Oort Poetica

The way ice can become a verdant spring. Horace, you know the way we stare through lenses; how we bathe the sky in radio waves. Do you understand what it means to listen to a body

Everything that could have possibly budged already had, anything neglectable was long ago done so.

My writing professor said to me that in order to get better, you had to dismantle the person you were, because that person was killing you. I kept wondering: Why did a killer love me?

Mama was a truck. A Ford Bronco, to be exact.

The First January Sun I Want to Share with You

At least a handful of sunshine,
the best ataractic; I
steady myself in the russet
downpour, attempting to trace
down this new feeling,
like a

Your gym is perhaps your favorite thing about Hattiesburg. Your student budget is tight, but you’ll manage to eek out thirty a month somehow—you have for the last three years.

The day before isolation, I celebrate my birthday, unwed, the first of its kind in my adult life, my divorce from a great man with whom I shared an OK eleven years, finalized by way of a $250 internet

I’d spend the night there on Saturday nights, get up Sunday morning and drive to my church and preach. I didn’t find God because I wasn’t looking for him. I was looking for me but I didn’t find him either.

Nirvana

I don’t think it was nirvana playing
I don’t know what it was
in the ocean sometimes
warm water is pulsing under the cold surface
I don’t know if I really mean it. I mean,
maybe it’s a

Maybe you can do this. It’s not your idea. But maybe.

Previously on...
Part 3  ||  Part 2  ||  Part 1  ||  Prologue

Your boyfriend was the first...

when i’m

on coke i feel like i’m

in cruel intentions but

i have the personality

of winona ryder in

girl, interrupted

I followed him up the stairs up to his apartment and once inside he made parachutes, wrapping loose MDMA in tissue paper.

If I forget to night shift my mac it’s tragic...

We can stand here / on the corner, arguing... 

Xenia and I had been cheating on each other with the same woman for about three months

After that, I gave up / on finding a good doctor...

People I Don’t _______ to anymore. This is a prompt inspired by Chelsea Hodson’s essay, People I Don’t Talk To Anymore.

I remember the next morning, puking, shaking violently, asking for God’s mercy. There was too much light coming through the blinds. I was a living, breathing version of “Hurt.”