this morning the air is thick with rain.

the irises bow their violet heads

and the maples graze the earth with heavy arms

as though bearing the weight of the water

before it falls.

this old brick house was not always so quiet.

not so many years ago, there was a clockmaker and his wife

at this kitchen table, two cats at their feet

lapping milk from porcelain bowls.

and there was me, lone granddaughter,

tearing through toaster waffles with my baby teeth

while the squirrels muddied their feet in the flower beds

just beyond the window.

i took my sweet, syrupy time

for the possibility that the freckled fawn

might come padding out from the edge of the woods

before i finished my breakfast.

never did i step off that porch

without an ice cream sandwich in my belly

and a fistful of grape hyacinths.

yes, this was a home, once.

today, though

the house feels more like the hollowed out skin of an orange.

the grandfather clock’s irregular chime

settles over my family like ashes,

everything an admonition of time’s unwavering hand:

an expired bag of sugar yellowing in the cabinet,

mom making the bed in her childhood room,

a circular refrigerator magnet reading

Ride to End Alzheimer’s, 2023.

together we wrap ourselves with the promise of paradise

as with a quilt, hold our breath at the kitchen window

like children, waiting for the white undertail of the deer

to pierce the fog.

one day we believe we will wait no more.

one day the grandfather clock will again chime

and the milky body of the doe will descend her hill

with heaven on her back;

in that golden hour the irises will lift their heads

and the maples will clap their hands

and from every shadowed valley of every mountain

there will be music

for the long-awaited marriage of the dust to its Designer.

until then, we wait,

some days with our knees in the soil,

others with our noses pressed against the cold glass,

every memory clutched to our chests

as the blue song of the rain

crescendos all around.

there’s a sort of violence about it,

a slow and sweet-smelling psychopathy

which would have otherwise remained anonymous

had i let the orange be an orange,

but immediately it was not just an orange,

it was my orange,

and that was the door.

i heard hunger’s footsteps in the hall

and made haste to take my time,

held the fruit up to my ear as though it were a conch shell

and i might hear the orchard on the other side.

i listened for the sun, for the chlorophyll

snaking through the veins of the leaves,

for the quiet song of gravity.

i listened but there was no sound,

no orange blossom unfolding,

no seed turning in the womb of the earth,

only my own appetite leaning against the

skin of my fingertips.

then suddenly

there was an awful sound like murder—

a crack in the door, a wound,

one white thread of light whispering

enter, enter,

and i could not stop myself,

slipping my thumbnail underneath

to pry peel from what was precious and mine.

i could not stop, but neither could i ignore

how the tangerine so resembled the moon,

all cratered and curled in on itself,

intact by some partial gravity, perhaps hope,

perhaps fear.

i swear i felt the fruit flinch.

i considered, then, that if the orange was the moon,

then i was a black hole,

obsidian mouth hinged grave-wide and lip-glossed,

like i imagine the gate to hell would appear

were it decorated like heaven,

studded with stars like pearls,

perhaps sores,

regardless, the dark vision was sufficient

to still my hands.

i set the half-dressed orange before me,

beheld my waning gibbous,

my waxing remorse.

it appeared so small, so childlike

there in front of me,

and i’d never felt so vast and starving in my life.

i felt like a man, a lowercase god,

somebody who doesn’t say sorry.

apologetically, my fingers resumed their work.

tell me, is this what it felt like?

enjoying me in season,

delicate in your tearing me apart?

did you hate yourself as my threads snapped?

as the parts of me let go of one another,

rocked back into the crater of your palm,

some of me scattering across the floor mat

on the passenger side of your Toyota Prius?

do you loathe yourself, still,

every time you talk with your hands,

or stroke your beard,

catching in your nostrils

my citrus-scented memory?

now, with the sweet acid of clementine

in my throat, i know what it’s like to be you—

eternally hungry, afraid of your own hands,

drumming to the music your intestines make

inside your body, as though

dinner is not already on your kitchen table

where your wife prays that it’s not true,

that you won’t come home with

yellow fingernails and flattery

that reeks of me.

I’ve always believed in the transformative power of kindness, a theme I recently explored in an article for Grice Connect, a local news source I write for. Little did I know, this concept would soon resonate even more deeply after my own experiences during an unforgettable journey abroad.

My partner David, his family, and I embarked on a trip that originally centered around a martial arts seminar in Germany, an amazing opportunity that emerged from their dedicated training. Eager to make the most of our travels, we planned an extension to explore Paris for two days. However, what was meant to be a straightforward itinerary unfolded into a series of unexpected events, each extending our stay and teaching us invaluable lessons about human kindness.

Our adventure into the unknown began with a canceled flight back home due to nationwide airline strikes in Germany, affecting our layover and leaving us stranded in Paris. Then, in a twist that seemed to compound our travel woes, I lost my phone on the Paris metro, causing us to miss our rescheduled flight once again.

Despite the initial panic and frustration, these mishaps became blessings in disguise, revealing the unmatched kindness of Parisians — a strong contrast to the stereotype of rudeness or standoffishness sometimes associated with the city’s residents.

The kindness we encountered in Paris was overwhelming. From locals patiently helping us navigate language barriers to spontaneously drawing maps or offering unsolicited discounts, their warmth and eagerness to assist were heartwarming. Every person we met was incredibly kind, helpful, and warm, excited to share about their love for Paris.

Our interactions weren’t limited to simply seeking directions or tips; they extended into genuine, and sometimes lengthy, conversations on the metro or in cafe lines, where locals were just as curious about us as we were about their lives in the City of Light.

One memorable encounter was with a woman who recounted her travels to America, reflecting on the joys of exploring new places with her children and now grandchildren. Her stories highlighted how travel enriches our appreciation for home, echoing our feelings of discovery and connection.

“Traveling makes us appreciate our homes more,” she shared, her words resonating with our own journey. This spontaneous connection on the metro was a testament to the depth of interaction possible when we open ourselves to the stories of strangers.

i sit with my knees up

at the kitchen table

cleaning the peanut butter from my teeth

while my oldest brother

tells me a story;

his voice competes with

the sizzling of bacon strips

on the stove

the days have already melted together

in my mind,

like honey in a hot cup of coffee;

it must be summer

freshman year

now exists only in retrospect,

and from this two-day distance

every failure becomes

painfully plain to see

in this moment

hugging my knees to my chest

i am so aware that i am a child

with everything to learn

and so much more

It has been a long while since I've logged on here. I have been totally changed by Jesus since then. Part of me wants to delete all my old posts and start fresh, but so much would be lost from those seasons of my life. So I am keeping them. But I am not that same poet or person, by His grace. May that hope and joy be evident in every poem from this point forward.

I make myself coffee at half past three in the afternoon, and pour in sugar and pieces of melted chocolate, stirred in with a knife. It’s the choice, I think, the freedom to do things because you’re the only one narrating.

My afternoons often contain some longing for morning. I let myself confuse the two, like the steam is smoke in my eye.

The choice is this, that at half past three, I have the whole day ahead of me, and in my head the hours stretch out so I can appreciate the already gone. I double booked myself all week and I will wind up pulling out on people I imagine I could love, if given half the chance. But can we love freely if we fall in love with sunrises and it’s already the afternoon?

Last night I did for free what I’d love to do forever, and imagined myself again a part of some collective with a vision. I have some ideas, you know, and sometimes I miss the village and knowing where the best water taps are.

Maybe it’s because I’ve spent the last decade always in love with one thing or another, and now it’s gone and I sleep soundly, thickly. I wake bleary, like sleep is something I can just fall into. I lick the bottom of my coffee cup and feel like the whole of something worth my own protection. And just like that, there’s a lifetime ahead.

I think I’ll always love mornings more when they bleed a little into my afternoon.

I have always been a person

who is loved from afar.

Like something to be admired

from behind a sheet of glass

never to be fully known or understood.

I'm starting to wonder

if the real me is too much.

Because it feels like any time

someone gets close

they aren't as impressed with me

than when I was at arm's length

I am not going to write for a while.

I waited a couple of weeks to actually type that sentence because I did not yet know if I was on a brief vacation hiatus or a Guns n Roses Chinese Democracy is coming soon! hiatus. Having no sense of a timeline, no desire to draw a timeline even in sand, it is time for me to say it. Writing has ceased to bring me joy. I have been writing for the wrong reasons, and I need time away to love it again.

At this time last year, I had great expectations for my writing. A literary journal of note had longlisted one of my short stories for a prize. An author of greater note had praised my work. I had finished my novel and gotten an agent to represent the novel, which was sent to acquisition editors at whichever publishing houses you’re likely name without googling.

You can probably guess this, but neither that short story (nor a couple others since) nor the novel have garnered any offers. My agent and I have parted. A small press has requested a partial manuscript of the novel, and there are a couple other presses I will query, but the odds do not look like they did twelve months ago. In other words, I’ve been on a losing streak, which should not matter. I’d like for it not to matter. When I began writing a novel, I did not have an expectation that it would get published; I mostly wanted to see if I could write a novel. I think I was prepared for failure and a return to the drawing board, but I was not prepared for almost.

I started thinking of my writing in terms of a nascent career, which is to say, I lost sight of why I wrote to begin with.

Two weeks ago, I had a plan to draft chapter 13 of novel number two. I entered my favorite local coffee shop, but seeing bodies occupying every table, I lost my will to write. I mentally listed the different locations where I could write, the playlists or the beverages or the reading that might ready me to write—and I realized that if I had to try so desperately hard to make myself want to write, I was doing it all wrong. Thus began my hiatus of undetermined length.

The thing is, by any reasonable measure, I have attained my goals as a writer. When I joined Prose four years ago and wrote for the first time in years, my dream was to get a piece of my writing accepted for publication. After a whole lot of work and a whole lot of encouragement from my fellow Prosers, some still here and some departed, I gave it a shot—and I succeeded. I succeeded several times over, not with any big name mags, but with half a dozen short stories and nearly as many poems. Thanks to the fluke that is the alphabet, my contributor’s bio has appeared on the same page as a former Poet Laureate of the United States.

If you’re a longtime Prose user, you might remember a Random House/Prose essay contest that George Saunders judged. When he selected my essay, and I sent him 25 pages of that thus-far unwanted novel as the prize, I hoped I might get a paragraph response with some general thoughts and maybe a piece of encouragement. Instead, I received three full pages of enthusiastic notes. At the top of his email, the man who wrote Lincoln in the Bardo told me, “You’re a wonderful writer. Your prose is crisp and fast and convincing.” I will never forget how it felt to read those words.

I will feel that way about my writing again. I will love writing again. I once wrote in a Prose challenge that creative writing “feeds not only on my technical skills or logical analysis, but on my capability to express to someone else how I think and feel, with the center squarely on the ‘I,’” and that fiction is “an output of the core, internal self.” I will find that self again. I have written 28,000 words of that second novel, and I will finish it. Two weeks into my hiatus, I can say that and believe it, which is progress.

You will probably see me less for a while. I am not disappearing; I’ll pop in to read some posts now and again. If I get any good news about my submissions still floating out there in the ether, I’ll let you know in a post of my own. I’m not yet ready for next steps, but somehow, someday, that first novel of mine will see the light of day. Sooner than that, I’ll write something. I’ll probably post it here. I might feel an irresistible itch and resume writing this weekend; I might not write for a year, or longer. I do not know when it will be because I will not rush and I will not write until I can do so with joy and for its own sake, but I will write.

Keep writing, friends.

Ryan

You who intentionally leaves the presence of God, who wanders looking for Him where He is not, who are confused and hurting and feeling the lost and overwhelming sadness of a child who has lost their Father.

Your confusion is justifiable but so unnecessary I have been and often am there alongside you. Do not forget, He is there for you, He has been where He is since the beginning of everything.

Every moment is a crossroads, every choice has the potential to be worship. He made you, after all.

Thank God for Jesus Christ. Praise God for his love. Praise God for the Bible.

John 17:25-26.

breathing the turquoise like lavender,

and sipping the blue summer.

bitter cold clouds glide and morph lava lather,

floating whispers cut by sweet pineapple sunshine.

soon, a moment, now

rhythms ripple the sky like skipping stones

we jump the music like puddles

splashing in the frequencies.

cobalt bass rumbles the earth hungry,

pumps the air with springing spirals

pushing and pulling the senses,

reverberating through cells.

heavy mud humming, stomping

echoes through our atoms dizzy;

balancing tuned body to innate electricity

the fizz of circulating lemonade energy.

we jump the music like puddles

splashing in the frequencies.

strawberry melodies spilling ribbons,

dolphin leaps of the spaces inbetween beats,

lines of colours overlapping,

colliding, mixing, merging, blending

in with the forest.

washing over souls the life fire sparkles

like a clear water cleansing harmonies,

sound waves crashing against inertia.

phosphorescent glow of re-charged love

for the world, for being, animation

flowing through burnt smoky ashes

of sapphire charcoal skies;

dimmed radiation of chlorophyll emerald days.

the smell of salt, dry bark, fluffy carbon mists,

trembling lights softening the eyes'

grip on outlines, loosening lies.

watching the cycles of patterns

tumbling colours through a mill rotating,

and the silence of listening

when the music comes to an end.