TREE SURGEON: POEMS 

By  

Alecia Beymer  

A DISSERTATION 

Submitted to  
Michigan State University  
in partial fulfillment of the requirements  
for the degree of   

Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education – Doctor of Philosophy 

2024 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
ABSTRACT 

In this poetry manuscript, I posit a few questions that reverberate throughout the poems: How have 

I formed intimacies and what are those variations? How have I come to recognize connection across 

persons, places, moments, and things – where does the distance grow, where does it subside? These 

questions are particularly important because we are still negotiating and defining topics of intimacy 

and distance. The variations of intimacy, the ways we come to believe we belong or connect are 

concepts that still falter through us, we are compiling language for these moments, reinventing the 

relational – how we might be with one another. This redefining is compounded when we think of 

how a global pandemic shattered and changed our notions of connection and intimacy. A pandemic 

that created circumstances for distance to prosper within us, for us to learn what technology might 

provide us and to in turn yearn for forms of connection we didn’t think we needed as much as we 

know we do now. Further, this poetry manuscript borrows methodologically from poetic inquiry 

(Galvin & Prendergast, (2016) and arts-based research methodologies (Leavy, 2015). Particularly, it 

engages with vox identitatis, or the creation of poems exploring self and identity (Galvin & 

Prendergast, 2016). 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Copyright by  
ALECIA BEYMER 
2024 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
for patrick, forever

iv 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

I am grateful without measure to each person I learned with throughout this journey and to each 

person who listened or supported me through all the tiny moments that make up our days. I am 

more because of our conversations and because of each of your unique insights. I am more because 

of a smile you gave me passing in the hallway, a hello or nod on a bad day, a comment you wrote on 

a paper, or an idea you shared in class.  

I am beyond grateful to my family. My mother, Antoinette Dean – for the way she notices 

the world and maintains an ethos of curiosity, wonder, and questioning. Always for her continued 

love and support, especially when I wasn’t sure I could write another word. For my father, Hays 

Dean – who is no longer here in this world – for how he supported me into the unknown of my 

dreams and how he looked at the ecology of being from the perspective of trees. To my brothers, 

Todd Dean and Chad Miller, my aunts, uncles, cousins – who are too many to name – you each 

made an impact on this writing and the person I am becoming.  

To Janine Certo – this work could not exist without you and your unwavering belief. I am so 

glad I got to meet you in this life and so happy we get to continue writing together. You inspire me.  

To Vaughn W. M. Watons, Joanne Marciano, Sandro Barros, Lynn Fendler, Divya Victor, 

and every professor who brought all that they are into their teaching and who gave me a piece of 

another world through their passion and expertise – thank you. I would not have grown and would 

not have learned how to render my own meaning without your comfort, questioning, and curiosity.  

To Lauren Elizabeth Reine Johnson, Cori McKenzie, and Mary L. Neville – I am so 

appreciative that I got to meet each of you, learn from you, and become your friend. Thank you for 

being in my life and showing me every day how to live in capacious and thoughtful ways. Also, 

thank you for listening to me talk Gilmore Girls and The Office.  

To all the doctoral students that sat with me and listened, and for your beautiful work – keep 

creating and by your very presence make this world just a little better every day.  

Of course, to my partner, Patrick Beymer, your belief in me is astounding. Thank you for 

always supporting me in finding my voice and convincing me to keep trying. You are an incredible 

human. I love you. 

v 

 
 
 
 
 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS  

BELIEF/LIGHT ............................................................................................................................................... 1 

HOME/RUPTURE. ....................................................................................................................................... 11 

CONNECTION/DISTANCE ..................................................................................................................... 31 

LONGING/GRIEF. ...................................................................................................................................... 42 

CODA ................................................................................................................................................................ 60 

BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................................................................ 67 

APPENDIX ...................................................................................................................................................... 70 

vi 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
BELIEF/LIGHT 

1 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Where is the edge of belief? Is it possible to believe 
something truly unbelievable? How does 
that begin? Is there a crack of light under the door? 
How do you know to see it as light?” 

-- Anne Carson 

2 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
THEORY OF UTTERANCE  

Cup your hands. Let the edges touch.  
When it rains, hold them out --water 
will still falter from the makeshift 

catcher -- do you understand? See  
that apparition: the low humming  
of track and train, that hushed fold  

in the obedient skyline, the hesitation  
of spring or the stuttering dandelions.  
Here, you are green and grass. Feel the sift  

of rain. This is what you are trying 
to say. Suppose sometimes while driving  
you let your hand skip wind, suspended  

out of the car window -- that there  
is this crack in your curtains where light goes 
to play, sometimes you can make out the cavorting  

of branches. Suppose you were only a ghost, 
the tendrils of smoke let out in gasps  
above concrete cylinders. You’d rather weave  

this. You mean: you’d rather let the looming  
in. There is light articulating  
under the door, some syntax of streetlamp  

or moon. Has origin ever really mattered?  
Why hold it all in? You are telling  
me language is just the derivative  

of the day you leapt from a cliff. Still,  
there is this: you feel the empty 
swing grating the thick gusts. 

3 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
ON THE EDGE OVERLOOKING THE VALLEY 

You, my first crush, were so proud of that old BMW. 
Remember? That time? We looked up, 

leaned against the hood of your car.  
The sky shattered in light residue  

and you kept pointing to stars I couldn’t see.  
We didn’t know what we weren’t meant to hold.  

Didn’t the power plants remind you of all we’d lost?  
Didn’t the river look like darkness moving? 

Remember. In science class, Mr. Elmer told us  
to believe, to take our paper-made star charts 

and find something someone had named before us.  
You are still pointing up. Drawing imaginary  

shapes with your fingertip. Orion’s belt seemed 
easy enough for me to trace. I was sure though 

that one of those stars was a plane. It didn’t matter.  
Daybreak, and the orange dust shivers up the valley. Stilled.  

Tell me you can parse the clouds from the plant fog.   
I still won’t believe you. 

4 

 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
I’VE LEARNED TO SOLDER GUILT, HUMMING INTO MY HELLOS 

As a kid, I was ravaged by the diffusive  
power of crabapples. I had the best aim  
of all the girls, we plucked the rotted  
green spheres from uncut grass, carried  
bunches in untucked shirts. Scattered,  
we hid in trees, waiting for the boys.  

Sometimes, I’m ashamed  
of my interest in inhibition.  

But there, slipping  
sneakers on bark, bearing my body 
against the weight of a branch.  
I have started to name grace: I fell  
from a crabapple tree, and a boy held  
his hand out to me. 

Sometimes, I want  
to choose the moon and its stunned light.  

I may always be that kid sitting  
alone at the kitchen table, listening. 
There will be nothing  
my child heart didn’t clasp  
in the spaces of screen doors.  

Sometimes, I still can’t shake the residue:  
crabapple, moonlight, belief, his hand. 

5 

 
 
  
  
  
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
THIS DISTANCE 

I’ve never known the clarity of a shadow. These ones, here, they trail the water, soft and 
superimposed, hazy dusts of their owner. Sometimes, I think of the unquenchable burst of the 
moon, how its ruins have learned to swell like snow. Or I keep thinking about the leftover leaves or 
the dismantling thistle and how the edge has funneled this distance into me. Or how sometimes I 
can’t tell the difference between the blue of the sky and the blue of the lake -- we live in turned 
worlds -- distance and closeness may be the same thing: the firepit and the water; the ice and the 
glass table; the dirt and the tree trunk. Or that time my father found a praying mantis on the inside 
of a wooden board and told me to look at its magic but never to get close enough to touch it. Or 
how at a concert, a boy I thought I loved put me on his shoulders so I could see how sounds were 
made. I think I know the light better now. I mean I see the shadow in you. I think the tree limbs are 
sprawled string -- taut and reaching -- across a four-year-olds’ fingers in a thread of connections only 
Cat’s Cradle knows how to hold. Or that lamp left on, a reminder that we are alive, that we know 
the part from the whole, but the moon missed this, missed the difference and couldn’t tell you when 
the night began, couldn’t tell you when the glow should end. Tell me to stop reaching and I’ll show 
you a skyline of darkened trees – not one turned to the ground. 

6 

 
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
MY MOTHER RECOVERS FROM A HEAD INJURY  

My mother has lost words     she looms between    tries to capture meaning in obscure 
pronunciation     a bird clawing syllables on tree branches     the gas has been left on again and there 
is no fire     she tells me     do you hear me     you never listen to me    no one ever listens to me     
her head injury has made emotion collapsible     intensity shifts     anger is pervasive     and comes 
on quick     my mother could out scream a bear with her sorrow     the bird is back     she says      
points to it    it is her echo     there is a nest     outside her window     which she says as widow     she 
wishes for a return     I used to be able to remember     just absence    the songs she loved     she can 
only hum     sifts through melody     in her dreams she says she always knows what to say     my 
mother keeps her television on the Weather Channel      she needs to know she says      what is to 
come     the swirling colors   of impending storms 
keeps the door open when it storms 
scouring the shoreline for what could be discovered 
a hurricane 
baby sharks 
a dresser with clothes still intact    driftwood  shells  my mother seemed to believe 
everything had a use     we make what we can at will     just imagine     I’ve re-worn clothes from her 
youth 
sister’s wedding 
kept a pair of ballet flats believing they were my pointe shoes     this is what happens when you get 
older she says     does it matter what the symbol is when we already know what it symbolizes     we 
all hold onto things       the contours of sentimentality      I keep a box under my bed        the door is 
open and a storm roams there       wind brocading rain         let’s just stand here for a little while 
calling 
longer      on the cusp of misremembering        all the while the tv permeates th$e room 
for a warning 
 it is here    rotating swirls of color over our heads  my mother remembers           
the stove is on      goes to turn it off     my mother carries words in her chest        she says she knows

 a velvet burgundy dress from her 
she 

things that weren’t meant to be kept found solace in her closet 

     a silk shirt her friend Marge bought her in Texas 

I remember walking along Emerald Isle 

no place matters too little 

 delivered anew       dead 

she always 
after  

but cannot say  

7 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
PÈRE LACHAISE CEMETERY 

Have you spent time hovering  
over strangers’ headstones, noting  
the ways the moss dawdles? Feel it  
outstretched and starched on stone. 

Is this the way stars used to skirt  
the darkness, plotted and laced  
before we knew what light  
felt like up close? 

Have you ever noticed the flowers 
curated and rootless on graves?  
How odd that remembrance takes  
the form of the slow death 

of another live thing. It seems  
like truth, like one  
I’m accustomed to at least -- 
let it always rain in graveyards. 

The sun is not with us today 
and the shade has decided  
to make murals. No one  
really knows. We are all cloaked  

in the obscure placement of mausoleums. 
The rain is also tempted by the starkness  
of the calm. Someone is playing the flute  
near Chopin’s grave. There is nothing to keep us here.  

8 

 
  
  
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
THE ORIGINS OF BELIEF  

I was asked to believe in the grudges 
of the moon, some form of luster 
and grief: a highway lit at the edge 

of prairie grass. If I choose 
to remember, I think I combed 
mercy in a baby doll’s hair. 

Watching Bambi, my knees cradled  
in my chest, learning young, that practice 
of succumbing to the whittling: 

belief folded in the yearning  
of forgiveness. I remember  
I forgot to breathe in the beginning 

of the movie, how forgetting 
was a way to borrow sanity. 
I think of that day now,  

in the wake of a Michigan winter  
I couldn’t forgive. That all I wanted  
was for everyone to be okay: 
Bambi and her mother. How 
naïve is hope. I think this now 
in the beginnings of a pandemic.  
I don’t know how to be. I recite  

false incantations on the resilience 
of prairie grass. The highway cuts 
the landscape and somehow 
what’s left is cradled in its sever. 

9 

 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
THEORY OF INTIMACY 

This morning, blurred and entrenched  
in a whirring of rain -- it means nothing 
that the trees have lost all their leaves. 
The lights are on in the hospital  
across the street. I have felt  
all that I have harmed. Does it  
dissipate? The incessant, gnawing  
of loss. I have a record player,  
and I never play any records. I  
just collect all the songs I wish 
I still listened to. When I greet  
people, I don’t hug them or shake  
hands, we gesture with our eyes --  
hello, I’m here, I see you. Connection  
is a lost friend screaming 
your name from across a park,  
you turn to meet them and  
realize that they meant it  
for someone else. Actually,  
you’re not even sure  
anyone said anything. But  
you wait there  
in awkward hope --  
Still, look  
and turn around. 

10 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
HOME/RUPTURE 

11 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice. 

― Italo Calvino  

12 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
THESE DAYS, I SPEND MY TIME IN THE RUPTURE, 

coaxed by the prosody of steel 
ground into steel. What I 
mean is I anticipate the fetter 
of railroad tracks and trains: 
how sleep still sieves in the space 
of noise. My father says I refused 
sleep as a toddler unless carried, 
rumbling through fields  
on the tractor. Within minutes,  
I yielded to the rhythmic hum  
and rattle. Standing here, 
near this train, I am bundled 
in its pitch. I am reminded 
of driving along the Ohio River, 
the echoing tracks aligning the hill 
and factories, how it emanates 
in its scrapping and sever.  
I used to place coins on the track,  
watch and wait for the train  
to pass over and see 
how metal could swell. 

13 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
GOING HOME: JULY 2021 

I’ve heard it said that we do eventually return, 
and in that returning I do not know what transfigures in us. 

When I go home this time, it has been two years, 
an almost divorce and a pandemic separating me  
from the proximity of this place. My cousin wants 
to commemorate this moment; she wants to grieve.  
She brings a plastic bag of fake flowers.  

We spend our morning looking over gravestones: 
people my mother, aunt, cousin, and I have never  
met. Yet here I am with a welling inside me, here  
I am placing synthetic fuchsia blooms in turned over  
vases. We hold each other, what feels like a different  
form of grasping. My mother creates a prayer. We tell  
the dead we are grateful for their existence. 

Later, when we have nothing left to give or garner,  
we drive past old homes on the hill: brick falling to the ground, 
windows rotting, collapsed glass. My mother gets out of the car.  
Tries to take pictures of the backyard because that’s where  
her and her siblings climbed trees. That’s where their bodies were held.  

14 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
ON THE FARM 

A little girl in pink corduroy overalls, 
arms clasped around the leg of a man 
in a photo from 1991.  

I haven’t given up on this: 
her forehead tilted up. Some form 
of admiration or fear 
in the half-light of autumn. 
It is here that I am the least 
of who I am to be.  

I am learning  
so many ways to inherit  
distance. On the cool,  
crunchy ground,  
I would make my shirt  
into a basket and gather  
all the dried leaves, then, 
climbing – body clasped  
to the trunk –  to the top. Dangling  
on the branch edge, I crisped leaves 
into pulverized bits – confetti of fall.  

For hours, alone outside,  
I remember the impossibility 
of onion grass, how I would braid 
consistency into it. I remember  
the briars succumbed  
to the horse mane. Peeling 
the thorny bits slowly 
as to not harm.  

Here, I learned 
aloneness – what it means 
to make of the world  
what you will –  
that leaving is an echo  
we carry wherever we go.  

15 

 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
JANUARY, 2021 

There are few things that emit silence 
in a voracity we call encompassing: 
midway through a snowfall – that space 
of the before, before humans coalesce  
it, the landscape shivering quiet 
mouthfuls. Still, all I can be is a version 
of magnified silence: a freshly mopped 
laminate hallway; a person who has succumbed 
to their thoughts; the shocked languishing 
of language, a moment when I have nothing 
else to say; the expanse that follows 
a teacher proposing a question to the class. 
A pandemic makes us accustomed 
to the reverberations of silence, how the absence 
of sound creates contours around us. Soon, 
even small notes become audible: the clink 
of the spoon stirring the coffee, the rush 
of the dishwasher, the soft hum 
of streetlights, a whirring that has begun  
inside me. I have become 
a curious purveyor of silence – somehow, 
now it feels as if there is nothing 
but the layer of days. How everything blurs 
into the droning of the heating vent – 
the buzz that claws me in the half-second I dip 
underwater, the energy of sound releasing on the surface, 
just me and this shrouded noise -- how I hear it 
in its labor, asking something of me, asking 
if I might listen: what might I do in the silence? 
What might we each make of this newly drawn 
tundra, of this rare intimacy between ourselves, 
between empty hallways and our pressed shoeprints, 
between the tapping pencil and the teacher gazing beyond, 
between clarity of words and the lacking inarticulation 
of this same moment; setting in the margins of a posed question 
Do we hear it? Do we listen? Are we willing to ask? 
What might sustain us, now? 

16 

 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
EMERALD ISLE, NC 

I once believed in the silence 
of margins, the ripeness 
of baby bird flesh, the dismantling 
of words, the foraging 
of sea cicadas and the dust 
of sighs. What I am trying to say is: 

everything is wrong and I can’t lift 
praise on my tongue or coil 
it in my collar bone. In child form:  
this hunger, scanning the shore for holes 
of breath and then unearthing, 
with both hands, the fragile sea cicada,  

holding its scampering 
fear, delivering it to a bucket 
where a fisherman would hook  
its life to a rod.  

Or this: the ways I intended to save  
baby birds thrust from their nests,  
my human touch exacting the absence 
of foamy feathers. I believed 
in the curious grace of preservation.  

But even now: this thin marrow 
of faith, this clawing  
of a warm body, this surrender; 
feather, shell, breath.  

17 

 
  
  
  
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
WITHOUT OUR FARM  

we burned for grass, 
brown or green and bit 
dirt from fingernails 
when our hands were clean. 

I was four; I knew it was over.  
Brier bush free; 
oat and horse saliva gone. 
My brother mourned 

for mud and worm. 
My father shucked 
corn, tilled soil, carried on. 
My mother took us, 

abandoned her shovel  
and gloves. We crammed  
into an apartment in the projects. 
I fed Cheetos to squirrels, 

striving to be near. Today,  
I retrace muddy footprints. 
On a crooked wood fence, 
I leave a note: 
Land, I was yours. 

18 

 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
WHISPERING IN THE MUSEÉ DE L’ORANGERIE 

Nothing of meaning exists here 
anymore: I am permanent, juxtaposed  
in front of a painting, mostly blues: 
cerulean, azure, navy, sky. I cannot  
move. The painting is heavy 
in layers, when it cracks there is nothing  
but tempestuous blue. You are not with me, 
though I want you to be. Someone has brushed  
this canvas in the ways I swoosh  
peanut butter on bread,  
thick as the slice. How ordinary.  
I make my way upstairs, to the room of Monet.  
No one is here. They tell me they are closing.  
They tell me to hurry in my solace.  
I squint at the corner and I only see small copies  
of color moving, transcending canvas. I step back, 
like they say, perspective is everything: 
a wall of lilies and color. This feeling  
is not Giverny. Yesterday, we were there,  
traipsing along the folds of landscape.  
Monet made an illusion out of the ordinary.  
I keep doing that too. Keep wanting  
things to mean more. But here I am  
past closing, alone in a museum, whispering  
to paintings that will never  
hear me, never look back. 

19 

 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
BEAVER COUNTY, PA  

Steel factories. River. Black shells on the shore. Spiked and towering cylinders along the skyline. 
Clouds. Or smoke. We walked around foggy-eyed and smoldering. Bridge. Another Bridge. Railroad. 
Freight cars lining the bank. Grief. Nuclear plants. The river vibrates down the valley. We were only 
made of hills. Sometimes things move like green. Fracking. The cows next door. A bowling alley of 
smoke. Brick. The bridge is blue, actually. We made the smog into shapes. We imagined: a unicorn, a 
hat, a sword, a tornado, or, maybe something else. The local bar. We lived in a shabby apartment at 
the top of a windy, mile hill. Little distances.  

I remember the phrase, I want to go home. I would move it under and over my tongue while at friends’ 
houses or forced family gatherings. Please let me leave was my hand wrapped on my mother’s dress, 
lightly tugging. And all of this, I remember happening too in my own bed. I would be curled in my 
blanket, rocking as if in a nightmare, fiercely wishing again I could go home. This questioning has 
gone on for years. I whisper this phrase to myself, as if I could make it appear. Maybe the 
resuscitation is enough. Home is a suspicious thing to conjure. St. Pierre says attachment is risky. Or 
Deleuze might say signifier and signified are not reducible. Or there is no word for home.   

20 

 
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
PARENTS’ SEPARATION: APARTMENT 11 

I can’t tell you the true story of how things came to be, how it all shook out:  
wet sheets clothes-pinned to the line choreographing dissent in the wind. I could  
begin here in the small apartment we clutched our lives to like pebbles I found  
on the banks of the Ohio River tucked in a matchbox. I remember when 
we lost power for weeks. Some storm, whose name doesn’t exist to me, had broken  
tree lines, branches and trunks arresting wires: a similar collapse erupted in my mother.  
During the night, she kept that door open, leaned into the crux of arm resting  
on the frame. There is something about watching a storm through a screen. 
So much violence sweeping past you: a knife blade shuttering onion. A sudden grace.  

21 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
LANSING, MI  

Today, on the bus, there was a couple in the seats in front of me. I could feel that hunger or 
sometimes we call it yearning or maybe with a softness, longing. I could tell that one of them wanted 
to be loved and not in the way that we pretend we want to be loved but in the way we feel certain. 
The woman had turned to the man and placed her head on his shoulder. Somehow they had gotten 
on the topic of tattoos and wanting to get one today. She said you wouldn’t get a tattoo of my name 
would you? He said he hadn’t thought about it. She said I had never thought about it either until I 
met you -- maybe you could get my initials. The man peered over her shoulder out the window at 
something -- I think a sorority house event. He made some comment about it. Then, he said, look at 
that church. His eyes continued to follow the buildings. She said, yeah, they have beautiful weddings 
there. Somewhere here -- this yearning -- between her attempts to solidify his love and his attempts 
to conjure freedom in the landscape.  

We talk about this wanting often. Even when we believe we didn’t know we were. Howe tells her 
brother, who died: that yearning, what you finally gave up. Is there a choice in it? Nelson says we 
don’t get to choose what or whom we love...we just don’t get to choose. This is what we leave 
unspoken and call it unsayable; we don’t have language for it or maybe we don’t know how to name 
it. So we leave it. Leave it like the crumbs on the kitchen countertop, or the animal wounded on the 
side of the road lingering with enough breath to fog up a compact mirror. 

22 

 
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
WHEN A FRIENDSHIP ENDS 

Threadbare silences permit 
a form of yearning. I have always 
thought you would be in my life. 
Naivete and hope sometimes seem 
interchangeable. At the coffee shop, 
I order a Matcha tea latte; it is the same 
as always. Tomorrow will be this way too. 
At the record shop, I pull vinyl with 
pings of desire: Fleetwood, The National, 
and a little bit of Bruce. We all have things 
we wish for. The vinyl pinches under my arm. 
Tiny jags of loss we carry in our sleeves, 
we carry in the crevices of our wrists. The same 
wrist that once wore a friendship 
bracelet for months after the friend 
had stopped calling. It took me awhile 
to stop noticing things in remembrance. I like 
to go back to the time before. 
When I was a child, I was a flower girl 
in a wedding. how silly and light it was to pull 
fistfuls of petals from my basket – 
the forced fall of clumps. Think 
if each loss could be strewn 
like beauty in a pile behind 
your footfalls. Maybe that 
is what the experts call letting go. 
I have generations of practice 
on collapsing myself, habits of quiet 
resentment. Would you trust 
that the same flower girl ran tumbling 
into a mud puddle outside. Look, 
she is jumping, she is laughing -- 
she has no concept of destruction.  

23 

 
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
MADISON, WI  

After a month of cold walks, of standing 
in front of the sharpness 
of lake, unexpectedly, a realization. 
Here, shuttering tents and reverent fishermen. 
There is a dog -- all hurried paws -- savoring 
slickness in the middle of the lake. 
The sun is lowering its luminosity, composing 
a horizon that highlights the cracking lines. Or 
what I perceive to be the beginnings of a break. 
I linger at the shallow edge, glittering fear under 
my footsteps. Everyone is okay. Lately, I’ve been projecting 
a lot. There is a narrow calm across the proximity 
of these built domains, an intimacy even: 
how, beyond, they watch for each other, 
listening in solace. What I want to recognize as closeness 
is not permanence. This whole spectacle will be gone 
in a few months. All that I believe I have seen 
will vanish. 

24 

 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
THE BODY KNOWS GRATITUDE 

The lakes here crowd 
with blue-green algae  
on the edges; 
shorelines expanding  
fluorescence  –  
I paddled into it once  
unsure, unknowing how 
to shift my presence  
on the board. 
I sank close to the gooiness, 
pondered touch and wondered  
at the crispness of my fear.    

This is the same hand that reached  
for a flower drizzling  
with bees, that dipped 
fingers in candle wax 
while it was still hot,  
the hands attached   
to the body that followed, 
barefoot, the hissing  
of the wasp nest 
that hung on the pole 
of our clothesline. 
The same person  
who, when the boy  
next door again said  
I couldn’t reach  
the highest point  
of the swing,  
couldn’t touch the sky  
with the top of my head  
couldn’t do a front flip  
from the tip of the seat –  
how many times did I try  
to make it so, how many  
times my body landed slightly 
broken. My mother always, asking 
in the E.R. “Was it worth it?”  

I love most what it means 
to believe in something, 
what acrobatic tricks the act of  
trying performs in the heart.  

What I meant to say about  

25 

 
 
 
 
 
the lake – I like to paddle  
to the middle and sit  
with that moment before  
I jump in the water –  
what could I find in my sinking,  
in the waiting, before we begin 
struggling to breathe again  
we are reminded of all  
we could let go of -- 
the swift shutter of air, 
the exasperated water  
making room and then  
howling itself around my body --   
that space before the air rises in me,  
before I rush, open mouthed to the sky;  
My eyes exhausting trembles of the  
surface blue, grasping every bit  
of the world I left for a moment. 

26 

 
 
MONACA, PA: ON THE HILL  

Gallagher’s, the corner store filled with penny candy and Slush Puppie slushes; Swedish Fish melting 
in my palm – I pull at the gooeyness while sitting on the curb, want of devour in my eyes. I’ve been 
begging my body to take me here for years. What is this resistance to joy? Handfuls of blueberry 
Frooties and peach rings. My mother is there shuffling me to the car – some gesture of constraint.  
Let’s go, she says, We have to go. Memories move thick with distance. I can almost remember the 
layout of the store and the glass case of cardboard boxes of candy. I can almost remember the smell: 
musty and sweet. And then, there. It is gone. Collapsed into me again. I drive along the street to my 
old house, along Brodhead Road. Gallagher’s used to be one street over. Or maybe it’s still there.  

27 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
MY AUNT ASKS ME IF I DISLIKE BEAVER COUNTY  

Here. I have left you. Carved & rudimentary: the river hinges thick pollution. A precarious hum  
of tires snatching steel bridges dwells inside of me. Please understand. Escape can sometimes 
become a synonym to return. Wait, wait  for me. Bare feet licking rocks along Raccoon Creek. Dew 
devouring sleeping bags and grass: skin of mist. Again. How do I say this is not the question of 
distance you mean to ask. Pause, please. Please. I don’t have a choice. I’ve heaved my body across 
the county line too many times for it to be a passive occurrence. What I’m trying to say is: this was 
never a binary. Either/or. Like/Dislike. The distal shadows are surveying the Evergreens hunched 
along the valley: a false map, an etch-a-sketch of performed boundaries. There is more. More. There 
in the burnt afternoon. There. Along the jaw of a hill, pressed and remade like pizzelles growing 
towers on the table. I have returned. I never left. Wait. Wait.  

28 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
FEBRUARY 2022: LAKE MONONA 

I started to stare in that way that you no longer  
look at anything, it all becomes a bright blur.  
Today, walking, I thought of the dense nature  
of nothingness – how absence has a weight to it.  
At the edge of the lake, I have collapsed into the banality  
of the day. A mere passerby of the many walking along.  
It is winter and people still go outside.  

Below the surface of the ice, hushed fish,  
I rest along the peripheral.  
The ice is turning to craters of water,  
like potholes puncturing pavement.  
I have been afraid for a while now,  
but I watch – absorbed like honey into tea –  
the people fishing are dismantling their tents. 

And nearby, someone is bringing in bags of groceries,  
celery stalks popping from the paper bag.  
A man is on the phone beside me. He says,  
“Congratulations” loudly. Are we living again?  
What had I noticed in my state of isolation, what had I begun 
to divulge only to myself – we all move on, I suppose.  

Someone throws a ball to their dog onto the ice,  
it tumbles falling into a crater, the dog stops short, aware 
of his possible nonexistence. The ball belongs to the fishes 
who up until this point remained quiet.  

29 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
POMPEII 

 If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it. 

-- Anne Carson  

And from there I can only think of Pompeii, and the eruption of Mount Vesuvius -- how in 
Herculaneum, a town nearby, it was recently discovered that a man’s brain was turned to glass. 
There are theories about the air, about the heat and how this was 968 degrees of hot and then a swift 
change to something we don’t know. We can’t name. Those in on the discovery are saying we will 
never truly know how death occurred -- how a brain may be coaxed into becoming glass, melted and 
reanimated, neurons intact. This is not a metaphor for anything except for how air moves. Was the 
air the man running quite fast, or was the air the man who hid in the stone caves by the water 
seeking asylum from an unknown force. If we believe in the movement, do we believe in the arms 
reaching towards something; do we believe in the ash that covered a city; do we believe it was the 
culprit we look for? 

30 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
CONNECTION/DISTANCE 

31 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
You existed to me. You were a theory.  

-  Tracy K. Smith  

32 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
CULLING LINES  

I’ve noticed the dismantling of winter, 
how birds descend on my street calling out 
to one another. My body splinters into chills, want 
of warmth in the air. 

I find my friend, near the bright patio chairs, 
acquiesced to the lawn. Diffused of promise, 
he bends grass petals in his palms, says he has learned 
the contours of disconnection as I sit beside him. 

We spend all our time traipsing under suns 
from one place to another, and I don’t know 
about you, reader, but I can’t pull my soul through 
my throat when I’m near you. I depart from myself daily. 

Tree shadows swell the river. We devour 
the soft collapse of birds -- how the silence 
feels like leaves falling, their curation resounding 
in the wind around us. Sometimes a voice 
calls out like loss, like two hands unclasping.  

33 

 
  
  
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
SURPRISING CONNECTIONS  

Sometimes, we / talk about Foucault. We / write our names on chalkboards. We / practice 
introductions. We / have been waiting. We / speak of reverence; the cordial silence of an audience 
at a poetry reading. We / discussed this in the beige halls, outside, the trees – permanent and thirsty: 
a branch stammered in the creases of its shadow. We / considered the birds that day. I mean, we/ 
looked up. We / deemed it inconsequential / it cracked with silence through the tall glass windows. 
We/ sat in a circle. We / used to believe in the surplus. But only the red and pink Starburst sufficed. 
We / didn’t have anything better to do. / Tell me / again / how proximity doesn’t mean 
connection. Tell me / the shape of loss doesn’t resemble feverish shoulders. We / stood amongst 
our / selves. Teachers always sit at the front, a staggering representation of their values. We / never 
returned home. We/ believed in the fragments. We / thought Wittgenstein was truth but learned it 
was only poetry. We / won’t heap nostalgia on this anymore. We / ‘ve lost appeal / anyway. Savor / 
this – the coffee and the glittering students / the birds will reveal themselves – a silky luminosity / 
look at that sewn sunrise / the bright wind satiating skin as we/ sit in the quad / go on / we didn’t 
know. We / lost the prosody the day sincerity interrupted us. Without / each other / we are narrow 
versions of ourselves. We / have no desire to become / anything / else. 

34 

 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
NOTES ON THE DISSOLUTION OF A FRIENDSHIP 

I can’t tell you anything 
you don’t already believe you know.  
Nearby, on the margins  
of Lake Michigan, kites slip through sky, 
patterns of sharp disappearance. 

The audacity of belief hunkers  
under rocks, dissolving in wave ash.  
I wanted to be near you. Never enough. 

Even though there are these embroidered 
scars that look like spurned  
shorelines and some of them shiver  
up my knees, others burst  
in my palms -- they are all crumbling  
in a piercing spectacle of grief.  

Even though celestial clouds  
meander like residues of intimacies, 
I’ve sewn it shut -- the dissonance  
of waking every morning.  

Even though we refuse to remember,  
refuse to stitch rock, sand, water, and green.  
Even though there is an arrival of a plane  
overhead, spinning noise like magic,  
the jolt of sound captivating, the initial  
realization of fear and then quick  
-- dislodged sensitivity -- I’m so tired  
of walking around parks. 

Even though the thirst  
of an empty parking lot is unpoetic  
in every way. Even though  
I believed in you.  

I still believed in the capacity 
of the wind soothing shoreline folds  
at the edges of a park. I’ve been exhaling  
memories all afternoon -- asterisks  
of thought, never enough. 

35 

 
  
  
  
  
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
MIDWAY THROUGH A PANDEMIC, I REALIZE THINGS ABOUT MYSELF 

I let everyone who entered my life enter through me. 

-- Jenny Xie 

I have inherited a propensity 
for the quiet. Something akin to the corrosion 
of wax compiled around a flame. We all have our cautions. 
I have hoarded cigarettes, sincerity, and seashells. 
But we’ve all devoured the mottle 
in that memory. Instructed those 
to place conch shells to their ears. Dissolved 
belief. Here, we say, you can hold 
the sound of the ocean. The swift throat 
of the unseen sits there as a sleeping dog. Not to mention 
we’d been drawing heat all day, been sprouting 
cold coffee on tabletops. My bedroom is my office is my gym. 
The stainless snow profligating 
over mud. I’ve retraced icy patches 
for the better part of an hour. Tell me the thrill of the slip. 
Once, I demanded tadpoles show 
themselves in puddles, so that I may bring 
them to my palm. So that I may cradle 
their beginning. I have always had intentions 
of closeness. I let everyone make a doorway 
out of my sorrow, needlepoint lingering. 
Where is my refusal? Stirring desire, leaves 
like mist. The sediment of unfolded 
clothes is on the table, again. All day 
you have been transporting 
bundles of branches to the wood chipper. 

36 

 
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
PUBLIC INTIMACIES 

Across the street from my apartment is a hospital and all day a family has been sitting outside in 
lawn chairs and they sit together in their waiting with a cooler filled and above them a nurse tapes a 
sign to the window that reads GIRL and fierce cheering and picture taking erupts and everyone is 
hugged but at the beginning of the pandemic only empty shelves and there was no toilet paper or 
hand sanitizer and I remember my professor telling me kindness is going to look different now and 
then she recounted telling someone at the grocery store please cover your mouth with your arm 
when sneezing or coughing please protect others and I remember crossing the street and then yelling 
hello to neighbors and riding my bike past a church adorned in multicolored ribbons with names 
and dates written on them in Sharpie and that a ribbon was for each person lost and how 
overwhelmed we are by death and I wish I learned better how to love from a distance as 
my mother and brothers were sick and I was ten hours away and people keep going and I wonder 
who has the privilege to invoke hopelessness and I smile at others under my mask and at work and 
we joke that no one would know that we’ve curved our faces in celebration of seeing another so we 
practice the crinkle by our eyes that comes with a smile hoping others see that we are welcoming 
that we are here with you and yesterday at the ice cream shop we could taste samples again and it 
had been a year or so since I tried all of the flavors key lime and almond joy and birthday cake and 
outside the store a woman introduces her baby to a puppy and they were nose-to-nose curious of 
each other’s presence and we crowd around this ordinariness we crowd now in open spaces and 
we begin to hold each other’s proximity and sometimes it’s as if nothing ever happened and often it 
feels like so much change like broken bones that never healed properly and the ribbons are still up at 
the church and we write our wounds on multicolored fabric and we grieve in the streets and I 
still wave at the person across the street walking her dog. 

37 

 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
INTIMACY  

I didn’t think it would turn out this way 

-- Lauren Berlant  

It was for a time  
a silent fury of discontent:  
a house with cold window edges, 
wailing floorboards, a dismissing  
vent behind the television. We had loved  
each other once before. Now, bone-clouds  
of disappearance leavened above and knives  
with peanut butter residue sat on the sink edge,  
counters with a layer of last meal dust,  
bare walls – we never did  
put any pictures up. The grapevine clasped 
to the fence had begun its slow death,  
cracking into dry brown straws, some 
falling to the yard. We were so unaware  
of the desiccation. All the residues of apathy,  
cold brush along the fence line. We didn’t notice 
in our permanent distance. Someone was calling out 
at the top of the stairs, the other  
was on the first floor deciding if she should run.  

38 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
THESE ARE MY FEARS 

spiders, centipedes, E.T.  
dark roads through deep woods,  
drinking beer before liquor,  
drowning, my shadow,  
Freddy Krueger,  
being alone,  
that feeling of restlessness,  
werewolves but not Teen Wolf,  
hair in my food, 
god but really the opposite of god,  
that space between love and in love  
where dust settles  
and someone else’s skin cells  
pile on your dresser. 

39 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
INTIMACY  

Intimacy relies heavily on the shifting registers of unspoken ambivalence 

-- Lauren Berlant  

After months of tracing some semblance of meaning, months of drawing constellations on your 
back as you fell asleep. There is something here. In the mornings, you prepare the coffee beans, 
curating the French press. We have this. It’s weeks later when I find a centipede in the bathtub. I am 
a vessel of fear. You kill it. You admit you saw a centipede in the bathroom weeks ago and killed it. 
You admit you did the same in our old house. There is intimacy here in the secret. The things we do 
for each other and never say. How it settles in us: a cleaned dish, a wiped countertop, a killed bug, a 
tracing of the stars on your back even after you have fallen asleep.  

40 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
BAD HABITS  

After Cecilia Woloch  

I bite my fingernails to the nub, drink Prosecco from the bottle even though the bubbles frolic 
down my chin, pet every dog I see on the street, steal the covers and then tear them off in the 
middle of the night, say I will do things I never have the intention of doing, run in the way that is 
healthy for your heart and the way that keeps your heart in a small glass box, far away from any stick 
that might knock at it its cage, and listening to my mother, daydreaming, forgetting my keys, losing 
memories, plucking dandelions and popping the tops off, biting the skin on my lips, spooning 
tomato sauce into my mouth while it simmers, staring at the moon, not listening to my mother, 
saying yes when I should say no, never washing gritty, greased over pans, drinking more than one 
cup of coffee a day, following more than I lead, believing I am not free, staring into my dog’s eyes 
for long periods of time, talking about things I know nothing about, trying over and over again, 
failing a lot, saying “I love you” first, standing too close to wasp nests, and wavering like thistle, and 
watching too many reality tv shows about the social experiment of love, and not saying how much 
you mean to me and not knowing that time is like when we used to ride our plastic sleds down that 
fifty foot hill behind the junkyard, quick and intoxicating,  

41 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
LONGING/GRIEF 

42 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
I long and seek after 

-- Sappho translated by Anne Carson  

43 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
TREE SURGEON  

After my father left,  
I climbed trees. I do not know  
what it means to be safe,  
but I learned how it felt to be held --  

woven in limbs, brushed in bark dust, 
uncoaxed by the prodding of the wind  
or the lulling certainty of ground  
and it was here, hovering, that I felt closest  

to him. He spent hours climbing trees, 
maneuvering limbs to cut out damage, 
ridding the world of one entrenched  
in telephone wire or lingering near a roof. 

I ate Handi snacks on branch tops, 
pretended the red stick was a saw  
and went at it, thinking I could  
break tree bones. 

I would move two-handed, driving  
it until skin had broken, until  
something lighter appeared, a dint  
the size of my pinky nail.  

Then, I would stop, wipe the matted hair  
from my forehead, examine what living was left 
and trace sounds of clapping leaves with my eyes. 
I am left wondering at the ways we sprawl 

and curl -- how trees don’t know what solace is 
but sustain it anyway. I will never hold  
a contradiction like that.  
What I remember most from those days: 

hollow never meant empty  
and ants can’t tell the difference  
between skin and bark.  

44 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
AFTER I LEAVE THE HOSPITAL, IT IS SNOWING  

Say there is an American flag  
that bellows in the wind at night. 
There, outside the hospital  
where we all walk to our cars. 

Say the dazzling pavement is tricked 
into icy terrain. Say this pandemic  
was any worse. Say someone  
loves someone in a hospital bed.  

Say we spent hours holding  
the hand of a loved  
with plastic gloves on. Say 
it isn’t over.  

Give me anything but memory.  
Give me your delights, like stars cusped  
on fingertips. Give me some form  
of revelry in this waiting. Give me hope –  
someone to recognize – standing outside,  
the cold breath escaping my mouth.  

Give me more than I knew to ask for.  
For days now, the limbs of trees lit  
with icy sweaters. It’s enough  
to make you believe. They always say 
with any loss – there is a moment  
of forgetting. You wake to a morning 
like yesterday.  

Say someone you love 
is still alive. Say it is still snowing: 
paper thin sheets draw an abyss 
of light.  

45 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
NEAR DEATH  

The body knows. One of my brothers was buried alive when I was eight. In a ditch. Covered with 
dirt. No trace of finger, or top of head. Disappeared. He was so casual about it. He said this is a risk 
of labor work. Digging. They needed to have it done. No, they did not have the proper equipment. I 
wonder what he was thinking in the few seconds the dirt coaxed his body out of breath. Hospital 
bed. Streaks of dust and regret. My mother. His wife. Me. I remember him reaching his hand out. 
Quiet. My mom and his wife lunged to him. I did not move. He felt so far. What distance grows in 
us.  

46 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
THE DISTANCE BETWEEN TWO HANDS  

Let’s linger beset by the margins of our distance. I am a negation known as presence. If you reached 
your arm out like a man dissembling from a cliff, half-fallen, chaos descending from your brows, 
reaching -- with the last slip of your caught life, reaching, so someone else might distinguish the air 
between your palm and theirs, might raise an arm in reverence to your humanity.  

But we are not at the edge of a cliff. No. And no one is reaching a hand to care for anyone. We can 
barely contort ourselves to offer water. Along the rise of the hill sits bodies that are buried without 
headstones. Everything comes back to death.  

People try to comfort each other: saying, the dead are with us. Here in the unseen. But all I feel is 
distance. All I feel is that twisting in my chest, sinister air – you are not here and I want you to be. 
This realization, a sudden enfolding, a clutching like a tiny girl holding her only beloved teddy bear. 
So tight, the stuffing is tearing at its eyes.  

47 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
I AM TRYING TO 

After Ross Gay 

All I can say is grief is grief. And I wish I had a better metaphor for it. A metaphor for the pain that 
inhabits me now: an attic mouse that has tunneled a minor darkness, resistant to leaving. I am trying 
to explain the ways I am ordinary; I, too, have been in the grind – coffee beans, shredded dust on 
the counter, the tea kettle pouring over its whistle, the intense smell of bitterness and caffeine 
steaming near me. I am there over the French press, coaxing tears to stay in their ducts, telling 
memory over and again it is to stay put. It is to be silent in the confines of the mundane. I am trying 
to say the death sits behind my eyes most days. Caught semblance in the distorted reflection on the 
stainless steel appliances (which are in fact not stainless). I am trying. The tears, ascending: kids on 
swift cookie sheets carving the snowy hill. The memories, intruding: the squirrel on the edge of the 
yard – either taunting or lingering atop the fence – the dog uncaring as to the intention. The grief, 
well, like I said: grief is grief. My friend texts that her cat has died. It was sudden and unforeseen. 
She says she can’t shake the guilt. Same, I say. She says please know I am not comparing your grief 
to mine. It really doesn’t matter. Grief is not comparable. I couldn’t explain it to you anyway. This 
grief. In its particularity. I am trying to tell you. 
I am trying. I am trying.  

48 

 
 
 
 
I SEE EVERYTHING I HAVE NOT DONE 

I see everything I have not done today:  
The egg skins crinkled on the sides of the pan 
float in the cold soapy water, the books piled  
high: meanderings on self-help and living  
with grief, the dog hair making nests  
at the legs of the table, leftover coffee sits 
in cups, there are crumbs on the countertops 
from the bagels that always fall apart. I think  
it’s the afternoon but I am still in my pajamas. 
We continue like this. The sun melts the snow  
in muddy patches. Pawprints waffle the sidewalk.  
And I’m supposed to go on living. On the table,  
half an orange peeled and ready to eat. Would you 
believe me if I told you everything is muted like  
a grey Pittsburgh day? Time is a fish I caught 
with my father that one time at Moraine State Park – 
it’s translucent flailing. We were meant to eat this fish  
but my father saw the fleck of near death 
reflected in my eyes and he let me send it back. Instead,  
using his long nails to break orange skin, the sticky 
sourness cupped in our hands. I don’t even know  
how to order these memories that move in me; 
a current of loss and remaking. I try to return.  
coil coffee cups on the sink, stare  
out a window overlooking a hospital, this is  
what longing is: elucidating the remains  
of every encounter; memories a catalogue  
of leaves –fallen, collected, recreated.  

49 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
ON GRIEF: EMERGENCY ROOM VISIT FOR CHEST PAIN  

The thrashing never ends, I mean  

there is someone throwing a torrent  

of kicks in the spaces between my ribcage. Like tattered edges of the Ohio River 

where factories rest in weary descent.   

Like cigarettes lit and luminary near beer cans. 

How someone loved the corner of a memory before you returned there. Before you left whatever 
beginning, lapsing, in the gray sheet above. Carrying in you a smoke stack. Carrying in you a rapture 
of honey bees. Carrying in you the death of Ash trees.  

There is a carefully tucked sheet, a bed of loss under us. This is where attention contorts longing. 

Into steel. Into mason jars tucked in boxes. Stacked irreverently in a storage unit off Route 51.  

Someone used to fill them with vinegar and beets we wanted to latch our teeth into on a night 
etched in snow.  

All the while we’d been searching the current of the river, asking for the future to convene in us.  

All the while we’d been folding hills under eyelids, been saying, on repeat, just a little longer and  
it will pass.  

And you go to the doctor. They ask where is the pain? And you are poor in telling others about  

your heart.  

Someone you love is dying. 

In the distance, the doctor says:  

there is nothing wrong with you.   

Like light slitting over the rusted bridge. 

Like the dog digging a hole in the yard.  

 Someone has excavated absence inside you.  

50 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
THE RIGHT WHALE 

is on its way out.  
Not my fault.  
It’s those ships lacerating  
their silvery skin.  

I have an alibi. I am at home,  
drinking coffee, reading W.S. Merwin.  
Meanwhile, the 400 left pulse the waves. 
They dip and swivel 
The black of their bodies, 
a pansy petal plunged in blue. 

The dead ones float,  
the ships drag them back,  
tie their tails to docks.  
Craters of red burst 
on their bodies.  
My hands are not red.  

I sit. I read about the whales,  
named Right because  
they are the right ones to kill.  
They are just a passing thought  
over breakfast.  
I did nothing 
wrong.  

51 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
PRESERVATION OF A FATHER 

Even now, my memories slip; unwanted mail under a crack in the door. Banal and askew. There was 
a time you taught me how to dance the waltz to Frank Sinatra. Quick-hearted and grand. Rare and 
flawed. Even then, you kept beer in your truck, popped it as you would drive off. Sometimes when I 
was with you, we would play board games you kept in the chest from the farm: Clue, Mousetrap, 
Checkers. Elated and flimsy. This was in the trailer at the top of the hill. I remember the smell of 
Copenhagen chew: how I would buy ground up jerky and shove clumps under my lip too. I wanted 
to be like you. Even now, I see you pointing to the knots of a tree branch, saying this is where we 
need to cut to preserve it. So there is a chance of new growth. How before they demolished the old 
firehall you found a nest of baby bunnies in the basement and placed them in a bucket; their fur fine 
and fresh. Even then, my mother dragging me from bar to bar asking if I could spot your truck. 
Pulling me by my hand through the wooden door. Even now, my memories are hazy counterparts 
of all I have lost. After your death, your children sift through storage units scattered in different 
towns – in them every receipt from gas or machinery or food and every small thing I had ever drawn 
for you.  

52 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
AFTER HIS MOTHER’S DEATH: FEBRUARY, 2011 

I wrote a poem about a bird 
overlooking our grief, rested  
on a telephone wire – why  
do birds always seem like  
the dead visiting? The bird  
transfixed above us  
as we split to the car,  
the air salty and immoveable  
between us. I had only known  
you six months, loved you for  
four of them – said the words once.  
I remember your whole family 
in another room. You had no space 
for tears until left alone, hunched  
over her casket. I stood in the doorway,  
not knowing a loss like yours, yet,  
not knowing how to traverse this pain –  
your uncle telling me to go  
to you. I hardly knew you, really.  
I didn’t know you like your mother 
did, like the family waiting in the foyer 
of the funeral home. But I went to you  
anyway, went to you in my own absence 
of recognition and placed my hand  
on your back. We did not talk  
about her addiction. We did not ask  
the question of suicide or accident.  
We would not talk about this for years 
and then, we would move it through  
our mouths casually, a bee sting 
behind the eyelids. We would move  
through uncertainty  
like it was fact. Only nodding  
to the loss and its denounced grief,  
letting it sit with us at the dinner table.  

53 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
LOOKING UP AT NIGHT  

This was nothing new. And yet, 
we tilted our heads in soft curiosity,  
a dog listening closely to an unknown  
sound; how our minds try to capture  
and sort. Funny, I knew you once, caught 
aperture: veil of phosphenes. For a moment,  
luminous and piercing. We have all been making  
light of uncertainty. Yet it grinds a book spine  
into us: coffee dust and sutured guilt.  
Bristle at the absence of another. How do I  
know you? Here, in this waiting, we have been  
the sonorous car horn, the impending disjunction.  
Always waiting to leave. Always a presumption of  
closeness. A nascent connection roams, a horse 
perked – ears drawing sharp constellations. We  
were the ones that bound the stars. Dappled and absurd.  
Didn’t we make meaning?  

54 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
ATTACHMENT THEORY 

Headline: Scientists Watched a Star Explode in Real Time for the First Time Ever 

Closeness is a fiery supernova located 120 million light years from earth. Even in its violent collapse, 
we watched. What do we make of this need to understand? We talked as if we knew each other all 
along. Days like small children reaching their arms to a parent. What of this desire to be held? Days, 
arms like scarves around the neck. There were conversations: sentences sewing distance. Say 
goodbye, on repeat. How did I learn to be close to someone? Looking up, a clattering of light fused 
into darkness. I realize later, we were all just learning how to love. Arms expanded in belief that 
someone might run towards them. Meanwhile, the wind is cradling shallow edges – cutting  
on the backs of necks. Tiny explosions. Closeness is laced and leftover ice dissolving in the lake.  

55 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
REPLICATION  

Aspen trees like scaffolds  
on the hill, they are reanimating  
fall. Yellow leaves rivaling sunrises,  
sinews of attachment.  
They are waiting to let go.  
Exact replicates of one another. 
The roots like lace. Woven  
underground systems of beginnings.  
In a fire, the trees become ash. Later,  
tiny sprouts pop and spread  
across the forest floor. Parts still intact.  

56 

 
 
 
 
 
ATTACHMENT THEORY  

Is it some fantasy to believe  
even when we are not  
with those we love 
that they go on living  
in the happiest of ways: 
each day is hot coffee,  
sugary donuts, sun scalloped 
on the bench at the park  
they must walk through daily  
admiring the trees and their  
abundance of leaves. I always think  
the lives of those we love must 
be going on without me in  
the grandest of ways. At least,  
I hope that for all those  
that I don’t see daily anymore. 
What are we to do  
with these hopes 
in death? How am I supposed  
to continue existing in a world  
where this person does not.  
Sometimes I wake up and think  
far off, my father is still living,  
still in a field somewhere  
in Industry, PA fine-tuning his truck.  
The cruel part: this belief 
only lasts a moment.  
Then, I’m winched back  
to this world, Like a dandelion  
plucked from the sidewalk crack, Like a fish  
pulled from the river, writhing into the  
painful, brazen light.  

57 

 
 
  
 
 
ASH TREES  

My purpose here is to tell you  
all the patterns of grief.  
Back in Pennsylvania,  
Ash trees are dying.  
Slowly. It takes 3-5 years.  
My father tells me,  
the Emerald Ash Borer 
has borrowed S-shaped  
pathways all over the trees; 
a child’s finger-painting 
of swirls. Narrow channels  
of obtuse death. See, the way 
they begin is by devouring 
the tree’s layer of nutrients.  
They do this over weeks, 
starving the tree like a lightning  
bug in an empty jar. Did you know 
their lives are only days long?  
Back to the trees: The woodpeckers, 
nuthatches, moths, butterflies,  
and squirrels are looking for new 
sources of sustenance. The advice  
the newspaper gives: if a tree dies,  
plant a new one, maybe two.  

58 

 
 
 
A COUPLE MONTHS AFTER MY FATHER’S DEATH, I READ ABOUT SONGBIRDS 
MYSTERIOUSLY DYING IN PENNSYLVANIA   

What does this life 
require of me. A constellation  
of sharp caution empties: embers 
crackle in a nearby firepit. Textured  
branches seduce the night, consider  
this was all you ever thought desire  
could be: planted calm and the arrival  
of darkness. Always someone running  
the hills. Always a creek, yearning. What  
scrapes the inside of my wrist, what thorn 
bush caught in the understory rises,  
what is left -- my father taught me  
to trust in the attempt: wake up, begin,  
follow some semblance of caught joy:  
eggs over-medium, a horse gasping oats 
from your flat palm, driving across a bridge, suspended, 
tasting air, a pronounced grin to anyone  
who will look in the service  
of a second; I’ll ask again: what does this life require  
of me. In the imprint of the landscape 
Sycamore trees raise the question to a slotted  
sky with absent blues: how long can a body 
search for what has been taken; this loss 
I wish to escape makes a nest in my chest: 
above me, Goldfinches are threading  
what little they could unearth: pine needles,  
bark, bits of trash, discarded feathers.  

59 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
CODA 

60 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
A few years ago in the before, before the pandemic and before I had known the contours of 

grief in the ways I do now, I met my advisor, Janine, in her office. It was a bleak, grey day in 

Michigan. The sun slotting lingered moments of brightness through her office window. We sat at 

the table together discussing our recent lives as we usually did. Janine had brought me a breakfast 

bar she thought I would like. I bring us here to this moment because it was one of many times that I 

was resistant. What I mean is I did not believe yet that poetry could become a dissertation. I was 

scared. Mostly scared that I would not fit well enough into the box of this PhD program in 

Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education. I had been running towards poetry my whole life, 

but had become accustomed to the notion that I was just someone who wrote poems sometimes 

and what I did would not and could not count towards anything remarkable or substantial. Like I 

said, this was in the before. One of many moments Janine believed -- more than I knew how to -- in 

the idea of poetry and its held, tangible form. I remember saying, “but it doesn’t feel like education. 

I don’t feel like I am saying anything directly about education.” Janine, sat back in her chair, paused 

and using her hands along with her whole body, asked, “Well, can you tell me what is not 

education?” This moment mirroring for me a story my High School English teacher used to tell 

about a philosophy student in college: 

The entire semester the students had read, researched, and memorized as much as they could about 
philosophy. The students studied the texts and notes from class, prepared for an intense final exam. When 
they came to the classroom there was only one question on the board; it read “Why?” Baffled and quite 
unsure what was meant, the students stared with bits of disbelief and horror. Their grade depended on this 
exam. After a few moments, one student wrote something down, folded the piece of paper, put it on the 
professor’s desk and left. My high school English teacher leaned forward in his seat, “and do you know what 
it said? He leaned back in his chair, “why not?”  

Now, we can debate this anecdote and how it is caught in the binary of the idea which is exactly 

where I would like us to sit in understanding this manuscript and the endeavor of writing it. When 

we elucidate the binary, the exacting opposition – then, perhaps, we illuminate all that sits between 

and around. Of course, philosophy is more than just an opposing supposition, but in this 

questioning we offer the correlation of a more, a beyond. What matters here is the question, how we 

answer that question, and the questions that arise and then enumerate around us. The way we think 

may in fact be the most interesting part, the way belief moves in us. Reorienting ourselves and 

others may be the most disruptive and thought-provoking thing we can do. So, I begin here because 

the question is not: is this dissertation about education or educational enough which is the question 

that prompted my fear of writing. The question is really about parameters of thought: why have we 

61 

 
 
decided that some things are and are not education? To be more precise: I have been educated my 

entire life, mostly in what might be called informal settings i.e. living.   

I think of this notion, in particular, when I remember the stories my family would tell. I have 

always noticed how as we each grow older we tend to grasp onto particular stories and tell them 

over and again, like an ode to a life well lived. My father had a particular story he would love to tell 

about me. When we lived on our farm and I was around three years-old I had an affinity and 

reverence for animals: either spending my time curled up with our farm dog or attempting to climb 

the fence to feed oats to the horses. One of the hogs and I seemed quite taken with one another, 

relishing a rebellious streak in each other. Often, this 300-pound hog would find some ingenious 

way to break from his pen. I, too, did not like being placed in a cage of any sort and would climb out 

of my crib often. I would usually make my way to the front porch where the hog would meet me on 

the front stairs and we would sit together. I would pet his snout and rest by his side. My father was 

often in awe of this as it seemed there was some unspoken bond between the hog and me. My 

mother was not amused, often screaming from the top floor window for someone to grab me 

before the hog tried to eat me. My father told this story almost every chance we saw each other and 

would let out his usual muffled chuckle that meant it was humorous and shocking. He would always 

say near the end some version of: you just weren’t afraid of anything and the animals just knew you 

in some way I can’t explain. I highlight this moment because it is a particularity of my life: a learning 

of sorts about who I was and a tracing of how I came to hold a reverence for animals and the 

natural world. In writing this poetry manuscript, I made a choice to move towards elucidating self-

awareness and endeavoring to answer the question who am I right now. I think about this because I 

think of how understanding who we are and our particular histories remakes in us possibilities of 

how we educate ourselves and others. More importantly, how we create and hold space for the 

multiple unfoldings of self and identity in educational spaces and beyond.  

Why Poetry? 

The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is 
“knowing thyself” as product of the historical processes to date, which has deposited in you 
an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory....Therefore it is imperative at the outset to 
compile such an inventory. 

-- Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks  

Poetry is a gesture of how I might name astonishment -- how I might begin to transcend my 

daily living and my lack of adequate language into a form of immense and felt complexity. Even so, I 

can’t tell you what a poem wants, seeks to be, or where the meaning of it may or may not arise. It is 

62 

 
a malleable melody of sorts with suggestions of strange syntax and crucial reckonings. The poem 

offers revised textures of belief, exhausted by the outlines of spaces and the resilience of readers. It 

is an attunement, an awareness of the tracings that might thread together a semblance of a 

contextually riveted moment. Poetry sits at the crux of the contradiction. That is, in the interstices of 

the binary -- the world unravels. For me, metaphor provides a rendering of this notion in form. I 

attempt the model of combining two unrecognized sources together (a + b = c). This is 

foundational and approximate in theory, but when I call upon it in poetry, it becomes unattainable 

and untenable. A disruption of its assumptive and perceived way of knowing. It has to move beyond 

itself. As Wittgenstein (1996)  discussed, “The same -- and yet not the same.” (para. 174). 

In my work, I call upon this as the symmetry of difference which is not opposition, but a call 

to name the in-betweens, the particularities, the affective resistances and resonances. My poetry is an 

enactment of distance and a conjuring of closeness. It is about the self, the beholden I and the 

corresponding you. The connective tissue and the collapsible nature of pronouns and relationalities. 

The intimacies and the intimations of intensities and the lackluster. The everyday, the mundanity of 

our noticing and the peripheral pinings of what continues to go unnoticed, undisclosed, 

undelivered.  

In a more general sense, I see this as the fragments of my selfhood and my own 

introspective attempts at wondering and acknowledging relationality and connection - how I might 

create the impossible inventory. An example: suggesting a movie to a friend believing they will love 

it, only to find they hated it. Small disagreements of misaligned selves: I like tomato sauce but I hate 

tomatoes. These are banal and general epiphanic layerings, but they move towards an interstice I am 

interested in: what is a theory of intimacies beset on when we feel distance sitting with the ones we 

are closest to? How do I account for the felt illusion of connection with a stranger -- a person across 

from me in a coffee shop? These are remnants of other relationships I have left unturned, 

unscathed, unquestioned. My poetry is a move towards a shaping of that attunement, self, other, and 

the dismantling -- a move from commonality and towards capacities of difference. Here, maybe, the 

disruption of our embodied forms, a tracing of abstraction and the loss --  the grieving of belief 

while in the process of conjuring it.  

In this poetry manuscript, I posit a few questions that reverberate throughout the poems: 

How have I formed intimacies and what are those variations? How have I come to recognize 

connection across persons, places, moments, and things -- where does the distance grow, where 

does it subside? These questions are particularly important because we are still negotiating and 

63 

 
 
defining topics of intimacy and distance. The variations of intimacy, the ways we come to believe we 

belong or connect are concepts that still falter through us, we are compiling language for these 

moments, reinventing the relational -- how we might be with one another. This redefining is 

compounded when we think of how a global pandemic shattered and changed our notions of 

connection and intimacy. A pandemic that created circumstances for distance to prosper within us, 

for us to learn what technology might provide us and to in turn yearn for forms of connection we 

didn’t think we needed as much as we know we do now.  Contemporary poets Jenny Xie, Ocean 

Vuong, Hanif Abdurraqib, and Major Jackson, among others, parsed concepts of identity and our 

distance from ourselves, of loss and divide, of intimacies, and the many ways we name 

relationships.  My work sits in the questioning these poets propose for each of us.  

I move with Berlant’s (1998) assertion that hidden in any form of intimacy is a version of 

this disbelief and wondering: “‘I didn’t think it would turn out this way’ (281). In a special issue in 

Critical Inquiry, Berlant (1998) theorized and invited others to theorize on what intimacy is and could 

be, asserting that “intimacy only rarely makes sense of things” and “Conventionally, in its expression 

through language, intimacy relies heavily on the shifting registers of unspoken ambivalence” (286). 

This shifting in register of the unspoken, the spaces in-between, the affect that permeates our 

connections and relationships is where I seek to pull poems into being, to recreate what became of 

the intimacies left sifting in the air in a singular, temporal interaction. In the poem, “Madison, WI” I 

meander in a mundane image -- a frozen lake and intersperse my thought-feelings and perceptions, 

conjuring an intimacy between selves. In “Tree Surgeon,” I linger on a memory of a consistent act I 

did daily as a child -- climbing a tree -- and I trace the patterns of intimacy in the tiny moments -- 

looking up at the leaves, trying to cut branches down -- and how these are a forming of a 

relationship with someone who is not there physically, but who was there in my attachment to them. 

As I continue to write poems, I will keep in mind this question: “What happens to the energy of 

attachment when it has no designated place?” (285). Where does that energy move, be, subside? I 

think of Sappho, and Carson’s (2002) translation of Sappho’s Fragments, and how Carson made a 

decision to let each fragment hold the space around it, so that the book is pages of blankness with 

one or two lines lingering. Further, Carson rarely uses punctuation so that a pause is only the 

blankness or the page turning -- sometimes it seems as if almost every line goes on in the registers of 

the unspoken. I often turn to this one line: “I long and seek after” -- the implied yearning and the 

unfinished movement of the text to me are an intimacy forming -- yearning is a want to be closer to 

something you desire. But here, Sappho never tells us, never ends the line for us -- that yearning just 

64 

 
moves into the air, settled there. This is the intimacy I speak of, an intimacy that may not be named 

but that exists in the interstices of our daily wanting, our daily longing to move towards something, 

anything -- to get closer, even without knowing what that closeness is or what it means or what will 

become of it.  

Writing Poems  

This poetry manuscript borrows methodologically from poetic inquiry (Galvin & 

Prendergast, (2016) and arts-based research methodologies (Leavy, 2015). Particularly, I engage with 

vox identitatis, or the creation of poems exploring self and identity (Galvin & Prendergast, 2016). 

Although this is a marginalized approach within qualitative inquiry, it has become a robust method 

internationally, and there is a growing community of scholars invested in thinking about the ways 

poetry offers multiplicity and reorientation of thought patterns. In working with this methodology, I 

spent time studying contemporary poetry and the many ways one may write and read it. I have been 

studying poetry for over ten years. Most of these poems have been written and revised over the 

course of years. Sometimes holding space in a drawer until I was ready to return to it. Writing poetry 

is an iterative endeavor that takes time, research, and self-reflection. When I set out to write this 

manuscript, I had anticipated reading and writing poetry daily in the mornings. Some weeks I 

managed this quite well, some weeks I wrote whatever I could onto the page just to practice writing. 

Most of this is in the trash or in some saved document I will never open. It took me a long time to 

believe in writing again. I did start believing though, only in kernels. When my father died, grief 

consumed me and I could barely muster thoughts. I resisted writing. It took me some time, but I 

began again. I tried writing one or two poems a day. It is difficult to write in the fog of 

sentimentality and longing; grief rising at the edges. 

Twenty to twenty-five of these poems have been written over the past five years and revised 

based on feedback from committee members and workshop peers. Thirty of the poems have been 

written in the past year and a half, a good number of them recently. I have revised the poems, 

returning to them in their own ethos. I also took into account an envisioned poetic cohesion 

particular to the affective contours of each poem and how it fit in the manuscript. While ordering 

the manuscript I attempted to coordinate poems based on theme and affect. I created four sections 

with four epigraphs that had inspired particular awarenesses and felt expressions subtly ruminating 

throughout. In the first section I was interested in how we come to believe, how we come to know 

relationality and ourselves. I began this section then with a contemplation on how language fails and 

begins again and I end the section on a beginning forming of intimacy. The second section invites an 

65 

 
understanding of place as attachment to self and others – how we remake place and our own 

versions of home shifts understandings of who we are and who we wish to be. The third section is 

about relationships – the theory of how connection and disconnection occur with others. The fourth 

section is both the longing to connect and the realization of loss and grief across each moment; it is 

the understanding of self through loss and death, and also the reanimating of how I came to know 

and understand the people closest to me, particularly my father and as an extension the natural 

world. Each section is building on my attachments and intimacies with family, friends, and place. It 

slowly moves through the consistency of loss, layering each one. I tried to place poems near each 

other that resonated with the epigraph, but also continued a poetic logic of language and imagery. As 

words are repeated, they build out meaning across contexts of the manuscript.  

These practices of writing and ordering illuminate the multitudes of distance in both the 

language and syntactical components as well as the many ways we have defined and continue to 

define intimacy and attachment conceptually. As I revised the poems in this manuscript, I noticed 

the nods toward the natural world and recognized our distancing from it, our continued neglect was 

also a theme within the poems. These poems rest in the in-between as newly awakened realizations 

in the mundane. The ordinary and mundane became an instrument of portraying these modes of 

distance from landscapes, people, and ourselves. I plan to submit this completed manuscript to 

several contests including: APR/Honickman First Book Prize, The Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, 

Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, Academy of American Poets First Book Award, The Ballard 

Spahr Prize, and the Max Ritvo Prize.  

66 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 

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Beachy-Quick, D. (2017) “Some Consequences of the Made Thing”. Poets.org. https://poets.org/  

poem/some-consequences-made-thing.   

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69 

 
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
APPENDIX 

“Where is the edge of belief? Is it possible to believe / something truly unbelievable? How  

does / that begin? Is there a crack of light under the door? / How do you know to see it as light?” 

is from Float, a series of small chapbooks from Anne Carson.  

“Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice” is from Invisible Cities by 

Italo Calvino.  

MY AUNT ASKS ME IF I DISLIKE BEAVER COUNTY borrows form from the poem, 

“Wednesday” in The Weather by Lisa Robertson.  

POMPEII has an epigraph from an interview with Anne Carson in The Guardian titled, 

“Anne Carson: ‘I do not believe in art as therapy’” where when asked, “Do you have a personal 

definition of what poetry is?”, Carson answered, “If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running 

quite fast through it.” 

LANSING, MI – “that yearning: what you finally gave up” is from the poem, “What the 

Living Do” by Marie Howe. “We don’t get to choose what or whom we love...we just don’t get to 

choose.” is from Bluets by Maggie Nelson.  

“You existed to me. You were a theory” is from “Savior Machine”  in the book, Life on Mars 

by Tracy K. Smith 

SURPRISING CONNECTIONS is inspired by the form of the slash from Hanif 

Abdurraqib’s poems in A Fortune for Your Disaster and the repetition of “We” in Gwendolyn Brook’s 

“We Real Cool.”  

MIDWAY THROUGH A PANDEMIC, I REALIZE THINGS ABOUT MYSELF is 

inspired by an epigraph from Jenny Xie’s poem, “Visible Relations” from Eye Level.  

“I long and seek after” is from If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho which is a translation by 

Anne Carson of Sappho’s work.  

INTIMACY and INTIMACY both have epigraphs from Lauren Berlant’s introduction to 

“Intimacy: A Special Issue” in Critical Inquiry. 

AFTER I LEAVE THE HOSPITAL, IT IS SNOWING is an imitation of form borrowed 

from Lisa Robertson’s poem, “Residence at C___” in The Weather.  

BAD HABITS is inspired by and a mirror of the form and content of Cecilia Woloch’s 

poem, “Fireflies” from Carpathia. 

I AM TRYING TO is written in conversation with Ross Gay’s lines: “But what I do know is 

that I love the moment when the poet says / I am trying to do this / or I am trying to do that. 

70 

 
  
Sometimes it is a horseshit trick. But sometimes / it’s a way by which the poet says / I wish I could 

tell you, / truly, of the little factory / in my head” from the poem, “feet” in catalog of unabashed 

gratitude.  

ATTACHMENT THEORY is written in conversation with an article about scientists 

watching a star explode in Live Science called, “Scientists watched a star explode in real time for the 

first time ever” written in January, 2022.  

A COUPLE MONTHS AFTER MY FATHER’S DEATH, I READ ABOUT 

SONGBIRDS MYSTERIOUSLY DYING IN PENNSYLVANIA is written after reading an article 

in Science called, “Songbirds are mysteriously dying across the eastern U.S. Scientists are scrambling 

to find out why” about songbirds dying in Pennsylvania and neighboring states. Scientists were 

unsure what was causing their swift deaths.   

71 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Poems in this book have been published in the following places: 

“Emerald Isle, NC”  and “Culling Lines” in The Inflectionist Review  

“Theory of Utterances” first appeared in Sugar House Review as “Let the Looming In” 

“Tree Surgeon” in Bellevue Literary Review and was a finalist for the Marica and Jan Vilcek Prize for 

Poetry. 

“These Days, I Spend My Time in the Rupture” in Pittsburgh Quarterly. 

“Midway Through a Pandemic, I Realize Things About Myself” was previously titled “Distance, 

Lolling” and was one of the poems that won the MSU College of Education Poetry Contest.  

“Beaver County, PA” and “Lansing, MI” were finalists for the The Waking Flash Prose Prize – 

Nonfiction in Ruminate.     

 “Madison, WI” was previously titled “The Lake Is Frozen Again” and won first place for the The 

Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets’ Kay Saunders Emerging Poet Award. 

 “Whispering in the Museé De L'Orangerie '' won an Honorable Mention for the The Wisconsin 

Fellowship of Poets’  Poets’ Choice Award.  

72