Free Apples

short story, originally published by Pile Press, 2024

A box of apples is placed on the street corner. Blocked darkly on the front is the word: FREE. The tree they used to belong to is still busy scenting the air out behind the house that the apples now temporarily reside in front of. It is September, yet the sun still lends enough warmth to the evening air to continue persuading that nostalgic fragrance into clouding heavily around the yard as the sky goes pink and gold at the edges. The tree sighs, the house sighs, the apples, in chorus, sigh.

read more

Bike Repair

poem, originally published by Everything Matters Press, 2024

I’m piecing together an old bike
sorting through parts in a bag
drawing out dried up leaves, scraps of old plastic and,
sometimes,
the part I need.
My hands are smudged black
the smell of it all,
the cold metal, the damp air, the used grease,
fogs up the moment
I look down at my hands
and see my father’s cracked skin
and knobby knuckles
cherry red new grease.

read more

Necessary Anger

essay, originally published in Cyclista Zine, 2024

I like a cozy story about the joys of bicycling as much as anyone else, I think. Descriptions of the feeling of confidently winding through city streets, flying through a sea of clogged up traffic, finding all the good shortcuts and making it truly faster to travel by bike than any other mode of transportation, the feeling of legs and lungs burning pleasantly, being free to stop anywhere without a thought. All of those things can make a day so good, even if nothing else feels good in that day. But joy is not the primary emotion that comes up, for me, when biking through my city. The joy is nearly always there, but bubbling up before it is anger. Rage, really.

read more

The Unweaving of Time in H.D.’s Trilogy

essay, 2021

In Trilogy, H.D. unweaves the text’s sense of time through poetic form, language, and structure, as she attempts to digest and adapt to life during and after global tragedy. In this essay, I argue that this move is one of a poet intentionally trying to create a path forward after a monumentally life-altering crisis, whose perception of time has been permanently shifted. It’s because of her experiences in both World War I and II that she sets time swirling in this three-part poem, because of the mind-shattering realities she (and the rest of the world) had to adapt to, and because in the midst of it all, words are the only possibility for eternity in the world. In an essay arguing for Trilogy to be read firmly as a war poem, Sarah H.S. Graham speaks to the tightly structured nature of the text, saying that, “At the end of reading, though, the impression is that, without imposing an inflexible structure onto that rush of language and ideas, the poem would run completely out of control, overwhelming both poet and audience,” (Graham 63). The rush that she names, in my mind, goes hand in hand with H.D.’s times alterations. It’s the rush of linear time falling away, and something new flooding in.

read more