Below is just a few poems I've written over the last spring semester of college:

Non-glow

When walls are backward towns

painted over with beige,

When your all is a roof stuck

under the tongue of a spoon.

And everything is

the cupped hands of air.

The world turns itself

outside your body.

Life escapes

a highway blur

in a camera lens.

We blink out of time

and turn into absence.

A corpse is not a missing person,

but a body missing a glow.

The end is a container of light

someone eclipsed with their hand.

Another Body We Don’t Share

We wash what we wear on the outside

and fit into the person leaving the house.

A soul is another body

we don’t share.

I always thought of it as a circle,

but mine is water-clogged

with tumbling.

What do you do with dry heat?

Lint collects. The vent blows through

the blurred slot of always looking

through what we don’t have.

When stone walls are the air

in my chest,

I have to breath past myself.

The house is a white sheet

blown up with air.

The washer stops running,

so continue like nature.

Be the climb of branches

that choke out the machines.

A line can’t drag itself

between the house and the yard.

What is domestic about nature

that we string it to ourselves,

and where does creation go

when God stops talking?

People are Distances

What takes place in turning

the knob to cold? Some twist

of water falling out of a head?

Some veil to shiver behind?

People are made of things

which break at glances

and collapse into words.

Some blue things bob under

black and surface as a bruise.

Everything ends,

but you wake up.

The world is carried

into a frown.

People are distances

you can’t walk towards.

That’s why mirrors don’t work.

The dull shine of your face

replaces the wall.

World Weary

Religious bones close

a grave inside your body—

everything blue

under your nails is real.

Your eyes turn up

toward the black

and rest on unblinking stars.

Anyone who isn’t a hunter

looks at a deer like a soul

struck in the open field.

World weary,

you can’t remember

how you came to be.

You fold your hands.

Buried Under Creation

An action requires consequence

then doesn’t. God sometimes a wife

who wipes down the world

with blood instead of bleach.

We are here. Or, you are here.

I’m just in the room with the drapes

unbundled and stretched over the panes,

so we can see only so far.

My eyes see until they don’t

want to. Then they are the fog

lights lowered to the asphalt.

I tell my friends, “I don’t feel

like a Baptist, not even on Sundays.”

Maybe the body looks for salvation

in the form of lungs,

realizes everyone has them,

and only goes back for air.

Age doesn’t remind me

of anything but peppermint hands.

I think of my grandmother

and wonder

if I’ll live in her fat forever

of forgetting everyone I meet.

Dementia is a sort of grace

to yourself. Not to others.

I sometimes wish nobody

met me. So I could be a secret

instead. One you’d bury under creation

and never miss. Because you wouldn’t

know me, or the person I’m becoming.