I am 38 weeks pregnant today. I am tired. A fatigue that almost feels exquisite, boasting its own radial warmth. A tired that insomnia still deems as brittle seed pod beneath its anchor. When there isn’t sleep, I read. A steady shift of one leaning tower(to-read) to a new, equally crooked stack(read). I keep finding new things to clean and sort and organize around our home. That nesting instinct is sewn into muscle. Chris pleads with me to slow down but it’s incredibly difficult to fight the urge. So, I stack the freezer with meals for after her arrival. I rearrange every closet, donate a mountain of irrelevants. When confined to my desk for work, I switch my focus—gutting my email inbox, abolishing archives and organizing poem drafts, publishing submissions. It’s fascinating—this innate craving for order and preparation wherever I can get it. In awe. This body, goddamn. I thought I knew her. I thought lifelong athletics taught me all I needed to know about her limits and resilience....

Little one, We are weeks, if not days, from meeting. Weeks at most, which feels so wild to say. This pregnancy has felt both endless and instant. Here we are, at the end of the first part of our forever adventure. Words feel ridiculous right now--how do I do the process justice? How do I express every corner of it--the pure weather of feeling that destroyed and built me over and over again? How do I explain how deceitful the mirror felt, how every single day I surrendered. Even on the days that I refused to. Your grandfather says I've changed. He makes a point to mention it separately from anything else we are discussing, usually waiting until the end of a phone call to bring it up. He states it with a smile. When I want to know how, he doesn't have the words for it either. Where are all the words for these things going? The other day I told a close friend about your two vessel cord--how we had to go to the high risk unit for extra monitoring to make sure you were growing. I...

taken back when i could still glimpse my feet Officially in the home stretch of growing a brand new human being. What a challenging, gorgeous, humbling adventure. Every emotion, named or otherwise, has left its mark on me. I have felt more power than I thought possible. I have been twisted in opposite directions by grief, by love. By fear. By a wild belief, so true that it stunned me--that I have always been more capable than I ever allowed myself to believe. Already my daughter is teaching me so much. Already I am so, so honored to be her mother.

Super honored to have a poem in Muzzle Magazine. Muzzle has been a publication goal of mine for years, so this is a big one for me personally. click here to read my poem in muzzle magazine, fall 2021 I also have a new poem in the anthology "Made of Rust and Glass: Midwest Literary Fiction Vol 1." available for purchase here

Little one, After weeks upon weeks of keeping quiet, of writing letters to you in saved word documents, I can finally acknowledge you here. You were the hardest secret I've ever had to keep. At first you were only a word, a confirmation, a photo I sent to your father while he was still at work. I was in shock and couldn't imagine waiting a second longer, let alone take the time to find some cutesy way to break the news. The moment of you was immediate, insistent. There was the agony of waiting for the first appointment, to finally see you. Everything told me you were there, but I still wasn't sure until I saw you, a tiny gummy bear on the screen. I could've stared at you all day. Forgive us both for laughing at one of your still photos that looked exactly like a tiny dinosaur. Don't worry--we're saving it. I'll show you someday. We told our families about you immediately after. The love and support felt extremely necessary to have around us. We didn'...

I think the brief sweet spot of travel is coming to an end. At least for now. Things have been absurdly busy since returning from vacation. I am super stoked to share that I've had a poem accepted to Muzzle for this fall, which was a massive goal of mine this summer. I've started doing some editing work on the side, and there is an oppotunity to release another collection sooner rather than later. I'm so endlessly thankful to be a writer. More big(bigger, biggest?) news coming in the not-distant future. For now it's back to all sorts of grinds. Here's to momentum. Oh and nature. Here's to nature as well because she's been knocking my socks off.

Leaving for vacation tomorrow and excited to completely unplug for the duration of it. I'm taking five books and a stack of poems to edit. Social media, work, news--my brain is oversaturated and I'm very much looking forward to stepping away. I have two new book projects in the works that require my undivided attention. I've got an ocean to be in the presence of. Also! I have a reading next Tuesday. I'm honored to once again be a part of the Hemingways summer reading series. This year is a bit different since it's virtual. Link to register is on my upcoming events page by the way.

I'm down to 1 book left in my first print run. The rest have all been sold/spoken for, and it feels so surreal and exciting to say that. My words have found their way to the Netherlands, Canada, South Africa, England, the west and east coast of the US and to a smattering of cities in between. I've received photos of it on beds, in open palms, on a stack of other beloved books. It feels like I've sent out bits of love and the love has returned to me in tiny, beautiful ways. I'm so grateful. For all of it. I was catching up with my dear friend Joseph via video chat today and expressed to him how I've been feeling both proud and guilty. Proud of myself for working so hard the past few months, for fully immersing myself in the hard work that comes with diving into one's craft. And guilty because of this busy-ness. I'm used to being someone who gives a lot of time to checking in on others, and lately I've felt more pulled away from that than usual. It's ...

Renee and I were joking today, about being busy--how if things to do are things being carried then I'm using both hands, both feet, all my teeth, and a swaying stack of tea cups clatter balanced on my head. The month of May, an exquisite tumbling of thing after thing after thing. My birthday is my new year, and for each one I like to reflect heavily. I usually write up something in this space to honor it, but this time I didn't have just that: time. I kept the reflecting more on the quiet side, staring off into a space a lot on the actual day. My love and I were married 9 days before it so I felt entirely surrounded by sweetness. Truly a gorgeous month. May also marked the month I started my role as a teaching assistant in a fairly intense writing workshop. I'm feeling particularly proud of grinding for this position--last fall I took the workshop as a student for the first time. This helped push me to finish my book--huge victory. I took it again in the first month of 202...

Acknowledge the lump of clay on the pottery wheel for what it is: a lump, full of too much and unformed. You hands work it into shape, your hands work it into collapsing. Your hands build again. You make too much. Things get messy. Maybe a vase with a Pisa Tower's belly, or a mug sprouting handles unti it is spider. We are too precious about these first moments of possibility. That is the first thing I stress to other poets. You cannot be precious about the first draft. You cannot expect a body with all of its bones and sinew, ready to run. Resist the urge to immediately abandon these fragments. You may not use all of these things. You may build it all and need only a tooth. Or a vein. You may only have a head, the thick of thigh, or if you're lucky, a heart--bloody and rolling.

Last night, my inksister and I talked for well over an hour. Our talks always start on how we are feeling/what we are doing/tiny&big updates and then we leave the path and wind through the woods and waters of talking writing and craft, conflict and love. There is always love like there is always weather. Surrounding and threading through. These talks are always so healing and helpful, and the way I miss her is a mountain crowding my heart. This time we discussed her memoir and my new role in a writing workshop as a TA-in-training. One thing I love about our talks is that we give one another room to speak. In the past I've been fairly awful at the allowance of space in conversation. The past few years I've changed how I view interactions--how they are moments worthy of quiet as much as they are noise, how listening is not waiting to speak, is never waiting to speak. To feel in the presence of my loved ones that I am fine never uttering a word again if it means listening to ...

So much of writing is reading, researching. This week, I've been poring over my own archives as I cobble together an outline for the next book. My own archives include twenty-one years of journaling--not straight through, not always consistently, but there is something to show for every year between then and now and that is something. I've done this before--going back and perusing. But never all the way through. Never in this place in time, and so it feels all new again. And alongside all the journaling are poems, which at times reveal more than we intend. What was once an amusing exercise now feels notably more emotional. To read back through all of these versions of self, to walk the path while knowing where it goes(or where it doesn't)...I am overwhelmed with what remained and what changed. All of it. I am both embarassed and intrigued by my youth--my rambling telling of it, how some things were given play-by-play and some were too full to recount it. Instead, I would j...

Snow is falling. The radar is a just-bloomed bruise stretching backwards from here to Indiana. The precipitation is not the slow and drifting romance of a meandering snowfall, but much faster--almost reading like rain through the window. I can hear the tiny click-click of ice mixed in hitting. A sky of bad reception. This is the kind of snow that falls to build and build fast. I'm sitting and typing with my coffee, light therapy blaring, and a picture of young me open on the desktop. I am six or seven in the photo--bangs of my Dorothy Hamill haircut in my eyes, scrawny legs jutting from light blue shorts. I am emerging from a kid ride in the amusement park--giant yellow and blue sandbags hang on either side of me. I vaguely remember the maze of heaviness, each one swinging slow and nudging you in different directions. I have just finished saying something, or I'm about to speak, mouth almost open and one small hand poised outward. I'm wearing a white tshirt and a giant pla...

Is it okay to say what I miss? Most of it, truly. I miss getting on stage--be it a mic stand in a book store with all the seats filled, or a single spotlight up a small flight of steps in front of a fistful of musicians. Miss leaving the pages in my seat and closing my eyes finding rhythm and feeling it. There is nothing like it. The online readings serve their purpose in filling a bit of the void but it isn't the same. You know if you've lived it--to be able to let your eyes wander around the room while you listen to someone spilling their heart. To note the weather behind you as they finish speaking, to clap hard in time with others. Even the nerves surrounding it are different. I don't want to see myself while I'm reading. I want to see a small lake of faces listening. I want to be awkward and shuffle weight from left to right. I want my left hand to make shapes in the air while I say words. In person energy. I crave it like nothing else. I want to sit with my frien...

swell I forgive myself for being myself, oh ye of little faith in I--for the eyes, the green ones I did not inherit, no matter how I wished for them. Forgive brain folds light and dark, their inexplicable pattern of restless city. My teeth for being slightly terrible and the sugar for ruining them. Forgive childhood’s neglect, sodas for breakfast. This mouth now paying for it. The dentist who whispers I’m sorry when he sees my tears slip sideways silent. I am cranked all the way back. Forgive. For mouthing hymns instead of singing them. Forgive the mirrors because it was never their fault. Nor winter’s fault. Nor the one who had you first or the one that has you now. Forgive our wants for their different paths, for this habit of wandering off into thick green. Be it curious or compulsive or inherited need to leave--I forgive my mother’s empty seat, a storm receding. For damning myself as a means to punish someone else. How unremarkable to suffer at one’s own hand. Forgive every doc...

At the end of every gregorian calendar year, I make note of the same thing: I don't really buy into new years. I think the definitive switch from 12 to 1, to ascend from one number to next is precise and tidy enough for most people. More power to you I say. But years ago I switched from counting down to January 1st to leaning into my day of birth as a new start/new year. This isn't innovative by any means, just saying that's what works for me. I think it felt especially important for many of us to get to the end of 2020. The past 12 months have been unlike any other. I turned 39 in the midst of a pandemic, and even life back in May reads a little naive compared to present day. I remember spending the afternoon on a blanket in the sun, wearing Chris's Onyx tshirt from high school. We were cracking up at our ridiculous Mad Libs and trying to wrap our heads around what the summer ahead might look for us. December this year stood as the month in which everything caught up...

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!