secret projects

I have so many secret projects that I don't share with you on here because I want you to see them in print. I want you to hold these worlds in between thumb and forefinger. But I've decided to let these words dissolve into the ether and pile up in your stomach like dust.

take these dusty words, and know that i am writing so many of them!

secret project 1:


TENDER:


 A double narrative of my time spent as a volunteer in hospice, and my journey to understanding how much i love women.

Today we knew each other. He is starting to trust my stranger’s face because I can repeat back to him the moments of his life. I will do this every time I visit now. I know he wants to die remembering that he has a son that also shares his father’s name. I smile at him while I reconstruct his timeline, and he sighs deeply—instinctively I take a deep breath too. He says in his brutal voice, a carcass of a voice, “ That        was        beau ti ful” My breath? My breath is beautiful? I take another breath, and this time I relish in it; I close my eyes. He nods and says “ E ven     bet ter.”

In the beginning, when we first were roommates, when we first starting calling each other best friends, it was hard to say goodnight. At the end of the day when she would have to make the long trip up the stairs to her room—the room so high above mine, it seemed to be balancing on the full moon—it was too much. Instead, we turned off the lights in the living room, or in my room, and let the purple of the night dye our faces. We wrestled out the sticks of our loneliness that were heaped inside us. We pressed our faces into each other until we left red marks. I held her hair in handfuls. I held her by her waist. When we slept, I wrapped her so tightly I grew new muscles over night. I let my breath be open on her back.

secret project 2:

PHOTOEMS 365

strangers and friends are sending me their black and white photos. I am writing poems to them.

when he was young his body liquid, it spread out wherever there was space. No sensation was too sandpapery to keep his loosely screwed limbs tucked in. He was like an animal unabashed—ignorant. That’s why him and Bif befriended each other; everything could be understood in a shoulder’s yawn, the peninsula of a knee.