BLOG

I never want to stop being interested in imagining what my phalanges look like under all this skin, how mushrooms grow in cow shit, what led sea cucumbers to vomit their intestines in self-defense, what brains look like under microscopes. I ask the reader to bodily identify with themselves in the end, with our own human grossness, and I ask them to recognize how amazing that is.

Most days are unspectacular, but on the worst days, nothing is in my fingers. Or in my brain. I don’t like anything I’ve written, so I repeatedly type and backspace the way I tell my students not to do during in-class writing activities. I click through old poems nostalgically as if to harness the magic of a moment when something sprang forth out of nothing. I feel like I’ll never write something good again. It’s as if negative self-talk itself will produce the poem…

I am a woman, a daughter. An inner life can be difficult to reconcile with reality and the way others see you. Within the surreal conceit of a coast of mothers and a single daughter who mysteriously wash up to its shores, I hope the boundaries between the interior dreamlike states and exterior reality begins to muddle and melt away.