poetry
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There is a photograph I return to more often than I should. A boy standing in England, smiling at a pelican like he’d stumbled into a storybook. I wonder if you knew that somewhere across an ocean, a girl was waiting for your voice to tell her it was finally safe to sleep. You were…
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People say everything happens for a reason. As if reasons are enough to quiet a heart. You arrived when I was still learning that survival and living are not the same thing. I was seventeen. Sleep felt dangerous. The walls around me heard too much. The nights lasted forever. Then there was your voice, traveling…
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Some people arrive like seasons, beautiful, necessary, but always meant to leave. You never did. You stayed. When the world grew quiet, when grief swallowed whole conversations, when there were no words left worth saying— you stayed. You stood beside me through hospital rooms and empty nurseries. Through birthdays that hurt and anniversaries that stole…
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There are nightswhen the world expects meto carry everythingwith steady hands. The memories.The grief.The questionsthat never learnedhow to answer themselves. So I step outside. The air is cool,the stars indifferent,and the lighter clickslike the beginningof a conversation. The smoke doesn’t promiseto fix me. It doesn’t erasethe empty chairs,the court dates,or the namesI still whisperwhen no…
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It’s four in the morning. The world has gone quiet,but my mind never got the memo. The clock keeps counting secondslike they’re something I can spend,while I bargain with sleepthat refuses to bargain back. The house is still.The coffee pot is empty.The moon watcheswithout offering advice. So I stand barefootin front of the refrigerator,bathed in…
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Some call it escape. Maybe they’re right. But sometimes it’s the only place my shoulders remember how to unclench. The world demands I carry grief like it’s weightless. Cannabis asks nothing. Only, “Sit for a while.” So I do. I breathe. I watch thoughts stop colliding long enough to hear my own heartbeat beneath the…
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Maybe one day I won’t have to choose between relief and proving myself. Maybe one day healing won’t come with conditions. Maybe one day I’ll light a joint without wondering who might judge the smoke. Until then, I’ll keep choosing the future I’ve been fighting for— one clear morning at a time.
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They might test my blood. They’ll never test the nights I stayed awake rocking babies. They’ll never measure the panic attacks I survived sober. They’ll never weigh the meals I forced myself to eat, or the mornings I got out of bed when depression begged me not to. Sometimes being a good mother looks nothing…
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They’ll always have an opinion. Too loud.Too quiet.Too broken.Too healed.Too honest.Too much. They’ll call art a wastebecause they cannot seethe pieces of my soulpressed between the lines. They’ll ask why it doesn’t rhyme,as though painhas ever followedsomeone else’s rules. They’ll laugh at the wordsthat kept me breathing,dismiss the pagesthat carried mewhen nothing else could. They’ll…
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The page was empty. Not because I had nothing to say,but because my thoughts kept arriving all at once. Then came a slow inhale. Not magic. Not a miracle. Just enough silence between the noise for one sentence to become another, until the poem had written itself before I realized my heart had been speaking…
Between Bruises and Blooms 