Open wide your mouth and I will fill it

We all start connected tethered to a source through which every desire is met. There is no rumbling stomach, no need to lift a heavy fork to one’s mouth. There are no lonely nights, no feet left cold. The world is everything it should be and we don’t fear the dark. We are content to […]

Habitation

The way the monarch butterfly moves face forward through the world is a small miracle— how she skips on air generous with herself giving first to the leaf then the flower. She transforms me from caterpillar into one who flies arms open, eyes wide a child marveling at creation— the smoothness of an acorn the […]

600 Thread Count Sheets

When I finally return to you having scaled the mountain of the day you enfold my timbering frame like six-hundred pairs of soft hands. With your tiny twill thumbs you press into tight muscles tenderly teasing out their secrets— those silent screams carried the day long now gently carried out to sea by a current […]

No Stoplight Living

As a young Christian in my early teens, I sat in the backseat of my family’s car attempting to discern God’s will through stoplights. Should I go to the school dance this weekend? If the next three stoplights were green: yes. One red light in the mix: wait and see. Two or more red lights: […]

Above the Clouds

It used to be quiet here, a place where a god could think— plenty of open space and clear airwaves. But now the traffic is tyrannical. A herd of jets stampeding across the white plains without pause, without progression, endless loops to the same destination. Much like their passengers crisscrossing the heavens advancing, retreating, searching […]

Dreaming

I awoke in a body. Different than the one I inhabited moments before. One in which I held a small dog, stroked her head, but didn’t hatch an evil plot. No, I sat outside a café in Paris, sun warming my face, a book open on the table. I stopped reading to consider the dog […]

Iconoclast

I have a name I don’t know. It’s carved on a stone I’ve never seen. A stone that’s out there somewhere perhaps at the edge of a lake perhaps within reach of a child who will stuff it in his pocket, rest it on his nightstand. Or it will be such a smooth stone that […]

Upstream

I am not this stream bending gently around a strand of trees, a path of least resistance. I could be if I believed the end is a soft drop into the waiting hands of a placid lake, a calm sea. But who knows if this way becomes a torrent, a racing to the edge of […]

Hard Face, Soft Heart

During my third-grade year, Cabbage Patch Kid fever swept the country. Little girls (mainly) couldn’t get enough of these dolls with their hard faces and soft bodies. Each doll came with an official birth certificate with a name as well as date and time of birth—details you could only discover when you purchased the doll […]

Idaho Knows

My mom snapped the photo of me in front of the residence hall at the Christian college where I soon would begin my freshman year. Arms awkwardly behind my back, I stand frozen, eyes wide like a deer caught in the headlights of the oncoming year rushing toward me. Time, I would later discover, swerves […]