Month: July 2025

Just because your roots have been
pulled from the ground
washed clean and rubbed smooth
doesn’t mean they aren’t still green.

Freedom’s just another
way of saying you made someone mad 

you’re the witch,
made to live in the forest’s edge,
out of sight but close enough to find
when they need your frightening knowledge.

Grow your hair, grow wings,
draw a pale map in the night
and follow it until you can’t
go a furlong farther

and there, in the air, create a space
where rainbows embrace
like snakes on a staff of restoration.

Wilderness blues

In these woods for half a year
I try to take my small flame to
every dark corner, to explore
the rot in every cave and stump. 

I need to prepare, I repeat. 
I need to see all the forkings ahead. 

After losing so many moons looking in the dirt
it becomes hard to see anything else. 
Everything looks like mud or danger. 
But doesn’t every leaf have two faces –

The rough one with countless mouths
and the green one seeking light? 

If you always seek the worst, you told me,
then by definition you discard everything else.
I grow more eyes to see
by darkness, by other light, predators, beauty.

Let’s curb optimism and fatalism, you repeat.
There has to be another way. 

These woods are vast and dark. I will find
a way out one day, to fields of corn and apples.
And for now, I will live here, I will survive
on rainwater and wild strawberries.

funerals are for coming together
and acknowledging a loss.

make sure you go. hug and cry.
something important has been taken from us

and it is worthwhile to see the corpse
to wash it

to dress it
until it kills all denial. 

there is no back, only forward.
but all wounds must seal and scab to heal.

once the loss scars 
we can pick up shovels

and hammers and go on the move.

Is evil something inevitable? 
Something that must have its time, 
like the darkness of the moon? 

There will always be evil doers.
Power will always have its own gravity. 
Some will always take lucre to tolerate horror. 

The arc of the universe appears to bend
toward abundance. But that same can mask
totalizing power until it’s too late to overcome. 

And yet, this has happened before. 
And been defeated before. 
Evil, like a candle in a jar, strangles itself. 

We know we can do better.
We see others do better, as they see us
doing better. 

And so 
inevitably
we do

the work
the time
the struggle
the tears
the association 
the building

necessary 
to bend history
toward justice –

to give evil a smaller jar.