Personal Work

I don’t know how to begin. This is a beginning. I don’t know how to avoid cliches, so I won’t try. I have been busy being born, becoming real. Before this I was unreal. Before this I was desperate, I wrote as if I was being chased down, I wrote as if time was closing in on me, I was scrambling to find the words before there were none left. The impending collapse of myself had been festering in my body like a prophecy – in verse. And it happened, I collapsed, I caved in and found life. What

Echo and Narcissus tell a story of decay.

In the beginning of the myth, Echo is punished. She is forced to help Zeus keep his chronic infidelity a secret from his wife Hera, distracting her with long conversation. When Hera eventually sees through this scheme, she curses Echo and takes away her speech. From this point on, Echo can only repeat the most recently spoken words of another person. Language does not belong to her anymore. She is hollowed.

Echo flees to live quietly in the mo

There was an entrance once. In the southeastern region of France, millions of years have been hard at work shaping a vast void in the ground, time sculpting a representation of itself: a cave. Millennia ago, this place, Chauvet cave, was home to a variety of creatures. Evidence of life is found in the fossilized bones scattered through the earth, the depressions that remain in the floor where they once nested. Many of those animals are extinct now, having passed through the entrance to live and

All I see is space.

We’re passing through a different world. Huge clusters of ancient rock and sand aging from white to grey, mountains as pink and red and severe as flesh, the moon out and towering in the dead of day. The sky is hazy and brown, maybe from a fire somewhere, I don’t know. My eyes playing tricks. Forgetting home.

Reading and writing have been difficult for me lately. I’ve developed a repulsion toward words. I’m tired of thinking about them, of trying to make meaning out of them. Instead, I’ve been coming to the park just to be with the world, to sit and see and nothing else. This is a portrait of an afternoon there—my apology to words, my bid for connection.

6pm. I lie on my belly, on top of my mother’s blanket, which used to smell like her but doesn’t anymore.

The breeze spreads sunlight across the ba