To read Dickinson is to fall, softly and irrevocably, into the mystery of want.

Apart of nature, I shed the skin I have outgrown, Refusing to be restricted by things that have lost their purpose.

nestled in the soft bit of skin between her neck and jaw,

it’s sprouted just out of her range of vision [. . .]

There is only an arm’s length between us,
enough to see straight into your brown eyes.

My whole life has been roots and cherry picking, digging myself up before I was ripe.

Double dutch girls, we never did learn how to be apart.

My crisis of writing and publishing stems from writing the darkest and most horrific parts of my life, without having processed them, publishing in soon-defunct literary magazines with little to no audience, and getting eight likes on social media as payment. Is this what I should turn myself inside out for?

The Quarantine Poems is a series of poetry written durning the covid-19 pandemic lockdown, available in text and in audio.

The first instalment, On Yearning, is authored by Sarah Lawrence.

Dust motes drift like ashes / perhaps an old dream / perhaps you

The collection begins now, a digging / the excavation of her pomegranate hips.

Now, as I am one year and seven months from thirty, I understand the infinity of growing old. I imagine myself as recycled clay. Formed into this year, grabbed by another and shaped into that one—but where is the kiln? Where is the sun that dries the grapes?

I still think about the endocrinologist lifting my shirt to see how my ribs were jutting out of the skin.