What a royal feeling to look into that bag and imagine something new on my tongue on a day like that.

The sun sieves through the canopy— / rivers are relenting. My soul seats itself // for the first time. Where it is quiet, it becomes cold. / There is nothing I must do but die— // what joy to let go of all things—what ease to give up.

‘Sometimes you are damaged. You think poetry will repair you. You think poetry should repair you. You shake your fist at it when it doesn’t. You walk hand-in-hand with your damage, into the world. You do not speak. You are surprised when people register you are there.’

‘I told, my dear, I was living living living in the river. / I told, her then, I was dying dying dying not to shiver.’

Coming to terms with grief after the 2011 T?hoku earthquake and tsunami

“While a part of me was glad I wasn’t like my brother, no part of me wished to be more fortunate than my mother.”