June 2022
Wasabi and the Crow
My darling, Loving you was like romancing air, nothing to butt up against except your charm. Orbiting each other, the magnetic attraction, the white space between. When I [...]
March 2021
Well past midnight
Her book topples from her hand, lands on the floor, open. Outside, centuries of stars, muted by street lamps, a crescent moon. Cicadas shrill, go still, then shrill. [...]
June 2020
Don’t Say it
Not in your mother tongue, diction quick and soft and hushed, not Kalahari style with plosive clicks, or in a guttural throat purr. Even the sibilant whisper, the [...]
First Night
She was on her knees straddling him, her loose hair cresting over his chest. It felt like he’d always crooned slightly off key in her ear, as he [...]
First Anniversary
Outside my window, the you-you-you of mourning doves and I wake, bewildered. The redwoods hold each other up below the soil, intertwined. On your side of the bed [...]
Nocturne in Blue
Mutable as a cloud sculpted by wind, I didn’t understand the boundaries of skin. Then the heat of your hands, a cradle for my cheeks, fingertips at my [...]
Visitations
Ours is a fractured romance. We appearto each other in so many disguises.You stumble on the beach and presto,we’re two French soldiers in a trench touching fingers in a [...]
Walking the Foreshore
I. Foam scours the sand. The pulsing lighthouse peers through clouds like lumpy breasts hugging the hills. My sister’s dead of cancer at 52 and I trod the beach [...]
March 2020
Nomad
When you have travelled through jungles of imagination, trod upon hot pavement in arid cities of desire, when all you’ve sought refuses to be found, stand still and let [...]
The Change
Five women at the creek cradled in the whisper of water over stone, intimate dusk, the occasional whipbird, a cackle of parrots, and somewhere deep in the forest – [...]
February 2020
Amber Leaves, A Glosa
What do you need? What does anyone need? The cell of darkness is there, it takes over the evening hills, growing and growing, your heart lost in it. – [...]
Waterborne
The babies have come splashing into warm pools. Water glances off fat cheeks, smoothes downy skulls. Flutter kicks propel them, while inside each cell of flesh and bone, fluid [...]
January 2020
Because You Do Not Call
I stand here in the smoke of grief trying to locate the fire. When your flame crackles and rises skyward, I bask in its warmth, but when it dies [...]
To Failure
Failure, you were unwelcome in my parent’s home. I was not allowed to play with you and if you happened to show up, I blushed and looked away. Like [...]