I recently learned the idiom “milk teeth”—wherein a newborn child comes into the world without any visible teeth, yet twenty-something baby teeth lurk under the gummy surface. Deciduous fixtures until they’re replaced by a later permanency. Milk teeth are a metaphor for innocence and immaturity. Unadulterated, the way we came into this world; deterministic, knowing we must shed them to survive. Baby teeth promise purity. They grow into the inchoate forms of our still formless beings—early signs of who we may become, temporary scaffolds until we become that person.

I’ve been taking long walks and drafting stupid little pretty bits of prose that don’t really mean anything. When I read, I’ll also jot down excerpts I find stunning—low-voltage shocks to the system that make me stop in my tracks and reach for my notebook to record in deference, in awe that someone had concocted this exact elixir of language—and then I’ll return to them as a font of borrowed inspiration. These are the working cogs of my interiority now: turning over words and pairing them with others until something clicks and I locate the low hum of a satisfactory rhythm. Poor-person’s poetry.

This (modified) collection is a writing exercise, just combinations of words that I think are pretty. In the way this triteness has been claimed by those before me. Call them literary darlings we should’ve killed long ago, but we’ve all written some version of: bruises, salt, the sun.

Vault tracks are a vision from the archives, a restoration of an appreciated artifact. Songs make it onto the cutting room floor and never further. The finished album is released, this perfect container of a sonically complete thought, and nobody ever asks what happened to those that never made it. They are locked away in the vault, deprived. Eventually, some of these tracks emerge from the shadows as a b-side or re-recording bonus or internet leak. They are not a nostalgic forgery; this is the real thing (or, could have been the real thing; as close as it can get). Sounds that are so redolent of, yet removed from a certain time. Evocative of an era, but elided from its definition.

now playing: “say yes to heaven”

inspired by seating charts (a silent act of care: saving a seat for someone)

i could make myself smaller, but i worry that creates too much space for you. take a seat. pull out this oaken windsor chair, slide into the plastic welded grooves of this bench, crawl onto the plush velvet of this chaise. if i shifted, left or right, i’d concentrate too hard on the permutations of airless contact. this is the anatomy of shoulder to elbow to fingertip. sitting in this still-life. i will puncture it with conversation, a bad joke. dig my fingers under my cushion, drum to a rhythmic pattern and stop at a hard clutch. i did not know what it would take to impale leather, but i suggest i am also capable of tiny destruction in your presence. i could claw out tufts of microfiber, baby wisps caught in the split keratin of my nails. my eyes will dart upwards at the ceiling, bloom that unspoken thing beneath that undressed feeling. hope flush, immobile. (show me love; turn around your closed fist and open your palm and let me take a look at it)

I write this nearly eleven months after my last recapitulation, the life I lived last year. I wouldn’t know how to describe 2022, another year of the namesake tiger, other than to recognize the shards of myself peeking through the churn of change. This was a year that kept shape-shifting until it lost track of its final form. I’m left with a remarkable impression of just how much a year can contain as it unfurls from unfamiliar stretches and reaches beyond its known limits. I’m reaching toward this new year, outstretched in a yawn.

a year in review

In 2022, I watched sixteen seasons of television and fifteen films; read approximately fifteen books and listened to at least 53k minutes of music. I’ve walked twice as much this year compared to last year—on sidewalks and roads in different cities, countries even. I boarded multiple forms of transportation, baked bread and blondies, and read into the dim hours of the night. I’ve come to appreciate cooking over a hot stove and cleaning at a cadence, home-care as an extension of self-care. I made art, with friends (candle wax; flour and sugar; tissue paper petals; acrylic paints; hot-glue and found objects).