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Archive for June, 2025

New CinePoem Release! From RISKING LOVE

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged on June 13, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Welcome to the first single from my new spoken word album, RISKING LOVE, which I co-created with acoustic guitarist Steve Law. Release date: July 18. We’re so excited to share these poems with you! Sometimes flirty. Sometimes raw. Sometimes electric. Always wildly alive. It’s an intimate album that explores how we might fall more deeply in love with the world as it is, even when that seems impossible. You can listen to this single on Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes, or anywhere you listen to music. You can pre-purchase the album on Bandcamp. And you can join us at our release party–free!–on July 18, 3 p.m. mountain time, on zoom. This amazing video was made by Holiday Mathis–if you want her to make videos for you, too, check her out and ask to be on her waitlist. We’ll be releasing videos every Friday for the next 15 weeks! Please watch them, like them, share them with your friends. We made these love poems for you! 

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Walking Back from Sanborn Park

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on June 12, 2025| 6 Comments »


 
 
Four-foot rattlesnake.
Sunning herself.
Right in the middle
of the road. Strange,
how terror can also
breed awe. For long,
silent moments, I offer
her all my attention.
After she slips into swaths
of sweet clover,
the sky, such a startling blue.
The scent of wild roses,
so stirring, so sweet.

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Mostly Invisible

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on June 11, 2025| 2 Comments »


 
 
So imperceptibly they show up,
the rings of a tree, and yet,
there must be a moment when
the dark line of the ring is not there
and then it is. So, too,
today, I swear I could feel it,
the emergence of another ring
inking itself around my heart
as my love for you, again, grew.
No one else will ever be able
to count these rings. No one
will know how love grew.
But I do.

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1990

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on June 10, 2025| 4 Comments »


 
 
That was the summer I picked up a sex worker
on East Colfax, confusing her upturned thumb
for hitchhiking. Imagine her surprise
when she got into my mom’s silver Volvo and saw me,
a girl of twenty in a pink dress I wore
for my theater internship that day.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Oh, you know,” she said, “just down the road.”
This is how I remember it. I warned her
how dangerous that part of town could be
before she told me how her pimp would beat her.
I think we both shocked each other.
She couldn’t imagine why I had picked her up.
To this day, I am grateful she never let me go.

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Let the World Have Its Way With You

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on June 9, 2025| 12 Comments »


 
 
Today it’s the daisy that teaches me
about opening. How lovely it was last week.
I praised its yellow, sun-gold petals
reaching out as they were from the bright center.
After last night’s fierce rain, the flower has been trashed,
stripped of its petals. Every. One. Bent and bruised,
they lie splayed in the dirt. And the daisy
goes on with its growing. New leaves.
New roots. New buds. Nourished
by the rain that tore the flower apart.
How often have I, too, lost all my petals, only to learn
that was not the end of the story of opening?
This world is a world of both beauty and loss.
Did I ever really believe one opening
would last me forever? It’s always a lifetime
of learning. Today it’s so clear that when
I can bring presence to loss or resistance,
this act makes pain itself luminous,
is how the heart grows roots, and buds and leaves.
Always it returns to this—offering the broken world
my wonder. In return, oh, the opening.

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The Opening

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on June 8, 2025| 6 Comments »


 
 
There is a terror that claims us,
that snaps its strong jaws around us
and thrashes us till we are limp.
Who could guess such a maw
is a portal to grace?
There are wounds so great
no amount of salve or prayer
or kindness or care can heal them,
and through them we find gateways to love.
It is after the wailing and howling with ache
that we hear, as if for the first time,
the almost inaudible song of our breath
and know it as home.  
How is it that what saves us
feels so far out of reach
but is here, bone close?
There is an infinite blooming inside us
we come to know only as we wither.
Even now, in this chill,
it is opening.

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It Makes Me Want to Look Again, Again

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on June 7, 2025| 2 Comments »


 
 
It’s like living with the same painting
for years and then one day seeing in it
something I’ve never seen before,
that’s what it’s like tonight when we’re walking
along the river and I see my girl as someone new
emerging from the daughter I have known
her whole life. It is, perhaps, because the slant
of light is just right for such seeing—
the source of the shine coming not from the sun,
but directly from her, from within.

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One Reason to Show Up

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on June 6, 2025| 10 Comments »


 
 
the whole world is burning
and the only way to bring it water,
the bucket of you

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Letter to Myself at Twenty-One

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on June 5, 2025| 18 Comments »


What is it that shines through all this withering?
—Kim Rosen, “Grand Finale”
 
 
You would be embarrassed of my body.
You would never believe contentment
is possible with a belly this soft
and legs this thick, but sweetheart,
I promise you I love being alive
in this time-ripened body that still
carries me into the garden to plant
snap peas, this body that cradles
my grown girls, that explores
the familiar terrain of my husband,
that walks through spruce forests and thrills
at the scent of evergreen and rain.
It is so much easier now to be gentle
with myself, even easy to be gentle with you.
Easy to forgive you for thinking you needed
to starve these bones. The irony is
you never felt beautiful, did you, and now,
when I am so far from your ideal,
I’ve never felt more lovely—
which is to say there is something
inside, a radiance, that beacons through
the crumbling walls of the body,
and the real beauty is being in service
to that shine, becoming less and less
a vessel and more and more that light.

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For Now

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on June 5, 2025| Leave a Comment »


 
 
Driving home from the movie,
our blood still charged with adrenaline,
my daughter and I move through
the dark just under the speed limit,
our eyes trained on the red taillights
in front of us, and we talk about plot holes
and how we would change the ending.
Neither of us would have chosen happily
ever after, which somehow felt false  
to the greater story. It’s not long before
we’re singing along to her favorite song.
I harmonize on the chorus, and
a “Peaceful Easy Feeling” grows in me
as we drive through pouring rain.
I may not believe in happily ever after,
but I do believe in content for now,
as in this moment when she reaches
for my hand and I slide mine into hers.
I can’t see her face in the dark, but
in her voice, I can hear it, her smile.

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