Tag: poetry

Do you know anyone in high school right now?

Yeah, my sister.

Is she a tweaker or is she normal? My brother’s normal.

Science Learning Center, 5:00PM, 2/19/2025

imagination is a gradient of experience charted against naïveté. it is the tightrope between consciousness and fear, where a knife is seen as shiny instead of sharp. to be able to listen to a house and hear the laughter through its membrane. to be able to look at a cloud and see a cloud and not a butterfly, or a hibiscus, or a tragedy. a contraction–a contradiction–in a mirror we crystallize infinity and sell it back to ourselves. in this crystal, a tombstone: you are a name, and then a last name, and no more.

I’ll be doing a lot of things this weekend, and by a lot of things, I mean doing nothing.

Chem Building, 10:30PM, 3/23/2025

there is a summer hidden behind the curtain of a weeknight, an eternity nested within itself. every day is a sacrifice and every sacrifice demands a savior. the sky opens like a slit throat, warm and gushing with the promise of a sunset, a scar that will wrinkle in the sun. in the shadow of the moon–in the interval between now and never–you will disappear into the black and i will not even have the thought of your face for comfort. oh, martyr! on that summer weeknight you became a hero to the world and the memory of a hero to me.

With this message, do you think you are blessing him or do you think you are cursing him?

Palmer Commons, 4:00PM, 4/9/2025

and then suddenly, a tilt of the head and the heart is gasping for air. each sentence a slipknot: a mouthful, or a minefield? a rose, freshly cut, stem against cheek, dying between breaths–who is the one dying? how easily the words spilled from my fingers and onto the page. the ink bleeds transparencies, truths unveiled and secrets deciphered. your glance dissolves muscle and unzips bone, a medusa in media res, where serpents shatter glass with their tongues and turn beads of sweat into reams of stone.

Over Christmas I started making it for him, my dad has a workshop, so I made him a wooden cooking spoon!

RoosRoast, 10:00AM, 3/29/2025

a sleight of your hand and the coffee has splashed across the white: the countertop a constellation of heartbeats, the marble annotated with stars. a sleight of your hand, this falling. your soul is stitched into tragedy and still i pulled the thread, hanging on for dear life, unraveling us both. the fourth law of physics: inertia is the toil and ecstasy is the reward. my autobiography will spill your name all over the margins, each footnote an explosion of springtime. do you remember the flowers? i wish you would.

I am learning how to make a crème brulee!

Do you have a torch?

I have a very big torch.

West Medical Center, 4:00PM, 2/25/2025

the fire burns bright blue, a blue that cannot be caged or stoked or photographed. the kind of blue that can be only described by a look–sapphire and cerulean and the teal from a thick stack of glass–the kind of look you never forget. i wear your lenses and they distort my vision: they turn you into stars, a bright pulse of glowing light. no one has ever looked at me this way. did you ever ask me what i wanted to tell you? a scar in my retina, long after the sun sets, long after i get my answer. there is blood and there is sky and there is nothing in between. a face so white, you would have thought i saw a ghost–

It reminds me of your mom, because back in high school she used to do it and then she would flip her hair back and I thought it was the coolest thing ever!

Ann Arbor City Club, 10:00AM, 3/22/2025

we are always evolving, though not necessarily in the forward direction. i met a man who claimed he could change the past–isn’t that funny? we can all change the past, if we choose to remember it differently. our neurons are built on a foundation of quicksand, always moving, always drowning; quiet your mind and they lose their tension, sinking, never to resurface. flushed away, a bitter flavor seeping out of filter paper. diffusion, effluence, transition state. a recipe for a coffee stain on a countertop: a sprinkle of indifference and a dash of luck.