Love letter to my best friend, In this world I dream of, our mother and my best friend’s mother stand side by side in a warm laundry room trading stories, bathed in soft clothes and their soft words in a softer life, a gentler world, one where they would not…

Philly. You didn’t pull any punches. Rocky’s city, The Roots’ city. The birthplace of graffiti. Bird Gang. “Jeet yet,” cheesesteaks, water ice. Jawn. Outta pocket. South Philly soccer in Spanish and West Philly cherry blossoms in summer. Cristina Martinez’s barbacoa. The hipsters took Fishtown but further north, the carne asadas in the park…

I meet a man and write 6 poems about rape. They are good poems and his were good kisses. Still, it’s a strange way to tell someone you like them, so I don’t. Trauma makes a strange math of you, the only thing I know that takes and leaves you…

There’s always going to be a reason, won’t there? A good, bloody, wound of a reason: The year your boss grabbed you when you were alone The years you had just escaped from home The boyfriend, the family, the different words for “life” That leaden weight that pins you to bed for months. They’re all good reasons, yes good eulogies. Good truths to patch together all those bad, bad years, and much neater than saying:

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you want to be well. You want to be happy. You want to be loved. You want to feel whole. You want to be seen. I don’t know who’s out there feeling lost, feeling cruel, feeling bewildered at life or people…

I used to write all my poems about my ex boyfriend; since I’ve been safe his name just blew away from my life like dead leaves. though I am still digging up rot from beneath where he lived Some pain is funny like that, It can hurt like the wound til it falls away like the bandaid. -11/17/19

Last night I dreamed about the man who once haunted my nightmares. He drove me out of every home that once bore my name including my name my house job phone number best friend city life. 4 years have passed. 3 since I last saw him. 2 since I last…

At the heart of all my research is a love letter to my mother All my digging a tornado and in its eye a quiet plea: for grace for forgiveness for salvation like a rescue light that passed over my mother’s blood line, us, screaming with drowning lungs a language…

The last few years I’ve been working on a piece I hope to pursue publishing for, on how to move forward in restaurants in the wake of #MeToo. It’s been alternately cathartic, painful, triggering, hopeful, and exhausting to write. There’s a lot of me in there, a lot of my…