[November 2025] Always, I want to begin with seeds. With blossoms. With beauty. Foundations, I can forget. Or maybe it’s more I expect them to sprout from the ground magically of their own accord. Like tender tendrils of new plants pushing through carob-colored rain-soaked soil. I am at home in the fluid, find cement suspect.…

[October 2025] The smell is unmistakeable. At least, to me. Pungent as citronella, sharp as pine, bitter as citrus rind. Yet somehow soft, slightly soothing — not quite bay leaf or nutmeg. My grandparents had trees in their yard and this time of year my brother and I would scurry around with the squirrels, collecting…

[September 2024] Though the physical photographs have long since disappeared, I can still close my eyes and picture Céline, the exchange student from Paris who lived with my aunt Cherrie for a year. Her short brown hair, stonewashed blue jeans, shiny boots, black leather jacket. She seemed so chic and cool, so mature, though she…

[July 2024] Even my words are sprinkled with sand here. It sifts through everything, swishing swirls of air holding tiny grains aloft. I am in Yucca Valley again. This past January I traveled here for the first time since family members moved, initially from L.A. to Joshua Tree and then from that lower plain to…

[December 2023] Floods are not only water. Floods can also be memories, mistakes, and miracles: we consider ourselves overflowing with each of these from time to time. Recently I’ve returned from my first plane travel in five years. I am awash in the experience of arriving, carrying the sunshine of where I have just been…

[June 2023] Birchbark. Newspaper. A match, when struck against raspy side of box.  Please, inventory with me: dry oak wood, pine needles, handful of hay, last year’s leaves, length of linen, letters you wrote and never meant to send.  Old corn flour. The contents of long-shelved canisters – cloves, cinnamon, cardamom, powdered garlic.  Hillsides, mountainsides,…

[April 2023] amalgamation /əˌmalɡəˈmāSHən/ noun Maybe, like me, whenever you see an unusual word you ask: why this one? Or perhaps that’s just poetry, which thrums through my mind always plastering the walls with rhyme and meter, endlessly sussing roots and rhythms. I am not sure when I first read the word amalgamation, though I…

[January 2023] “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” – Nelson Mandela Let me be clear: the gravity I must defy is my own.  Here I am, at two-and-a-half or three years old, just discovering the wondrousness of words, how they zip out from my mouth to light up the world like fireflies. My parents take…