It begins lower than language, a warmth gathering where thought can’t quite follow, a slow ignition that doesn’t need permission to become itself. She feels it before she names it - that pull, that answering deep in the body’s interior, as if something long patient has turned towards the light at last. And when the word comes, it moves through her like rhythm already underway, carried in the hips, the mouth, the small involuntary arch that knows exactly where it’s going. Yes

Not the blaze of roses, not their cliche insistence, but this delicate blossom - a kind of arrival so gentle you could miss it if you were thinking of something or someone else. All winter the branches have held their breath, black script against a sky that wouldn’t answer. Oh how, we learned the grammar of endurance: how to wait, how to close down, how to be smaller than we are. But now - as if the air itself had loosened - they open. Not fully, not all at once, but in a sca

"The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master." - Elizabeth Bishop, One Art Loss has always had a strange aesthetic in literature. Why? Because it is rarely presented purely as absence and is instead framed as the condition through which the world becomes newly visible. So

I like opening the peach with my thumbs, the seam loosening until the fruit parts in my hands, oozing with an orange river that floods the blue roads of my wrist. Give me pears dense with rain, pomegranates split with their red constellations, and cherries so ripe they bruise when I breathe on them. Tell me what to do for I’m tired of arranging the world myself. Yes, hand me the bowl and watch as the fruit gathers here on the marble, each piece opened, each stone lifted out a