Because so much of patriarchal culture writes off any nurturing type of love as femininity or as lesser, it’s easy (and strongly encouraged) to hear “the way men love” as an oxymoron, or as a warning. But there’s also something so sweet about the love that startles through that expectation, that blooms regardless and despite it. The love that forgets to introduce itself.

Whenever I see a small aircraft descend past my apartment, with drooping lights against a dark sky and darker ridgeline, I think of a poem by Ada Limón, called “Accident Report in the Tall, Tall Weeds.” There’s a section that reminds me so much of my dad…

According to the witch-prophet in the Goodwill, I have a kind gaze, one that renders what it touches beautiful. Like superhero laser eyes, but with art…I believe, in that way, that we all, on some level, are superheroes. Or witches, or prophets, or whatever. That is to say, I believe in magic. That there’s magic in the world. That we, as experiencers and as meaning makers, are magic.

On small town community and the lessons Donkey Basketball, Hunter’s Ed, and the Cold Weather Shelter taught me.

2024 is a year of Miyazaki whimsy and Levinasian ontology: of existing through a thousand marvelous, miraculous, devastating encounters.

There’s this perception that trans people have to leave their small towns to reinvent themselves, but that’s not always true.

“I love you. I’m glad I exist”

Reflections on one year of HRT and making a homeplace of my body.

Injury is an invitation to intimacy. I think that’s why there’s always an injury episode in the dramas. While there’s obvious vulnerability on the part of the person who’s hurting, there’s also vulnerability in expressing care.

Though I'm skilled at recognizing where my reality sometimes departs from the shared perception, experiencing an unshared reality is lonely. Sometimes I wrote it off as sleep deprivation. Sometimes I thought I was going crazy,—the insidious, unhinged-student, Bell Jar crazy. And sometimes I considered the possibility that there are multiple realities, and I am caught on the cusp: living in one, sensing another.

During a year of isolation, I come to realize that this insurmountable alterity I've felt my whole life---hasn't lately been around to feel.

draft 12: an unexplanation / an assemblage / a rumination—on art, & self, & the artistry of being

but such signs are difficult to read when you’re driving so fast down a country road that you catch air going over hills while hay-heat smoke surges through your open windows & lifts you up to the ceiling & swallows the space between you & the seat, & you can feel spaces—every gap has a pull to it, pulls you toward all things—& you are like the smoke between them all, & you can feel far-off wildfires spiraling up cedars, licking dry bark, & you can feel the urgency of the hay balers, feel the car pulled back down to sweat-beaded pavement, & it’s only been a second, but when each second sings with the whole of the universe, how the hell are you supposed to read signs?

I miss you like missing a train, as if I’m sitting at the empty station, waiting for you to draw near again.

“Maybe my body hates me because I never wanted it.” Ibrahim stops examining our finger ratios. “Now that’s pseudoscience,” they say.

While my younger sister poses in front of Rothkos on her brief recess from a jostling lurch through the white-walled American wing / , whose plaques admit no mistake, / I read a different room. I read, beside “Seascape with Three Boats” / , each ship a beige word curled over stunning blue, / that the calligram, an abstraction of Islamic calligraphic scripts, “occurred well before the advent of twentieth century Western modernism...and continues to this today.”

I wrote this lyric essay years ago, but I feel its themes—indeterminacy, loneliness, distant forms of intimacy—are especially poignant now. So I want to share it with you, this love letter to friends, and to longing, and, too, to the possibility that sits within uncertainty.

My bones are not softer than average, and their pain when broken is sharp, hard. But years of injuries have taught me that bodies are soft—softer when wounded—all the way down to the bone.