Last May, I drove my father to Columbus, Ohio to watch his father die. Neither my dad’s car nor his body was prepared for the trip. He had been recovering from diabetic ulcers, fatigue, the aftereffects of a decades old concussion–all of which left him with lessened mobility and energy, a disordered apartment, and an oblique (but reluctantly stated) need for help. I had traveled to Charlotte to help him clear the spiderwebbed curtains and supplement heavy counter-tops, to try to reset him to some normalcy that might encourage him to take his diabetes seriously, but his father was dying so we needed to make a long drive.

A long car ride is time. It pulsates with the rhythm of the wheels, the ebbs and flows of conversation, the impossible nowness that it always calls back to. Riding in a car together is being thrown into the present of a relationship. With my father, it was his ailing body’s difficulty driving for long periods of time, it was my desire to care for him through muscling through the long drive. I could listen for the echoes of his long drives: his post-grad years spent crisscrossing the country as a traveling bus boy. TGI Fridays offered a passport program where you could move from location to location at will. My dad took advantage of this to travel for baseball games. He would park his car in the empty stadium lot, fall asleep for the night, and try to see if he could snag tickets for the day’s game. Sometimes, he and his buddy would be hassled by the cops; other times, they’d get lucky.


—

There is a spiral staircase that leads to nowhere in a barren lot in Bed-Stuy. I walked up the first few steps and found myself inside the tattoo of a spiral staircase on the arm of a passenger on the bus to dripping. Inside the skin, the grates of the metal steps are pores slick with sweat. Slip and fall down the staircase into the void of untouched flesh, or climb the curve that disappears into a flurry of dots. I turn the corner to find the spiral tightens as it moves upward. Like a mouse squeezing under a doorframe, my bones become soft as my body navigates the narrows. The curvature is dark like that black of black ink that burrows into the skin. I am in the pitch darkness of an infinitely small step; I am an asymptote moving through the time of moving through the staircase. An infinite spiraling upward that never reaches the top, the nowness of climbing itself.


—

I am on a long car ride. I am trying to explain to my father that dance music is a durational, psychedelic form. I put on mixes by Relaxer and Upsammy, I try to explain that reputation can bring about an almost meditative state. I am trying to explain dripping, what I am excited about returning to the festival, how those moments where a gurgling texture burst into a serrated rhythm are like cracks in self, moments where you have been stretched so far by a fleeing but knotted sheet of icy fog, where water becomes gas in a continuous multiplication of snares spreading the body thinner and thinner.

On a long car ride, there are many car rides, humming along at the same rhythm of the journey. At some point, I might have had a momentary, but peculiar fantasy of the next years dripping, of bringing my weakened father to the festival where he might sit in the back of the inn like those old wooks who disappears into their beards and psychedelics–but our trip had begun around 8 or 9 pm, and as we reached 7am, Columbus Ohio an hour or so away, my dad suggested we pull over at a rest stop, sleep an hour or two in the car. I didn’t make the connection that this was an afterimage of his days as a traveling bus boy.

We didn’t stay for long at my grandfather’s bedside. He was tired, irritable, and ready to die. My dad joked with him about getting back on the golf course. My grandfather struggled to understand. We ate lunch with my uncle and his wife. My dad mentioned some worrying test results that pointed towards leukemia. My aunt cautioned that cancer needs to be taken seriously. My father seemed non-plussed, mentioned his regiment of methlemene blue to treat the blue light exposure from his computer screen. My aunt and uncle, both scientists, seemed skeptical of my dad’s wellness plan, unsure if his shamanic path (and new age medicine) was an adequate substitute for western medical care.

Absent any mutual understanding, we got in the car and drove back to North Carolina. Returning to my dad’s apartment, I heard the soft hush and distant twinkle of the sound healing machine reverberating against the haphazard stacks of boxes filling his consciousness outpost.


—

Oblique solutions to fabricated problems. The banker explained the court order I would need to pry open the box. His business card falls out of my notebooks at the rave and the person who picks it up informs me that she is legal counsel for the death factory and that they are growing tired of my riffling through boxes. I respond that of course I am tired of one box only opening to another box. I am confused by the TGI Fridays paystubs, unsure if they are a map through this maze of boxes, or if I only encounter the flaked skin of a careful architect. I present her my card, “The Rainbow System of Personal Growth and Health,” in a bid to reassure her that I am only concerned with the continuation of my employment at the death factory, that my accounting is not auditing in the service of subterfuge, or at the order of organizing. She looked me up and down, trying to pinpoint the movement of the sky blue aura towards and away from my throat center, as if evaluating whether I truly lost myself in the boxes or had fabricated a fake but effective map to move through the maze. And it was on this count that my presentation of “The Rainbow System of Personal Growth and Health” had actually drawn more suspicion because a color coded body map of the chakras is necessarily both a fake and an effective map, an unreal guide to techniques for wellness and a phantasmic portrait of the body. Do you think, she started, that you could squeeze your frame through the crack of the cardboard fold of a box?

—

Every celebration is a funeral. My grandfather died the day before dripping 2025. I brought a book on shamans where the shaman either journeys to lower/higher worlds or accompanies a spirit on its voyage to our world. My father had been fashioning himself a shaman, learning various esoteric systems of metaphysics, healing, mindfulness, politics, and geography. At the time, I was trying to formulate an understanding of raving and wellness, one that might take seriously the personal transformation that practice demands. Or maybe i was just curious if man can communicate with the dead. I am always placing an idea between myself and reality, uncovering a context that is a gift wrapped in a box. Once, when I was a teenager, my dad presented my brother and me with a box a week or so before christmas. He encouraged us to focus our energy on the box, to try to materialize the gift we desired. We always spent christmas with my mom, but, the day after (at my dad’s apartment), we opened the box to find a statue, or a totem, or a talisman. The shaman succeeded in realizing reality.

Now, my dad is dead. I crossed out father and wrote dad, the former felt like another container, an idea, a separation. What I am uncovering in death is a grand conspiracy. It is not surprising as the last section of the last conversation I had with my dad circled around Israel and Iran, speculation on another big attack plotted by the Israelis. I had wondered at first whether the CIA or the Mossad had finally caught up with the old man. A conspiracy theorist is not only a keen analyst of subterranean subterfuge, but the center and target of a gnarled scheme to eliminate free thought. The conspiracy theorist, the shaman, the father–all deal in rites of passage.


—

For a year, I only wrote in fragments, shards of glass. I preferred haphazard thoughts, the kind that you could break apart into different sheets of paper without losing any meaning. But my chopped up sheets of paper lacked that serrated edge of broken glass. A fragment ought not fold in on itself, and so I began to realize my sheets of paper were more like scraps, their edges grew dull, they ripped, but they did not break apart into more fragments. I have begun experimenting with writing on glass. I take a solid continuous plane and write a whole story, from left to right, up and down, making sure that I have reached an adequate conclusion. For example, I write about biking across the Williamsburg bridge wearing my jingle bell earrings. The story is a retelling of Orpheus and Eurydique where a lover bikes behind me. Up the incline, maneuvering around the absent-minded pedestrians, the rubber gripping the concrete, the eagle-eyed acceleration around the construction site where you must be quick to avoid the oncoming traffic. Through all these exercises, I would need to keep my eyes facing forward. I would need to have faith that the jingle of my bell earrings guided my lover, that they had overcome every obstacle, that they had not turned the other way.

The story concludes with me gathering speed, barrelling down the Brooklyn side of the bridge, not looking back. After transcribing the story on the sheet of glass, I take a hammer and smash it into fragments. I watch the story shatter into moments. The broken hole is not of the story, but of all the bike rides I have taken across the bridge. And so I find a moment and, on the exposed space of the shard of glass, I continue another story (of the misguided reconciliation with a friend at the center of the bridge on the fourth of july, of my scatterbrained flight from the anarchist film festival, etc etc) and as the story fills the whole shard with ink, I smash it again to find smaller fragments. I am going up and down the bridge, to Manhattan and to Brooklyn, all at the same time. Only when I have assembled the thinnest fragments, the sharpest edges, is the story complete.


—-

Bigfoot. I do not know if the plural of bigfoot is bigfeet or bigfoots. I do know that a regrettable misconception has spread that bigfoots roam the forests. The falsehood stems from an attempt to establish an equivalence between bigfeet and homo sapiens, to reify the missing link hypothesis, to find a corridor through the evolutionary maze. In practice, sasquatch is of a different order of intelligence, possessing the capacity for telepathetic communication. The adapation–or rather the refusal to theorize from this fact–explains the misguidedness of searching for bigfoots on the surface. Bigfeet developed telepathic communication in response to living underground. There are vast caverns underground, filled with stalagmites that resemble trees. The caverns do not have any light–natural or unnatural. Instead, the bigfeet have mapped the terrain through a series of bruises. Each collision with a wall, each fall down a hole snaking deeper into the earth, each eye poked out by a jagged rock emerging from a wall–every pain is communicated telepathically. This inventory of injury is geography. Pain is a map.

I only know this because a bigfoot mistakenly transmitted to me. He mistook my maze of boxes for the tunnels of his home. He mistook my thinking for the sorrow of his world.


—-

for isaac and ocean

There’s always a double
Another rain fly

In the echo of the bass
On the surface of the lake

Joy and sorrow
The same wave
Rippling
A wake

some poems written during the summer and fall of 2025.

Trees and Treeing

The tree is treeing no longer and you watched it fragment into hundred of shattered branches dancing out the door.
My entangled arms caressed the lightning streams
and my knotted eyes were too weak to see
the danger posed
by those without time.
I felt the pebbles at my feet
and watched them manicure the calm elapsed by twisted green and forgotten shade.

Did you know I heard the hushed voices
and watched the embers entertain
a circle bound
to the rhythm
of a fading flame?

It was all a speck, shrugged off skin, the same that autumn granted and abandoned
in the slushy torment where I lounged, ambivalent and still standing.
Did you see my delight in the afternoon rain
that extended from that young woman’s young children’s playdays
before she filled the house with strangers who bury mice at my feet
and say strange prayers that may be older than me.

Old women are are young children
and strangers forget that cuts scratch out decades and instants all the same
I am the tightest circle in my trunk and the weakest digit in my outstretched palm.
I am comfort and charity, endurance and envy, absolute and absent
as i slouch toward your rotting concrete
the same that I happily cracked with my thundering feet.

I heard them say
they’d cut me down
on Thursday
But I only thought, which one?
They extend across the horizon, unbroken and complete.
But you live without time
And I pity the day of the weak.


August 17th, 7am

I play the body game of getting lost in flailed limbs. It is my birthday. I am alone, playing the body game of getting lost in greens turned blue. And then again, back to green. I’m trying to reassure myself of my self in a way. I gathered people I enjoy spending time with, and kept saying that I really just want good conversation, laughs. There’s this repetition, as if I’m trying to convince myself, I’m not sure if others hear me lost in the loop, the reassurance. I guess it is a part of acknowledging and moving past other lives I’ve had.

A new poem about dancing

And I return
Blue slipping past
A smudged edge
Charcoal on the bridge of my hand
Extending the fragment of my finger tip
Til collapse, catastrophe
And I return, the arch bending, tracing, murmuring
“Have you ever fallen”
Of course!


Punk Time

A court date is the eternal return of the same
Deferred judgement for fabricated crimes
The petty tyranny of frightened hordes
Bended backwards in stuttered time.
A mob chases its own movement
Anarchists trapped in a rainfall of letters
To addresses abandoned
After the day where my roof was filled with cracked boots, reckless renegades, and the sound of a note pitched to an accelerated ambivalence.
I am back at square one, in a game of murmurs
I misheard the clown cars hum in the crackle of cicadas
But did they not rev their engine so loud in the forest of forgotten names
That I let my face slip in their flashing gaze.
She forgot the DIY HRT, but remembered the drive through donuts
Keep your eye on the circle, not the whole.
A cookout drive-thru completes the circuit,
But the cashier keeps forgetting my food
So I drive around and around
As the hitchhiker tells me I have such pretty hair
Does she know I hide my thoughts in the tussled mess?
I forgot my comb, but remembered where I lay my head.
Leaving too late, trying to return again.


Birds in the JFK Terminal

The din of hurried movements
Framed by haphazard chirps
Birds fly in holding patterns
Float above granite skin
Shuffle eye lids
Dream of wings caught between surveillance schemes and flying dreams
When the heart beats in a fragile cage
Doubled back on a haggard frame.
Traveler, do you wander to lower or higher worlds
Overburdened by the song slipping from cracked beaks
Cry for affectionate flight, flow w/ the jet stream.
A song burrows into the heart,
vibrates wings and arms,
taught cry for air,
breathe,
expand as the terminal screams.


Loblolly Pines

Green Needles Bristle
Above the waves of overtold stories
Stuck in youth
Where words are yet to have meaning
Highways open onto shadowy paths
Smelling of pine and draped in Spanish moss
Do you remember how the sand gave way
To cratered waterways
Rolling balls, tumbling time
I am a child playing a game for four
I am an adult playing a game for two
On the loose unpacked sand
Thudding rather than gliding
Amongst the Loblolly Pines


unititled 1

The competitive funeral director tries to assemble the most successful grief. He listens for the loudest wails, the same that harmonize with the softest whimpers. He collects bodies, but deals in feeling, knowing the mourner is a bundle of cries, curses, and contrivances. Mary at the Cross stares at the laminated Mary with Child. She inhales a plume of holy water, buoyed to the surface of the sky. The Catholic priest is stiff competition, with his ritual, his divine transubstantiation. If the director gathers bundles of feeling, the priest cuts the rope–the sticks strewn about form a cross that is grief, singular and of the world. The funeral director sighs. It is so difficult to compete with true believers.


untitled 2

I had no buck eyes red
To wear to my grandfather’s funeral
My father suggests a golf polo
To honor his father’s pastime
“Something to add to your wardrobe”
And here I sit, in my vivienne westwood,
Honoring one of my past times.
Destiny is always untimely
We don’t tune our clocks
To the eruption of red
Making its ways b/w the pews
After or before my westwood arrived
So that I snaked past the green and yellow mosaic of 9th street
To find a buck eye on the rack of Mr. Throwback
Why “The” Ohio State, he asked.
Another certainty I lacked
For they all reside in bronze
Grandpa Tom’s alchemy
Melting steel into buck eye red


An Interesting Cruelty

Kyo tells Rocannon that the wanderer will take a companion, for a while. Wordlessness is not loneliness, he reminds the wanderer. But the wanderer will always be a stranger or a god, marked by the outside of community or nature. True companionship is the wind between the leaves, the hum of a bicycle wheel over fresh pavement, the unspoken ease of a flowing pen.

There’s a relationship b/w wandering and walking,
Strolling alone and moving toward a group.
Disorientation or comfort.


Steve Aoki in Nassau County

Gabber Americana
Nostalgic Release
Sincerity, not even, just fun
Steve Aoki is the groundhog of Nassau County
Fall has arrived
Fatigued cake
Sanctioned rave, a flyover
Could you just dance, with a smile
On your face
Not question intent
Not craving criticism
Maybe that’s the gift Steve gives
After having ripped his shirt off
So soon into the concert
At the bar, in the subway, they would drink forever given the chance
I’m sober in a field of grass
watching neon and pastel overexpose
On the Jumbotron

We’re getting confused by ideologies, identities, and choice.
Collapsing distinction unfolding form the world
Into the heroism of selection.
Don’t assume the depths of the soul contain treasure.
The prize of possession is bullion turning into liquified gold,
Slipping from fingers not yet wet
With the black water humming beneath.


Deli Girls at Nowadays

A wormhole rather than a blackhole.
Pulled through time to a different space,
same sweat, different flesh.
When do things crack open,
splinter into shoves and pushes,
feet plunging into dirt-stained cement,
but the leaves of a spiraled pathway
have curled into windcut skin
and black finger tips stained with bike grease:
Bend backwards, “but I’m not bitter”,
that time turns thudding kick drums into
metallic arrows, screaming silver
moving at cybernetic speed,
tendrils that pull hollow arms back into a tangle of codes, glances, and battle cries.
Stumbling through Foley Square
to find slogans that hurt.
metal bike frames don’t bend
the way of finger tips pulled back
to the top of a wrist.


The tight spiral

I imagine that I am at the center of a spiral and that I am pulling it tighter and tighter. It coils around me, but it also is me–a continuous line bent into tighter and tighter curves. It’s like writing a sentence that never ends. Other times, it’s like a thought gathering more associations, more intricacy. A line of thought that wraps itself into a bottomless center. Sometimes, I fear this spiral. I wonder if it will suffocate me, if every coil is a sharper edge bearing down on the inside out line that I am.

But then I remember that the spiral is in two-dimensions. And that if I wrap it tighter and together that it will stretch into three dimensions, spiraling up and down–outward even as it continues to grow tighter and tighter. The line becomes an hour glass. Its edges unspooling, now duller and welcoming. Now flying and crawling and digging and swimming–all while still spiraling.

Review

The Mermaid Parade, Coney Island
A punk on the subway
Public Works: Act 1, Storefront for Art and Architecture

two poems written during the winter

inspired by ursula k le guin, jackie wang, e e cummings, positive dialectics, student protesters, and skeptical faith

Trans-Actions of Care

You were cradling the wailing stone
as long as its pitch matched the din
of the pigeons flapping wings.
In the moment, where he startled them,
scattering grey in the cool sky
behind the draped figure gasping for air,
I heard the thud of the wailing stone
cracking the plaza with its heaving sigh
opening the fleshy earth to the prick of our spiked bodies
interlaced in dived diversions of the wailing stone’s churning path.

Did you know the wailing stone
cries softly in blues and yellows
the same that dot the rushing stream
where canaries carry tuna in their erect beak?

I could never hold the wailing stone
my hands crack under shrill asks
the prying of compassion slices through a cooled granite
fragments fall into the rushing concrete
a slimy joy found in shattered serenity.

Did you hear how they composed the wailing stone
of furtive glances, bit lips, and auburn eyelashes
the collapsing faces along the ridge of discontent
an impasse extending from gasps to grasped silence
in heavy words of the mason’s code.

I never heard what the wailing stone said
I only heard it scream.


untitled

In the broken voice
Squeaks through
A half-remembered vestige of prestige
Yearn for after-thoughts
That tumbled from Giants’ lips
Before landing in the reflective pool
Of scratched pages.

At the table
carvings and theses
strewn about on dinner plates
that clattered in tongues
I’d tried to nail down
In their squirming place.

Vanity’s auburn hair
The cracked skin of an unsure handshake
Arms and legs contort in fractal spiderwebs
Are you the seeker of an ambivalent gaze
Or the follower of a mismatched path?

Neglected pleasantries, distorted apologies
The clarity of smudged vision
Within the cracked wide-angle lens
How brave to not encase
This graveyard of cadmium and zinc
That shrinks the horizon
Into a bottomless tin

Oh vanity,
Discard me
From the divine asymmetry

some poems written during the winter of 2024-2025.

a collection of poems written from fall-winter 2024

who are they the children of?


My absence of discipline
Reflects
My difficulties with self-love.
I need to recontextualize discipline
as an act of self-love.

Modulation

Appreciation. A discipline of self-love.


a candle at the vigil

Hear the ringing
in your ears
as the grief
of the world.

Feel the sting
of autumn air

Everything moves
at its
proper
pace.


Kicking Glass

Blood Stains
Dog Hair
Cream Tile
Caked Dirt
Onion Peel
Walk Walk
Cover Toe
Blood Stains
Paper Towel
Foot Steps
Black Plastic
Trash Bag
Walk Back
Drop Hay
Fumble


A prayer for headphones

May I walk down the street
Ensconsced in sound
So I may hear
My own thoughts
My own taste
My own love with the world
I have created for myself

May I ignore my neighbor
Put plastic, rubber, and foam
Between the conversation
The interaction
The exchange
On my way out the door


Nowadays

Sitting on the wooden platform
I hear a voice in my head
the one that finds
in each movement
an affirmation
love
for
myself
I think about the cycle of breath and self, that each momement I breathe in, I bring into being my self.
“That’s what its for,” a dancer remarks,
as if mocking my need
to put into words
what can be expressed in movement.
A trickster trans girl
mocking in that way that good clowns do,
where you find what’s already known.

And maybe I feel the pull of someone
who feels in a similar way to me.
I feel clumsy and excited, the giddy
of knowing I might slip.
And how far to fall
between becoming a girl
falling in love
or falling in love
with myself
as a girl
in love.

Not to get
Too caught
Crushed
But to feel
Like the sidewalks
Stumbled between
Writhing bodies
At the electric distance
Where I am far enough
To lose the space
Between our feet.
Laugh, Trip, Stumble


Drunk

Jade refracts
Kisses fall
Uncovered sleave
Dance once a week
What if I want to fuck you
And figure out our connection later
I’d dream
In nights spent
Dancing
Losing myself
In your breadth

Drunk on the B Train
Crushing Orange Line Beers
Grand Street Bound
Too Slutty
Too Smart
My words caught in my mouth
Fell asleep
So long ago
Erica on the train
My concrete brain
Everyone at Columbia
Looks at me
Like I’m a faggot
They must be So Smart
To Notice.

My biggest flaw
Is that I don’t
See
My own
Beauty

Drunk on the B train
Writing poetry to find
The rush of my glance
Meeting yours

Drunk on the B train
I refuse to leave
I kick my feet up
Spit My Beer
Fuck You
I am a faggot
Fucking women
Fucking men
I’m the shallow pool of spit
We bathe in
We breathe in


Pull-ups

On the railing
The J train rattles by
Yawning autumn
Against the Williamsburg high rise
Nourish the cramped kitchen
Let the smoke flow
From the haunted toaster
Spitting flames
Half past
My forgetful face
Pressed against the grimy scene
Bike by
Stop
But turn around


Your Polaroid

A photo of us
From an Asheville bar
Fell out from my journal
I hadn’t noticed it
Tucked between the unwritten pages
Long past my structured notes
About why we couldn’t be together
But I remember wanting nothing more
Than moments alone in the booth
Than the timer ticking toward flash
Then the press of your lips as the shuttered closed
On a photo of us


A Mouse
curled up
on my kitchen floor
writhing
almost like a dog
rolling on his back
almost, but not.
The pained spasms
of an unsure foot
and me
with a broom
trying to help him outside
or at least
remove him
from my sight
compassion
or my selfish desire
to let live
what will die.


A score for four ppl
1) Think of your name
2) Now think of another name
3) Discard the first and second for a third.
4) Introduce yourself
5) Take your partners name.
6) Go through your day with a new name.


scratch, jest, ride, drink, advance

This is of a place, spiraling through the circuit party at market, maybe too many drinks and joints along the east river

This is the movement in and out of the ID card to track my movement in and out of campus

This is the cash register being chased, the pursuit of some things or experiences that might make me feel like I’m moving

And I am caught in the movement of modulation, cycles, pusling tangled webs, root systems stretching underground, relations and relationships, vibrations and ethics, qualia, sense and sensation, the interwoven web of things that maybe in the last instance cohere into a structure-in-totality.

I do not have the language of freedom.


How do you hear a place?
Take out a sheet of paper
close your eyes
select a place that matters to you
try to focus on the sounds of the place
Can you hear them?
Where does the sound exist?
Pan
Echo


Dancing, an image

The carpet gave too much
with my step
not quite finding
the rhythm
of interlacing hands
of jumps and crashes
“i thought about dancing with you”
what a terrible thought
to betray in hushed confidence
after your friends passed the bottle that smelled of biting and pins
i took your hands
that drifted through the air
like a ribbon, twirling and unfurling
set free into a ruin of thread
Unearthed, Unearned Confidence


There’s something funny

To seeing your ex
In other people.
At first,
The Fear
of an unplanned encounter
of a flood of emotions
from hands gliding through a mullet
from plucking the hat off to find their face
the fading ache
of nights grasping each other’s form
of finding the momentary embrace of a bathroom stall
a handheld walk home
among the snowflake shadows
But now,
the resignation
of dyed haircuts stretching down into braids
of electronics recycled into sigils, wrought iron, and moss
from the fumbled assemblage of self
From youth becoming a whisper of presence
Among the faces in the crowd


“Mansions”
There was a moment of truth
In the afterglow of spurned affection
“Don’t try to make it work
If its not your end goal”
Children of divorce, drinking and dancing
In the after glow


Liminal notes

Lost between
the devil and the cloud
a pretzel and a carrot
my classroom or my desk.

Before Sunset,
a name escapes
falling asleep
on the benadryl periphery.

I’d walk in the cold
I’d bike in the snow
I’d sweat in the greyhound
my skin
pricked by frost
wet by snow
sticky by seats
all to curl up
in the space
in between.