The Lavender South

Nowadays the vines are mulling their own, backwashing blackberries for reprieve. Wine-drunk they curl like tongues licking at the back of the throat for a little taste of themself, flavor already aftertaste. The drupelets’ sable …

Now like any good Texas story, I will take you on a ride and you will swear you are not going to reach your expected destination, yet somehow, every blacktop road coalesces into a place …

If I could return— to the boy I once was, the child with quiet eyes, sickly body, and a spirit shrinking under the weight of names not chosen, I would kneel beside him at six …

  This collaged erasure, titled “introduction,” is part of a larger project I’m working on, As the Mobile Moves: a memoir in literary experiments. I envision this beetle poem as both an introduction and a …

I see you, and all I want to do is make you smile with a deep belly laugh that stretches from fingertips to the toes that wiggle in the sandbox trying to be free and …

I love you, your shaggy Beatles haircut, Greenday t-shirts, bell bottoms, platform Sketchers, the way your violin sings and stirs others to do something about something that matters.   Feeling unloved, unseen, unimportant, misunderstood, abandoned, …

If home isn’t the place I grew up, and surely not the place I am now, where is my soul supposed to live? My childhood bedroom is scant now, last August I stripped its walls …

As a child I was convinced I was an alien. I had been transplanted onto this orbiting rock called Earth to collect data on human behavior that evaded my understanding. The family I was placed …

I’m sorry that I can’t give you an “it gets better” story. But what I can give to you, my younger self, is the most essential skill to endure what’s coming. Practice it. Hone it. …

Five years ago, I was a closeted trans woman who didn’t feel like she fit in anywhere. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, and was content in getting an engineering …