I invite you, dear reader, to fight against the comfort boredom provides. I invite you to relocate the passion you may have lost sight of in the winter and drag it back to the surface, just in time for the flowers around us to bloom, reminding us that it is spring: a time of renewal and rebirth.

the reason any of us write at all is to enter another soul, to understand that which we cannot easily understand, to connect with the people and places we’re made to believe are separate from us

You spend another morning on the beach, this time a different one. It’s meant to be queer but it’s like you’re the only gay around.

For me, the war is a blip on the news, a headline in the paper. Something that happens very far away. And as I hold up my candle, as I watch the wax drip from the wick while the wind whips the flame, I think about my future.

this desert we travel is vast     stained with beauty

that consumes and then loses

We can hold space for literature, art, beauty, the things that remind us why we are happy to be alive, and fight for the future we feel we deserve. One does not have to take place of the other.

“Minutes teach the hour to walk,

then the hour walks away.”

These stories have become my indulgence in escapism, and an antidote for doomerism.

“I walked along the lake and surveyed the multicolored houses, the French balconies blooming with flowers and ivy. The light changed. I turned to the lake and looked to the sky, now unable to distinguish what was thundercloud and what was mountain. It was the most beautiful place I possibly could have imagined.”

 “I have to go to court to change my name back to my own name?” I challenged the voting commissioner to disenfranchise me.

The patients cling to us. They think we have answers. We think we have answers. But every night I go home and all I have are numbers echoing in my head—oxygen saturation, pulse rate, blood pressure, beeping monitors. I try to sleep and see lines, peaks and valleys, the last rhythms of strangers.

I don’t want to be so tight-hearted,

but cannot watch closely a paper fortune teller

with every square reading disaster.

There’s a desperation in Maggie’s eyes, and in her unhesitating violence.  Could there be more going on than just some action that instinct drew out of her?  Could there be frustration?  Anger?  I’m reminded of how doctors used to slap human babies to help introduce them to breathing outside of their mothers.  Something we learned from the animals?

Water likes to take the path of least resistance, and when I’m stuck with a bad case of writer's block, finding that path of least resistance helps.

She doesn’t even know if tonight will erase her brother’s odious laughter from her memory. All she knows is that for the first time in her eight and a half years, Mason deserves to be punished.

Baltimore shimmers in the record heat. I shiver

at the new smells baked out of the harbor

Something as simple as a format, theme, or adherence to style can not only provide a jumping off point to get that curser moving, but I have found that it actually gives me room to be inventive in a substantive way. If nothing else, it provides a false, reminiscent whisper of my teenage rebellion. What’s more motivating than that?

My fear is that my daughter won’t get her stem cells before Putin starts a nuclear war; she will be left here with nothing in her bone marrow. If she gets the transplant, we have two days at least after that.

“That’s my daughter. She ran off. They found her a couple towns away,” Mannie said. “If you’re gonna stay here for a while, you better wash up. I can’t have you getting blood on the carpet.”

“I want to tell her that cowbirds aren’t even from Texas. That they just ended up there in search of food. In search of something better.”