last night
melody
Stargazing
I reach up from my pillow with curled fingers,
toward the stars I stuck to my ceiling.
I track my self-made constellations with blurry vision,
my glasses set aside. I remember
Six Lists of Four: A College Update
Three Lists of Seven: After Midterms
For My Family
Day-To-Day: A Week on Lesbos
Homesick, Homeless
Angel Missing Wings, Any News Welcome
Too Many Tissues
5 Lists of 7: A Brief Look
Life Jacket Graveyard
Over 80,000 life jackets piled in a hole, punctured and filthy and bleached by the sun, feels like poetry, like tangible words. It feels like memories sealed in plastic, like sorrows under the sun.
Abductions, Italians, and Our Foray Into Homeless Living
Remember a day when your plan went wrong.
Maybe the kids acted up, the printer broke, or the dog decided that now was a great time to go on the kitchen floor. Whatever it was, imagine that stress sustained for an unrelenting week.
No one can say that I wasn’t warned. I was told that serving here in Lesvos would be hard, I knew that it would drain me, I just didn’t expect it to start before I got here.
In Defense of the Gap Year
“What’s it like, not having homework?”
“So, what do you do every day?”
“Oh, are you still here?”
“I didn’t know you were writing a book! I thought you were sort of waiting around for college. You are still going to college, aren’t you?”
I have been asked endless variants of these questions, and I’m only halfway through my gap year. I know that they weren’t asked with any hostility, animosity, or judgement, but the tone and amount of the questions does weigh on me.
Lesbos: A Beginning
Trying to understand the plan of God for my life seems to be a current theme.
It’s difficult, to say the least, to parse out my own desires from divine intention, or coincidence from sign. Or maybe, just maybe, I was looking at it all wrong. Maybe I have to get to know the God I follow, to align my desires with his, first. Maybe some of those desires were placed on my heart.
Glass Drops in Winter
It’s impossible not to lose yourself in the story, when every twig drips with crystalline ice and a cushion of chill softens the edges of bare trees.
Face the Future
How to describe what is to come? I stand barefoot on asphalt cooled to freezing by congealed mist, staring into the gray ribbons that twist in penetrating light. I rock forward on my toes, shivering, straining to see more than shoulders of trees and bushes emerge from the swirls. I can’t be the only one to feel this way, as if the thought of plans, of the future, grow an instant cavity in my chest.
I miss you, I love you, I’ll see you again.
Light pooled beneath the lamp on broken pavement. She crushed her tears with the heel of her hand. “I’ll miss you,” she laughed through the sheen in her eyes. I simply stood.
he escapes from the earth – يحرب من علم
Independence Display
The lake looks painted, spirals
in oily ripples
from where my toes touch the surface.