“If not for the tenderness, we might misconstrue our personal context as elements of our sacred humanity to fix rather than elements of our sacred humanity to learn from, journey with, and understand devotion to the art that is love.”

“I do not hold my breath waiting for the bell. I close my eyes and let the night be night and the smell be smell, and I practice the plain grace of staying.”

“Love, after all, is not a performance. It is an unmasking. It is an act of faith.”

“Here, we honor how love interacts with us all. Find togetherness in the sorrows and rage that can lead us to a healing most profound in the collective understanding that we are not alone. As we do this, may we find comfort and permission in other pieces that urge us to celebrate ourselves, melt into grace, and see ourselves for who we truly are.”

“It dawns on me that I deserve a little more.
A little more grace and understanding,
a little more acknowledgment of all that I am.
A little more of the good things.
I have already given myself enough of everything else.”

“You see, I am a great tragedy of love really. Once consumed of an extraordinary person, that is to say, I was once consumed extraordinarily. True love has both destroyed and contained me.”

“Vision blurred / but I could feel / the one place / the last of you / stayed in my heart.”

“Gaze for Gaze: / In your soul beats my heart, / and I can’t hear her no more lest you in me.”

“the table needs you”

“I am me in the most undefined, shapeless way possible.”

“Drums beating on every quatrième beat, / Hypnotically locking in its crowd. / Soulful vocals engraving lyrics / Like poetry, asking for respect & unity.”

“the way my heart, having known / you, will continue to echo cavernously / even after your love is chiseled out / from the other crevices of me: / my mind, my soul, my fingernails, etc.”

“stretch marks sing survival / surrender written in scars / search this sacred skin”

“When at last we crashed into the shore, /I prayed —I still pray— to the moon’s pull, / to bring us home.”

“Love returned to me in a new form— / Not his lips, not his promises, / but the quiet communion of me with myself— / A love that was both tender and fierce; / both sensual and sacred— / A holy sensuality that asked nothing of me but truth.”

“Free me from imagining you as the reincarnation of my father / sent to see if I can keep my worthiness under your gaze.”

“That gap, the silence between maintenance and nurturing, became the space I had to cross.”

“I wanted her / to step away from the pond. / Less Narcissus,

more nurturer.”

“[This piece] is a celebration of honoring yourself fully, body, spirit, and journey, and moving with both confidence and tenderness into your own becoming.”