A Few Separate Thoughts (from Eunoia Review)
The Ability to Self-Regulate (from Eunoia Review)
After your Skin, (from Eunoia Review)
Hemlock (from Cirque Literary)
Out Across the Orchard (from Anti-Heroin Chic)
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Bear Creek Campground, Kelowna, BC
i shadowed you across a mossy log
the moisture underfoot as fertile
as the heat of our closeness.
each step gave way to a new ecosystem, another planet to follow you to.
the soles of our moon shoes filled with fern and fungi
and while you skipped pieces of my heart like rocks off the shimmering water,
i studied the world you had created.
it looked better than mine; assured within its boyhood,
even the woodlouse, half-crushed, held on in adoration
a dichotomy i understood.
and the silence of the forest pressed against my eardrums and our tank top arms
pressed against each other, our first lesson in comparison
and lust. i forgot we had mothers sitting cross-legged on benches
drinking wine from plastic cups. little to offer for refuge
but the accidental mercy of their own self-doubt.
buoyed by the log we floated through the afternoon light
swords of amber anointing our freckled faces, our tongues licking at the smoke
of a fire that would always burn at our backs.
you were given to me as a birthright.
the moon rolled over and found us cordoned off
by blue pine boughs. wrapped in rayon shells,
we peered out into a galaxy of flashlights
allies before the battle.
(Bear Creek Campground, Kelowna, BC originally appeared in Permafrost Literary Magazine print issue Winter 2019 Vol. 41.1)