A Poetic Intermission: What I Write When No One's Looking

In honor of National Poetry Month, I felt called (and slightly terrified) to share two unedited pieces from a poetic manuscript of 40 poems that I’ve been quietly putting together over the past few years. It's an exploration of the human experience through four emotional seasons: Wanting, Having, Losing, and Being.

I’ve written a lot of prose lately about emotional thresholds—desire, memory, heartbreak, liminality—but I haven’t shared much of my poetic work here. That feels a little vulnerable, and what I reserve for my other Substack. Poetry has always been my most intimate form—how I process, how I play. It’s been with me since I was a teenager, quietly shaping how I move through the world.

These poems live at the edges—where yearning meets fear, where memory becomes devotion, where we soften instead of grip. They’re about love, yes. But also about the in-betweens. The places we quake. The places we kneel. The quiet, holy ache of being human.

These poems are more personal than my usual posts—and while I always write with heart, this form allows a different kind of intimacy. Consider it a peek into the undercurrents of the human heart.

Let me know if you enjoy these and I'll consider adding a few more in this month, before going back to writing as usual. :)

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A Poem on Wanting

Desire isn’t always about what we want. Sometimes it’s about what we’re afraid to want—what feels too close, too intense, too true. This poem lives in that shiver-space: the place between two people who could become something… if only they let themselves melt. It’s a love story that never fully lands, suspended in its heat and hesitation.

Quivering

You quiver
On the precipice of possibility
Together
On a jagged rock
Humming above the engine of your old Jeep
That leaks oil
Like I leak love

Us
Against each other
So hot
That you sleep in the other room
You wonder if it’s a dealbreaker
And I think it’s a sign

We are heat, I say.
It’s why we spark like that.

You’re so tough
When you realize you’re softening
And I am scared
To melt myself against you

I promise I won’t smother you

You kiss me
Over and over
Slowly
But only before a door closes
Like two sticks rubbed together
Until there is warmth
Until there is love
Until there is the impossible
That we could shelter under

And then you go
Somewhere, anywhere
But here
Because
It hurts to thaw

Like two kids
Pulling each other’s hair
Scuffed white sneakers
Tee shirts sticky, sour and sweet
Chasing after little boy test missions
Lobbing paper planes into the air
That circle to the ground

Noses dusted
Wide-eyed
Shrieking
Running
To find them
Unbroken

So stuck on seeking
It hurts to be found

I am in front of you
Quiet
Under my skin
My back
Cold and empty
Waiting for your hand
To pull me into you
To brush us off
To fall into flight
Again.

I like how small my fingers feel between yours,
How it hurts my
Knuckles—stretched,
Splayed.

I wonder if it’s a dealbreaker
And I hope that you think it’s a sign—
That ice could become
The sweat between us,
The wide-eyed breeze that lifts us into each other,
The air we gasp and dance.

To feel that anything
Could be possible
Together
Quivering.

It hurts to hold on
To what wants to melt.

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A Poem on Being

This one lives in the after. After the wanting, after the losing. After the names are forgotten but the imprint remains. It’s about the kind of love that roots beyond the physical—the soul-marking kind that buries itself in the ground between people, even after they’ve gone their separate ways. It’s a hymn to memory, grief, tenderness, and the way love plants itself in us forever.

Dirt Devotion

I can still feel
My bones against your breath—
A marionette
Carved
To dance love.

Be with the place where you feel like no one will love you,
He told me,
And let him touch that.

You bowed me
Jagged elbows
Jackknifed knees,
Heaped
To the cold
And I wept,
Soft.

You pulled me
Below stone squares
Strung by monks
Into the places that gnash
And I broke—
Open.

I can still feel
The way our bodies faced—
Gestureless
And thick—
Until the tips of your fingers met my cheek
And your eyes poured into me
So that I overflowed:
A well
Rolling over us
Rivers and pools
In your palm.

You are the one who melts his heart,
He told me.

I can’t remember your face anymore,
But I can feel you
In the red leaves that waltz
To the air playing
Ancient love songs.

Fluttered skirts as they
Catch their breath,
Cackle
And tumble,
Crumbling
Shells of themselves,
To the ground.

Between us
Which now stretches past
Strip malls and state lines—
But we are planted,
Feet full
In dirt devotion.