Oh my heart is both so heavy and light. Finally emerging from the fog of a 2 day migraine and back at my desk doing the final adjustments on the book. This is where I am feeling both free and sad. Once again the word bittersweet feels necessary. The pit of me is such a hodge podge of things. There is relief and pride, there is fear and something else I can only refer to as a sharp sadness. I've always had a complicated relationship with goodbyes. Finishing the book feels like one, whether I meant it to or not. It does. I've spent hours and hours with these poems. I've felt both anger and love for them at times. Never have I felt so connected to a body of work. There's the feeling of saying what I needed to say and also barely denting the surface. I didn't expect to feel so emotional about it. But here I am with tears in my eyes, proud and afraid and brave. Writing this book pulled me through the remainder of this bizarre year. Writing it put to rest what stayed fit

My labor of love is rounding its final few corners. I say this with a mix of pride and peace. I've worked hard, harder than I've ever worked on a collection of writing before. I can say that and mean it. Be it maturity or timing, I've discovered a new love and understanding when it comes to the page. I suppose I have this year to thank for some of that growth. What a strange time to be living. I think certain personal decisions and energies are palpable to others, whether we mean them to be or not. Kind of like how one shitty attitude can dull a room in record time. Those close to me have noticed something mended--as if writing and I took a long, lush walk sometime over the summer and squashed some shit being avoided for much too long. In the past I've likened my connection to my work as that of a bad lover--erratic, intense, hot and cold and never sure. I simply don't feel that way anymore. I don't want to love anything in a harmful way, especially myself. I

American Monster: Love & politics in an age of corruption. Join us for a multicultural poetry reading with Christian Nowlin, Jose Padua, Nikki Allen and Michael Simms presented in partnership with Vox Populi, a public sphere for poetry, politics, and nature. December 7 - 7pm--8:15pm Click here for more info & tickets!

epilogue of the bear trap I sleep in a square. I bookend my profiles with pillows and keep two below my head. Waking means lifting and climbing--sleeping means sinking. I dream surrounded. Tell me what surviving did to us. Tight mouth and buoy boats—I’m not buying it. I stand in every aisle of the store, ignore the weekly list. I have no plans. I try to buy them, place palm around new ones in the far back. Does everything I own have an expiration date? How is my blood? Is it everywhere? Is it obvious? Do I need more? In the back of the house, rotting limes. They liquefy. Porous green to a brown gray mass, happy dents. Successful hand transplants. Do the veins and nerves ask each other to dance? Do they tangle like tree roots, fire their guns into the other’s shins & lapse into tango for life? My coat attracts snowflakes, stellar dendrites on my shoulders and sectored plates up the nose and on lips as I walk from bus to house. I push my hand into the pile growing on the ca