In August I have a few things being released (I’ll keep you all posted!) but I figured I’d post the beginnings of another poetry collection I’ve been swimming within.



My sister and I believed our grandfather

sat at the edge of our beds during the night


We told our grandmother this

although we could tell she thought we were lying


And we were.

It’s hard to remember which sister began to believe the lie first

which one of us saw him,

months after our proclamation

at the foot of our twin bed, face lavender white, silent, hand against our knee,

watching us the way a father would watch his children

Every night, excited for the lights to go out

and realize we were not alone


The night you died I crawled into bed

hoping Frankie and I were still so young

we could tell a lie into existence

and together we could claim we awoke to face our father

sitting at the edge of the blankets

body milky water, rain on skin,

and suddenly,

there you’d be


My grandfather died before I was born.

We never met him

but we could tell we missed something important

his face everywhere in the house he built in pieces

gaps left unfilled, grout-less after death

our mother, aunts, grandmother told us stories and yet

we grew paranoid we’d never hear

the full history,

they all knew something we didn’t


So it was easy to claim that

after dark, we two

called our grandfather back towards creation

through our desire to love

what the women we loved



As if,

we could never fully belong in their world

without him

For the Sake of It

When I was little and my dad found his way home: mange-ridden dog fur clumps dangling from scabby skin—I stuck notes in his wallet. Often there was nothing else—no I.D. not even a penny. Our secret: a small piece of paper left to be discovered on the day he, inevitably, died. Frozen on an alley staircase, bones hissing as they lifted him onto the stretcher: if found, please call 303.733.1758. people loved me here

It grew so terrible. My fear of the phone.

Crawl into a cave. make claws of your hands. What is it you would write without light? All around us we are left with the leavings of those destroyed. They say Neanderthals did not survive because of the brutality of their loneliness. And yet, all alone, swimming in the embryonic caverns of an earth more obviously seizing. compelled to carve abstractions into Dolomite.

24,000 years ago, a time so distant it enfolds me to infinity, a race driven to sea and left to die alone. not even the light of moon over ocean and yet here is the stone and here is the hand in the dark. There is no one left to see me and yet, you see, here I live. Who is it that can say they did not leave us art? 

I’ve taken to writing notes in my books. Dear Aliens. If you find this in the heat rash and devastation we’ve left in our wake. believe me. despite all evidence. we were good. please forgive us.  people loved us here.

To Say I Love You

we are sisters that believe loving is to have stood too close to a black hole. We’ve happened upon a dying star. To say I love you it is to say, I can’t see myself anymore.

for us: to say I love you is to look at a place even light cannot survive. gravity so strong a slippery veil of photons and electromagnetic waves—moving faster than our eyes can see—cannot escape

but our human minds are limited. what do we know of black holes—something defined by its negative space? Some believe it is from this vacancy our universe was born

We have only theories. when you enter a black hole, can you ever leave? is it destruction or reconstruction or are they the same? matter reconfigured, ordered differently but inevitably, impossible to destroy?


I came across a little boy standing in a courtyard while the sun transformed his hair crow black. light rebounded. I walked towards this child embossed in plumes of murky light, still amongst green. My arm lifted and bore a hammer down upon his skull. without pause for his little frame, felled to earth so quick, I nodded to his mother and left

if only it were so easy to pull these waking thoughts from their hole as to drift from the damage of a dream. as if they were flesh I could peel from the nape of my neck, against my chin, lift this skull

if only the mind were skin


The Harvest

When I was in high school and college I worked at a sports bar. Every night I was given a shfit meal and, without question, I always ordered a hamburger with cheddar cheese and avocado. These were huge hamburgers—half a pound and medium-rare so that they were perfectly juicy, with the bun slightly soggy and moist. I truly looked forward to this burger every day (in retrospect I’m surprised I didn’t have clogged arteries by the time I was 19). So, it doesn’t need to be said that being a vegetarian wasn’t really in the cards for me. I dabbled with being a vegan when I lived in Austin—mostly because I was surviving on around 200 dollars a month and could only afford rice and beans and being a vegan made cheap eating sound sexy and purposeful—good for the earth as opposed to just plain ole’ broke.

The only time in my life I have seriously considered being a vegetarian out of animal ethics, not for environmental or heath reasons, was during The Harvest. I don’t think Andrew the vet, or Mark would appreciate my less-than-affectionate term for the AI procedure but it’s the only appropriate phrase. It conveys the true feeling of the event—something slightly sci-fi with an undercurrent of malice—of things unseen.

Poronui has twelve special hinds. They’re master breeders. The stags they produce have elegant antlers with a high SCI count (how they rate antlers, by length and size of the tines—how you determine the value of a head). A lot of true Kiwi hunters despise the type of trophy hunting that is done at Poronui and I must admit, I do too. We breed our prize animals. The Red Stags spend four years being shuffled around the paddocks, impregnating hinds and eating grass. Each year their antlers are sawed off and their progress monitored. Then, when they’re older and past their breeding prime—they’re released into the game estate, where a hunter, generally an American, will stalk it, shoot it, ship it to Texas and hang it up on his wall. These animals are familiar with humans—they’ve been in Marks trailer—they’ve had shots when they were fawns and been herded by dogs. They’re not truly wild. But a hunter can be sure when he goes to the game estate that there will not only be a stag—but where to find it and that it will have many guaranteed SCI points. 

While a true Kiwi hunter has to go out into the bush in search of the delicate signs of a wild creature: hoof prints—bare bits of trees where they’ve rubbed velvet off their antlers---while a true hunter always heads downwind, is always silent, always curious and honed to the minutiae of a Beech forest—a hunter at Poronui (in the game estate at least) has only to rely on Mark to find their stag. Instead of hiking for days in the bush, they hardly have to hike a hill, a feat some of them can barely manage. Mark not only knows where the stags generally like to spend time but has also, secretly, named a lot of them.

But this whole procedure is incredibly good for business—a prize stag can range from 12,000 to 40,000 USD. What the fuck. I have seen people come in and shoot an animal that costs more than I’ve ever made in a year.

In order to produce prime stags, or even good meat—Mark needs to harvest the eggs of the twelve special hinds and then use them to artificially impregnate recipient hinds that will bear the fawns.

The day of the donor surgery dawned sodden and grey. I volunteered to help with the process but the prospect of spending the entire day in the deer shed under the torrential downpour being flayed by the frigid, valley winds, was less than appealing.

Inside the shed, water sprayed through the gaps in the roof and the floor was thick with mud—mud that was a mixture of urine and feces. Everywhere you could smell that intense musky scent of the red deer—now so familiar to me. Part of the deer shed was portioned off with these bright, surgical lights—like the kind you would find in a dentist office, the ones that blind you while you stare up into the masked face of a man with sharp tools. Below the lights were stretchers—very large stretchers with a hind laying at an angle with their heads near the ground, their legs strapped up and their uterus right in the middle. Andrew wore those jumpsuits mechanics wear—with a surgical gown over it—no mask but a cap covered his hair.

My job was to wash and shave the bellies of the deer and then spray them down with a sanitizer before they were rolled into “surgery”. Then, I helped roll the huge creatures out to the end of the deer shed where they slowly rose, drugged and foggy, running lopsided back into the paddock.

The sight of the deer lying, belly up and exposed on the stretchers was incredibly unnerving. Not only because they’re not docile creatures—they’re massive and don’t have the domesticated, droll look of cows—but because, while I was assured they were properly drugged and couldn’t feel a thing, their eyes were open and rolled around in their sockets and their tongues fell from their mouths.

While I washed the deer, Malcolm, the vet assistant, shoved a tube down their throats so that they had oxygen during the surgery. Quite often they resisted the tube being forced down and squirmed and attempted to kick while I had the razor poised over their bellies slicing off the thick hair. I was terrified to hurt them or even nick their flesh accidentally so at first I didn’t get close enough and Andrew had to tell me to do more. I was nervous and cold, covered in shitty mud and the only woman surrounded by men who a) were a lot stronger than me and b) definitely knew what they were doing. These were not city girls who are farm girl wannabes.

Only after I saw the surgery did I realize how incredibly stupid it was for me to not want to hurt the creatures with the razor. I watched as, literally minutes later, the hinds had the flesh above their uterus sliced open, the organ pulled out with giant tweezers—bloody and pink like a tube or a worm brought into the open--a needle inserted depositing the fertilized egg, and then they were sewed together again. The whole time the deer’s eyes remained open, their tongues dragged on the floor and occasionally they twitched. Sometimes they kicked and Malcolm had to administer more anesthesia? (Whatever it is that makes them sleep).

Once I looked up from the assembly line process, not even conscious of how many deer I’d worked on, and actually saw the shed. The bright, flickering lights in the otherwise wet, gloomy darkness, all of us covered in mud and shit up to our elbows: Jason, the gruff farmer in charge of the cows, Darrin, who helps build fences around Poronui, Malcolm, the vet apprentice, and Chris, the groundsman at Poronui. Then, in the distance, Andrew and John, standing over huge animals, literally tugging the innards of a deer out into the world, impregnating them, and then sewing their flesh back.

I felt like I’d entered a low-budget 80’s horror film. Animals half-waking, half-sleeping—men performing what-was-not-but-appeared-to-be a botched surgery—all with the single goal of creating “better” animals for eating, shooting and hanging up dead in your dens.

While I was fascinated, curious and excited to be apart of something different—something so physical that we all were legitimately exhausted at the end of the day, it made me feel sick. I thought—these creatures didn’t ask for this, these deer have no say, no choice. It made me rethink farming all together. These weren't cruel farmers--they're not heartless or uncaring, in fact, Mark truly cares about his animals. This wasn't a scene that PEETA would put in their highlight reel. I’m not even going to say I don’t want to eat meat any more. But I am honestly going to say that I really struggled with making sense of that day and I struggle with it still.

Our lifestyles are a series of events and moments that we use to cultivate a mythos from which we want to build our particular culture and life. Without a doubt, The Harvest, changed me—regardless of way the experience chooses to manifest.