“you ask me to be patient. i paint an old bookshelf

& remember my posture, the way blossoms become

one last thing.”

“Much of this is simply a lifelong tendency on my part to notice where the crowd is running and then run in the opposite direction.”

“Upon learning that Louisa May Alcott spent more than a decade moonlighting as a sordid, heady mix of Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Brontë, I dove eagerly into this secret canon.”

It is as if by submerging yourself in a horror story, you will be unmade, but you can also re-emerge, different than before, if you choose. The overused adage is true: we imagine horrors in order to cope with real ones.

As the only mammals that can fly, they are often 
imagined as something not-quite-mammal, 
a species dancing in the liminal space
between bird and rodent.