Humanity: Raw & Unfiltered
She first sees him on a Tuesday night at the rooftop bar of the Ace Hotel. He’s wearing dark blue jeans, a white button-up shirt, and black boots, and he and the bartender, an attractive woman in her late thirties with a black rose tattooed on the side of her Read more
When he found you, you were like a caretaker of living vines. You walked free up and down rows of collected lives, learning their ways, seeing the value in their twists and turns. He licked his lips, shook his jailhouse key in anticipation of the mayhem he would bring your Read more
My hand aches forging a kinship with my heart and my head, side effects of sleepless nights and too many poems. My words render no verdict, reduced to scrawled symbols inadequate of expressing the affliction of my affection for you. The rhetoric betrays me— fractured, a breakdown. So I crumble Read more
Nearly eight years after my father’s death, I received a phone call from the nurse I had hired at the end of his life. Jen was a kind and compassionate person, and she had been at his side when he passed away. Because of her other commitments, she was unable Read more
Summer meant grandma’s 80’s brown conversion van. Brown carpet, brown velvet curtains, semi-sheer accordion blinds and dimpled beige leather seats and a third row, pulled at the rusts into a bed. A speaker system more elaborate than the dash and a giant bread cupboard that actually stored a mini box TV. Read more
My delight at the ultrasound tech’s declaration, “It’s a girl,” was immediately followed by a heaviness and fear I associated with that specific gender reveal: the food thing. I did not feel this panic a year ago when the sex of my son was announced. Food things were girl things. Read more
The floorboards creak as you shift your thin frame closer to mine. They groan like the ghosts of our past, the persistent and unwritten tension between us. They speak of the unspoken desire, suddenly rekindled by our proximity. The ghosts sigh as your breath brushes my neck, a welcome rush Read more
She eyes me above water-fill lines brimming with confidence and ruby-red smiles boasting crimson-stained cheeks, her merriment swirls by candlelit chimeras showcasing nuances of red, bookmarks of who she is. Slowly, a carmine chant rotates in her waters, vermillion-coated, dark as molasses enticing lovers to hold her crystal stem drowning Read more