I love to live where it snows.

Where I tuck my cold toes
Against my husband’s warm legs

And we can stay in bed
Watching the snow, in wispy flurries,

Bury all our reasons to hurry
In graceful drifts and banks of white

Sleeping soundly through the night,
At first light baking bread, scrambling eggs,

Brewing coffee hot and stout, laced with nutmeg,
While some pork crackles in the cast iron pans

Calling forth my offspring better than I can
In peals of giggles and visions of wintry delights

My husband and I drink up the sights
Black coffee kisses by the kitchen stove

He is the fullness of man: an endless trove
Of potent strength and character- his able hands

Built the space wherein I stand
Safe, cherished, with ample provisions:

His life is a million noble decisions
For which I lay a million kisses on his beard

I love living here
In a space none has torn asunder

Where the work itself becomes the wonder.

Fast, another day breaks new
More tasks await than I can do
Thus I engage, in the historical sense,
Searching for the significance,
Sifting the vital from the inconsequential
Assigning value to inherent potential
By the framework of my worldview

As every human is prompt to do.

Along some rocky bank
Of wave-bleached stone,
Threshed sand, tangled strands
Twisted weeds like strings of
Ransomed pearls
Where brave men stand alone
And weary women glean
With spines like wilted stems
Both holding hands
In the ebb and flow
Salt-licked gusts the
Howling metronome of the
Foamy churning of days-
Along this bank
I broadly face the sea
Echoing the sirens’ call
In soft falsetto tones
Harmless in humility
Helpless in my humanity

And out upon the vast expanse
The Great God hovers
So I send my call,
My love song,
Across the misty-tided
Ocean of evidence

He called for me first.

Pursed Doors,
With disuse,
Become wall hangings

Parsed Stories
From inside
Eventually stop rapping

And the bare knuckles
Of things that have been
Fold across the still lap
Of inert chronos

Wrapping over the lips
The muffled mouth
Of closed doors.

Framed art
Oft passed by
Neglects to capture
The incalcitrant eye
It fades into flat spaces
Of cobwebs and refusals

The day breaking impotent
When the mouth reopens
To finally loose
A foreign tongue.

Toes again
In the virgin soil
All the running,
The years, the misplaced faith
In our irrevocable brokenness
And I return to wade in the waves
Of the great unknown

A great secret
Hidden all these years
In the plainest sight:
Everyone’s broken.
Our existence
Is an inalienable right
And blessed privilege.

And the standard
Is to breathe
Toe the ebb and flow
And fail
And believe
And live on.

I’ve been the foreigner
In every land I’ve lived
Seeking strangers to give
Alms of recognition
My ambition
To form a family
Bonded by noble desires,
But I’m ever the outlier
And my search is finished;
I return- I am diminished
And as I should be.
Slipping quietly from view
While foreigners run to and fro
Mending all the world’s woes
I will sit in the brokenness
That birthed me,

Because it’s the right thing to do.

I used to believe the open road
Healed all wounds
And how it soothed
The standing heat of idle days
Rolled out every which way
But home.

These roads became a vascular web,
A spaghetti junction,
Serving a single function:
Protecting the pocket that
Would not heal
Untouched.

Using these temporary escapes
To instead restore, to expose,
To open the pocket, to close
The distance between two points
And no one untraveled
Knows the pain,

The hope,

The strength it takes
To roll up the pavement.

This is a fraught, complicated,
No-win situation.
I can find no solution
To the dilemma I’m in
Nothing that satisfies
My body often churned
I struggle to distill
All I’ve seen and learned
By act of will,
I force my next steps
Unsure how to deploy
There’s grief, there’s anguish,
But underneath, there’s joy.

You, who sings over my soul
In every changing season
Are God of all, God with us,
Brokenness is no treason
In the Hands of the Great Physician
I regret no sorrow I’ve seen
When You’ve flooded
Every hidden moment between
With joy inexpressible.

Sometimes
When the work is done
The evening tucks away the day
Lullabies to the sun
Darkness spreads like a duvet
Over a terrafirma mattress
I say goodnight to my fight
Between the faith and the actress
And the moon is a screen
For the slide projectors
Lying in the dark, in the quiet,
Where there are no protectors
And memories harp on in sharp form
And years burn like papercuts
Nothing negates the good,

But it hurts anyway.