2025 Excerpts

everything is a work in progress

Mercy’s Hand and Arm, Study for “Mercy’s Dream” (1857) by Daniel Huntington

I.

I lost track of half my year. Most of it was eaten by late-night debates on my screen as though my life hinged on it. I have lost all my journal entries about that time, except for this excerpt where my future has lost its body:

Grass linoleumed over in white plastic, brain singed. 
There is no dust to speak of, to meditate on, where flowers 
used to shout and love broke our skin open like a river. 

There, God loved us, unconditionally through the window, 
warming us as we elongated time in the basement. 
I am hungry but I don't know what for.

A tree stump excites me. I look for things that crawl, 
and things that sing. Those pesky crows, those robbins, 
those swallows and pigeons. Not even dandelions survived 

the desert of sterilized flooring, off white smiles and eye contact 
sectioned off. I have been unmade and made into a grain of rice. 
Music plays faintly behind the metal door that hovers above me. 

The omnipresence of a god I used to know, curled among
lab grown rats, horses, and cob webbed saints.
A snippet of my hair is forgotten in a bread bag. 

Another snippet petrified into ocean rock, crushed into gravel.
Fingers wired to a circuit board, a doctor comments that my spine 
is a dime a dozen, there are plenty in his basement of bones, 

where a deer licks me like I am Lot's wife.
Some days I forget I have no skin 
but I glitch in glitter, porous for the suns rays

missing vitamin d and what it does for my bones and body.
Awake from sleep, black wave oozes around me. 
Are there still stars swirling around my weightlessness?

I seep through another wall, families eat without a mouth, 
The father pulverizes a turkey, peels it for his family of dolls.
It's a familiar scene but, what does it mean. The cake is not cake,

but we all smile for our picture.

II.

I knew I came back to my body when I felt a stab of light from the sun, hurting my eyes. That morning, my children played pickleball with strangers who sniffed out the wrongness in me.

Goodbye windows of the sky. I am leaving you today. 

Your fluorescent smile flowered all over the field
when we met, ocean was blue—not yet downtrodden with teeth 
full of plastic and deciduous tears. 

Every season was predictable until it started to burn. 

Too many hands twisting the fabric of our land, turning it red.

Tomorrow, I tear the last page of your fingerprints 
over the interior of my body. It is gone.

Your syllables defeathered in the waves. 

Starlings lose their shape and direction.

Moon chewed down to the bone.

I watch you wither in silence.

III.

I carried the weight of their rejection for months. Every morning, when I woke up, I would be thinking about what I could have done differently. And none of what I hyperfocused on mattered when I received the phone call about my father. I have no recent pictures of him, so I have to borrow one:

Vincent Van Gogh‘s The Starry Night (1889)

The scars my father picked on his arms are haloing the stars tonight. 
They can’t help but glow yellow with an undertone of fentanyl. 

For a brief time, he was trying to be beautiful, something of value but
grief flaked off his scalp making him pry his wounds wider and brighter,

Forcing him to eat spoiled meat the way Van Gogh ate yellow paint
and turpentine. Was this supposed to be a slow death with every cobalt 

Stroke or did the meth make him see what he saw through the window 
of his asylum. He is staying in one of the houses tonight, lying down 

On a borrowed bed, admiring the moonlight. Tinfoil pipes and rocks
all in a stolen bag. Identification documents in another name.

The opioids are hitting the spot, dark and looming like the cypress tree,
threatening to take over the landscape. No family but a compendium

of friends helping him twist his veins into a grotesquery of knots. 
Eddying the clouds into a vortex. Within it, the children he lost.

He thought he was a ventriloquist in control of the weather.
Strings attached from his pipe to the sky. Smoke bending and curling 

everything at will. Until the moon took over his eyes, mauling him, 
wrapping him tight. Its yellowed talons suspending him in the dark.

IV.

Is this it? My year suspended in darkness? The other night, there was a windstorm, causing a power outage. My daughter and I stepped outside to charge my phone in the car. We looked up and saw the stars, as they were, as everything around us was draped with a black cloth of silence, absent of artificial light. I don’t know what 2026 will bring, but I know that God will walk with me as he will with you.

Someday these sparks will revive
and I'll no longer have to tether to the sky
or lay live wires in the water just to feel 
your fire 
burning in my bones.

Someday, my bones will no longer be dead, dry fodder
like thorns and thistles suited for the fire. 
The fruit I bear 
will no longer have bruises 
or a ring of mold around its edges. 

Once I tasted the sourness of spoiled meat,
so I can imagine when my offerings are bitter.

Here. I'll  let you prune me 
and someday, I'll bear the fruit you've predestined me 
to bear. The burden of loving my neighbours
                                                                   	will be lighter

and you'll no longer have to pry the things 
I've wrapped so tightly around my fingers. 
I'll unclench my teeth like my son when I forced him to return
a block he stole from church earlier.
Every word of yours will linger.	

Someday, I'll no longer be indifferent to your words 
or forget to eat my daily bread. 
I'll live by them instinctively,
like how murmurs of starlings dance automatically
in the expanse of pink and orange skies,
like David before you with all his might.

Someday I won't be embarrassed to dance before you
and I'll  sing as though I mean every word 
like mountains breaking into song.
My hands will be lifted up like branches of trees
as though perpetually in worship. 
and someday, my prayers will go beyond the glass of your window.

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