You leave a dream out to rot. Every spring it hangs on, a little more rust and danger. There are almost 100 days in spring. 100 chances to wake up. If you're early enough, you become the hero on a planet previously thought uninhabitable, barren landscape with a beam of hope projecting so hard it's a spotlight shouting rainbows. There are such things as unicorns. You don’t notice it at first, then you notice it some but think it means nothing. You don’t get the sign until you’re standing in the middle of the field. All around you soft purple roars. The ground is still wet. You wake up before all of it gets trampled on.

On the day you were taught what a metaphor was, the test to confirm your understanding of the topic: How is snow like a mother’s love? You jot down answers at breakneck speed, wanting to be the fastest with the most right answers. You don’t get to read yours out loud. No one does. And anyway, if it were really a test, you would’ve failed because twenty years later it hits you after an argument about how you ended up like you, why you can’t be like xyz, and you don’t have a good answer except you never thought you were strange, after all your mom is exactly the same. Stifled by the implication that gravity was upside down, you walk out the door into a chilly night in January, look up at the stars like seeds once dipped in glitter to see the first snowflake drift by, alone and unsure as a baby deer on a highway. It keeps falling and never touches the ground but when you wake up the next day, the ground has been covered by a layer of stardust reconfigured as snow.

Home hums, the air thick like the inside of an overripe cherry split open. Kool-Aid stains on the counter, a bowl of Froot Loops dissolving into milk colouring it sweet, and a chair always slightly pulled out. The seat’s still warm. Honeyed light drips through the blinds, just behind the boxy TV that’s been left on too long. Outside, the sun shakes. Vines creep through the cracks, flickers of backyards and then plants everywhere, dying, dying then replaced by new plants. The floorboards remember every step of your light-up sneakers and then the clack-clack of stilettos when you were learning to walk for a second time. A mirror splints into every shade of blue, folding into the hush; it’s the only thing that’s seen all of you. All the shadows and stairways leading nowhere, plot twists and close encounters, and then, finally, somewhere—a doorway, the shape of something just before you wake, realizing you’ve been singing the wrong lyrics to a song for years, and off tune and off path, here and alive and with a cloud in your belly, you still managed to make a home.

Crop circles on fields that go on and on, concentric circles inside greater circles. One day going back far enough the blue stopped and there was no longer a word for it. It was all one swath of land and sky on which flowers and birds owned their peace. Then, you had no preference for either when asked what you wanted to come back as. Both were great options. Thousands of years forward far enough and you’ve forgotten that stretch of time. You buy compression socks and a travel pillow and lie down for a nap on a long haul flight to Tokyo. In the middle of the flight you catch a glimpse of the northern lights, it haunts with its beauty, reminds you that you haven’t lived quite like a flower has but you will die like it does and what a pity. A few hours ago the sky said soon, a few hours later it will say it again and one of these times you finally hear it.

You worry your stars have left you behind. The sun once beckoned and taunted its fingers in your gravity, baby dream as delicate as a leaf on a tree at the top of a cliff hanging on as the season changes; it goes up and it goes down and without a calendar to tell time we go by hunch and stars and pray there is no mistake.

In 2021, I posted a series of short prose poems every day on Instagram. I wanted to push myself creatively with as little as possible, intending to do the project for 100 days. I stopped at 50 because my freelance practice took off and I thought no one would notice.

The flower folded
No chance it gets any better than this

Everywhere we are lamenting the shortening of attention spans—or in the case of Netflix, the total disintegration of it, to which Netflix says it's not going down without a fight and has started making suggestions not of how to make films worth paying attention to but how to make films for people who aren't even paying attention.

In the grand tradition of fairy tales throughout history, The Wizard of Oz, both its literary and cinematic versions, is much darker than it seems at first glance. 

Miu Miu is currently an anomaly in the luxury fashion market; where sales have been mostly down for most other brands, they’ve just reported 93% growth in the first half of the year, up from 2023. As it turns out, Miu Miu is popular with Gen Z, the first generation to grow up completely digitally native in a land where cats rule. Could we be making a transition from cat ladies to cat girls, from a symbol of spinsterhood to girlhood?

I think this is what they call a prelude. Funny, all this time I thought things were ending. Introducing an array of inspirations for the prequel collection, "We were blue for a limited time only." Not for a limited time.

When I decided to write 30 poems in 30 days for National Poetry Month, I hoped that I’d learn how to be consistent and that I’d slowly edge my way towards becoming a “real” or “better” poet.

During the pandemic, it kind of felt like the world was ending. And then most of us came out fine: some with new careers and hobbies and businesses, some having lost, but most just fine. I can't help but think that despite the normalcy of the lives we have returned to, maybe the world as we knew it did end because the way I've been feeling since hasn't felt the same.

A while ago I was reading about the decline of the western as a film genre: “In recent years, the cowboy has been replaced by the superhero as the most common expression of American values in blockbuster filmmaking.”

I have been told all my life that I could be and make anything, and that it's up to me to make my own meaning in the world.

It was the Grammys last night, a time for Flowers, women, and poetry.

6 foot tall fashion models walk down the runway all somber in sculpted gowns with the tonally contrasting yet familiar sound of something blaring in the background.

"Not all wounds bleed, 
I gander there’s an itty bitty one in me,
pretty coagulated into shame and prisms."

Since the time I've had my very first website decades ago, so much has changed about the internet and how we show up online. Shiny object syndrome and a forever identity crisis means I’ve tried it all, various platforms and bio variations and labels to try to perfectly encapsulate what it is I do.

I’m going a bit behind the scenes to share some of what’s been going on internally over the past few months. And maybe this doesn’t fit into any plan, but you know what, sometimes I really hate strategy.

One of the nights that I spent climbing out of a half-dream I was there at the Eiffel Tower looked at it for all of three seconds and it—the surround sound, the smell of stale Pulp, a thousand deadly sins—it was like I was in a casket with stars for a ceiling, laying still though legs moving seeing midnight blue for the first time and not just black masquerading as blue; the colour of romance is always the colour you haven’t seen before.

"this is what it’s about:
the loneliness of being female and surrounded
by a world that knows how to use you but
not how to value and understand you."

Of the many killer lines Miranda Priestly artfully delivers in the film version of The Devil Wears Prada—putting cerulean and the economics of materiality onto the map for the rest of us—one of my favorites comes near the end.

I’ve been selling things for a long time. I was the one rounding up my family’s junk to become another’s treasure in our first and last yard sale, the one begging mom at age twelve for $100 to buy the beeswax I needed to make and peddle lip balms, the one who, as soon as I was old enough for a credit card, signed up to sell jewelry at an online craft marketplace, the first of its a kind and a revolution at the time. I wasn’t particularly crafty; I just really liked making and selling things.

I have officially been a writer for a couple of years now but not necessarily a poet, even though technically I have this past week just launched my first collection of poems and I have made at least one sale, which, I guess, means I’m technically a poet. Hurray?

What’s your sign?

Life, the ratrace. We think it’s a race to the cheese but it’s really a race to the death; and along the way, there are a few things that matter in how we in the 21st century define a life well lived (the only time in history where so many of us can measure life by the subjective concept of fulfillment rather than a very cut-and-dry you’re dead-or-alive survival): how much you make, your relationship status, how big your house is, where you’ve travelled, and don’t forget this last part because if you do, the rest doesn’t count; how much of this is documented on Instagram for all to see.