“Still punk AF,” I whisper, ruthlessly searching, seeking a splotchy yellow with an arrow corner to destroy the last hole in a starfish ... and I thought: America might need to do a jigsaw puzzle.

"Be it an extra plate on the table or a shared plot in the earth, in the end, it is my grandmother who adapts ... But as I armor myself in their adornments, there are certain loops I hope to break."

A song for a hellscape timeline without so much as a half-sip of beer or a Hershey kiss. 

I often feel like the pet my mind keeps. Aware it goes to work, but not understanding where, only away. Hopeful it may return with treats. Sometimes, the treats still have bones in them. 

It is the season of the blanket ... mind the precise order four blankets must be layered. It is an actual Technicolor Dreamcoat. Childhood’s Kevlar against the dark. 

When you create worlds that weren’t there before, they aren’t discovered overnight. But, if you’re good at it … if it becomes a reliable world … word eventually gets out.

Like those Oxford scholars who sought the earliest known occurrence of a word, I found something buried in an old handwritten summer letter.