Radiance is motherhood. Being a single mother has given me eyes that I would never have in any other timeline. I am grateful for the gift of life passed through my womb. Birthing is a form of knowing.

Radiance is the light reflected from our words pointing towards what matters most to us. There is a deep vulnerability involved in standing beneath this light or feeling charged with directing it. Every moment of delving into this and choosing to be seen, to be heard, brings us closer to creating a life for ourselves from our words.

i’ve watched leaves raining down from their mother tree,
yours was a droplet of salt on our wounds.

In a Nebraska grocery store, packets of corn yellow 
at me from the shelves and I’m back to the planting  
season, when the rains have appeased the land.

everything I am 
is wanting & needing/

every bone, every 
hollow, this image/

is a god fashion-made for you/

But you can see me there.
In the picture of the birds. 
In the church of avian beings. 
Small, colorful, and endangered.

he insists, we lost the civil war 
because i kept aiming at a god, only i could see
hiding behind a cloud.

how do i tell him that he’s my grandfather 
& i wasn’t born until 28 years after the war?

but if I knew one person in the world who could die
for others, it was you,
if anything on this table is bitter, it must be my coffee
stripped of milk,

I don’t remember most of it
It’s been a decade since I descended from the hill with paper wings sewn into my back.

i am disgusted by what death

looks like even before the body begins to rot—

that being able to touch life into

unbecoming is not the kind of god i want to be.