Poké Lessons: Firestones

I will risk showing both my age and some "geekiness" in this piece. When I turned thirty, two years ago, I started secretly replaying my copy of Pokémon Blue Version. Chalk that one as a reward for finishing graduate school or else something to fill the space between accepting a new job and discovering the…

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Message in a… mentholated lozenge?

I threw away all the fortune-cookie-slips when I purged my desk, except for one that says "Action is nothing without the Motive". I almost discarded a cough-drop wrapper with them, except that I noticed something I overlooked: words in tiny font. "Be resilient"; "Go for it"; "Get back in there, champ!" All are excellent phrases…

A Discount Muffin

first draft "A Discount Muffin" is the poem I eat tonight. I am ravenous to find nourishment with meaning and its empty calories (so-called?) are filling a visceral space. The mental debt owed to me is the coffer I constructed, empty, to fill for myself from my self, extorting my self in proficient, endless anachronisms.…

Cactus Adonis

I wept Sunday. Cradling an iPhone in my lap, earbuds like IV-lines between my father and me, I sat on the floorboards of my friends' attic, near the brightly-lit hole leading to my room, and finally found my fountain.  Bizarrely, I had not wept at all during this entire painful period and I was aware.…

The Great Fortune Cookie Spiral

"The Szechuan Pepper Daddies" were the improvising-troupe who threw fortune cookies at random as they entered, inviting an audience member to open one as a prompt for their show. I saw the 'Pepper Daddies' in the second-round of the Fighting-Improv-Smackdown-Tournament (b.k.a. "FIST") that Washington Improv Theater hosts every year. They lost to "The Prosecution" in…

Conflux #1

Vocabulary.com offers conflux as a synonym for confluence, as "a flowing together" or "the act of blending together components thoroughly"; its connotations are slightly different from the riparian 'confluence', which is the name of a nascent entry that I never wrote because I could not get it perfectly in-mind.  After browsing an entry by a…

Mind-Trip: Visiting Past Selves

The morning after my graduate coursework was complete, and with no more school assignments to write, I sat in dim quiet. A restlessness stirred in my core but fatigue lingered-on. I decided to try a self-compassion exercise I found on the Internet. It told me to think of an uncomplicated love and I tried to…