I stare at the sand in the grooves of my sandals under fluorescent lights. Like a shell without the ocean’s saltwater sheen. Fish out of water. It’s different in here. Cold. Sterile. Appropriate. I scream internally where no one can hear. For color. For the outside. For all the “inappropriate.” Expected words tumble out of…

I wake up in this borrowed bed. It came with the house from the retired Dollar General store owner in Florida who once owned it. I allow my life to sink into it each night as if it’s always been here cradling my mind, hugging my body. My fingers caress the thin lump of a…

Endometriosis. There’s a term for this nightmare of a condition that plagues me. Creates small fires in my belly. Devouring my ovaries in unexpected wild waves. An internal storm, leaving these lemons sheathed in curved razor blade armor. They take residence below your abdomen, sitting four and five in a line, just within your hips,…

I can’t tell if I miss you or if I simply miss a feeling. A flutter when my phone lit up and I thought it might be you. A warm surge from my heart to my hips as I set the music and lit the candles, waiting for the first sign of you in the…

I was really hoping you wouldn’t be something else I have to heal from. And yet here I am… That thick, hazy white light that was us, leaking from within, lowering in soft shades from my physical form out onto this river valley. I wonder if you can see it way down there on the…

Arms reach, toes curl, spine pops just fine it seems. And yet this womb of mine aches, swollen and aggravated. By what I can’t understand. Veins and arteries surge thick. Enflamed. Perhaps the ancestral women are upset I haven’t used my machinery. Perhaps they’ve met to craft a grand plan to take it all back,…

The softest yellow swaths of morning fell through the bedroom window. I followed each ethereal line from doorknobs and floorboards infinitely up and out over the barn, past Rich Mountain, and across the Blue Ridge. I imagined her there, laid easy in a soft mess of clouds. Chubby little cheeks smushed upward. Tiny belly rising…

I started out the door, directionless. I wasn’t sure where I needed to get myself on to, yet sure I needed to find out. The electric hum was subdued here in the valley. While 18-wheelers filled with apples and oil and boxed sugar snacks slowly squealed and burned ’round the mountain’s switchbacks, they were a far…

I sense a softer us Feel it in my bones Like a memory Something I’ve always known and want so deeply to re-remember. Re-kindling its warmth within my hips Re-connecting the fibrous veins of our stems where they’ve come unattached. Allowing space for the heavy wet of your petals to fall alongside the back of…