i do not squish bugs.

I woke up to a dust of snow over my sheets

as if the world knew

the hot beating of my romance riddled blood had been

turned off for the night,

as if the static electricity crept out of my chest when you said,

“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to ruin this,”

and filled the clouds with the ice of your shoulder.

I’ve been left by lovelier men,

but none that carried the weight of my Winter’s dreams.

“Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root - pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer.”

After midnight lonely hands find lonely hands -

forest floor pine bodies sway as they

sip on whisky and stale novels

while midnight bar stools become weighted with longing.

Every so often a passerby will drop an ember, burning through two people

like a slow, low flame -

yet the arsonist will strike a book of matches

when all they desired was a

swift singe.

As a little girl, I remember

daydreams of a wedding day fluttering about the edges of my head,

watered by summer camp girls who would pick flowers from

North, South, East and West,

to lay them under their pillows -

to dream of chiseled, handsome faces.

Growing older (then) was an exponential thrill, like a climax of femininity,

where the negligence of being young

let one flourish where they wished to.

I resented containment until I swallowed a heart whole.

A good friend once told me I must

surrender the search to find

what I’m looking for -

but I stopped picking flowers long ago.

And where there is no Echo there is no description of space or love.

There is only silence.”

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

where my mind made certain

that I had forgotten where I stood-

& there,

in a jungle of feral instincts,

in a wilderness of predatory survival;

there, in its modesty, a forget-me-not

resting as a shrine to the apprehension

I left sleeping in morning

mist.

L.E.L.🌱

to feel the walls,

to be familiar.

because in the end,

I will not care about sending ripples across the earth

or for clever treasures enclosed within empty walls.

I will care for the gentle hum that

verberated my very being,

that mapped the lines of my life into an oscillating orbit,

that pulled but also radiated,

heart to ground -

heart to endless cosmic space -

where I was true and I was sure

my closing would come with the righteousness of the holy,

but my church is that of the earth beneath my feet.

L.E.L.🌱

We live on a planet where a single tree

provides more sustenance

than a billionaire.

Where limbs crawl with wandering salamanders,

where crowns cradle endangered nests,

where nooks of ferns and berries shelter and nourish,

where trusting leaves both drink and make rain, where they pull and store carbon,

where hollows nurture nocturnal creatures,

where tannins confront minacious insects and hungry fungi,

where entangled roots hold neighbors strong, supporting foundations across thousands of years,

yet where all is monetized with a swipe of the pen and the greed of men.

lost, the weight of difference

burdening my right to exist

just as I am,

just as I always was,

who I was meant to be.

in a place evolved from concrete structures

and monetary minds.

my riches composed of mother nature’s secrets

she keeps for those

too tender to feel at home

within the concrete realm.

L.E.L.🌱