I first heard your voice years ago, and it's still sounding new.
So I'll be hoping this always does as I bid it adieu.

They say the Albrights are a fertile crowd. They find out I'm the daughter of one of Sister Albright's eight children, then sometimes they ask who I'm married to, sometimes where my husband is, sometimes how many children I have. Rarely do they ask how old I am, what school I go to, if I've got a husband, if I've got children. I've none. I've good ( Read more... )

When they say, Brothers, let us cry glory, thousands stand and open their hymn books. When they say, Brothers, let us approach our Heavenly Father, thousands bow their heads. Numbers abounding in the arena, but just a few thousand of the Great Crowd in the fields of God, and the unity of movement is beautiful from here ( Read more... )

I lean into the nightstand and turn off an old cello suite playing loud, and with no recollection of time or space or anything but my mother's coffee brewing, I close my eyes and think, If I know anything of time or space, I should think it's my old best friend's birthday, and has been for five hours. But I can't think, I can't do anything but try ( Read more... )

Even when penning it was only pending, I always pensed I'd give you the penned at the start of eleventh grade, mindless of what milieu was our middle. Of course, how unenlightened was I then to the idea that before the next class we'd be walking down the way together. And now, at the start of junior year, I'm beholding from across the bench-tables ( Read more... )

Well here I am, here I've been. Laying at the end of your hallway for months, just like always, just with a crippling desire to stay. And if not me, someone is always singing that awake is the new sleep, but let's just lay back down, right here.
Well here I am, and my head is still sleeping in. And it almost feels worse than New Year's.

We settle into our house and she asks me if I'm home, and I suppose so, but I mean no. Even with all my things, what was a vacancy still feels vacant to me. Immediately fall in and throw up my yellow walls, my stomach acid. And maybe this is just sickly thinking, but when I said I'd weep bitterly, this isn't what I thought it'd mean.

I let a lone yellow thread of a brand new shirt fall through the dusk and onto the paved corner of seventeenth and eighth; the only part of me that I left in this city, the only part that would consider returning.

Nights like these, every strand of hair must defy gravity. And by God, they will, after I stand under a blow-dryer long enough. But after I sit in the grass long enough, consequence is coming with the clouds. I've ran from the rainfall enough times to know that the home of the heavy will always be after me. Yet, then danced shoeless and soaked by ( Read more... )

For years I've worn the same painting clothes, every time finding a more adult body underneath, and a more adult character spread over the walls. One thing that hasn't aged: my love for the smell of hot cotton. But that's it ( Read more... )