arriving to revivify, my grandmother’s tears
a sweet cooling resurrection.
In this soil I was planted, and here
in this soil I am made new.
Ananke
Damp summer night air fans in
through the window and my
peppermint tea has gone cold.
In this place I am free but wanting,
suspended in the moonlit pocket
between everything that was and
everything else.
I close my eyes and raspberries
ripe and hot scatter the ground
like triumphant confetti. I am five years
old and spread out on the mossy grass:
shaded in the watchful cool of
our backyard aspen, my handmade tulle
skirt wrapping me up in a lilac tinted
pool of my grandmother’s love.
A place only feels like home once
I’m done living there.
Right now the familiar musk of this moldy
basement makes me dizzy. Last summer
I spent an entire day searching the
shoreline for crab shells long outgrown.
I lined them up one by one on the porch
and soaked in the comfort of old homes
safely abandoned.
It is too cold here, and too dark. The bleak
grey skies are not cozy yet, my chest hurts,
and I do not know if what I want lies beyond
me or further back.
A place only feels like home once
I’m long gone.
How to Cast a Spell & other poems
in Luna Luna Magazine
How To Cast a Spell
Winter midnight, trickle of
muted moonlight, more like
shadow, still in skinned-knee reverence,
here is how you cast a spell:
Cauldron open face up on the desk
flecked with musk and mugwort.
Stir in sea water, honeycomb,
gold striated stones. Invoke:
Air to drink into parched lungs,
Earth to root wet soil deep,
Fire to burn noise, wreckage, and
Water to guide soft slippery excavation.
Take three deep breaths:
Consecrate this page to heal and to shed,
may the spell I now weave
honor all that has been bled
By water and salt rock, by smoke and scent,
by heart and outpour, conjure up
ocean wild, wind blown, eyes wide
unafraid mystery, born deep in the belly
of an active volcano:
It lives.
It breathes.
For as it will,
so mote it be.