Little girl
You’ve no friend
But your teeth

You could never see
The trees for the forest
The blood for the poppies

Fist closed tight around your
Milk-wet
Love

Dripping like cracked egg
From the wrecked nest
You’d hoped to die in

To be alive is to be
Wasted
A wretched thing

Always
Going the wrong way
Into the dark

Looking over your shoulder
As you walk
Into the den

I don’t care very much for watching horror movies, in the same simple way that I wouldn’t eat a plastic piece of bread when I have a fresh loaf of buttery sourdough right in front of me.

I feel that life supplies us with enough, and if not our own lives, then history. I have always despised Halloween decorations, and not only on the obvious aesthetic level. Is this not enough for you, I can’t help but think, gesturing in my mind toward everything, the horrors of the past, far and recent, and of what is happening as we speak, and what is surely to come.

The public desire for even more horror, this pseudo-horror (I always think in this specific instance of pseutiko, the Greek word for fake), can’t register to me as anything but wholesale gluttony.

Of course there is a certain kind of magnetic beauty in the trainwreck. We all stare at the car crash, wonder where the ambulance is heading, try to catch a glimpse of the body on the gurney; we want more than anything to know all of the gory details. Of course we are drawn to bad things. We want to touch the fire that would blacken our delicate skin and walk the cliff’s soft edge. We want to do what we aren’t allowed to do: sometimes it seems as though society makes certain acts and objects taboo just to drive us toward them. Whether it’s curiosity or the search for an adrenaline rush, we secretly want to do that terrible thing, or, at the very least, have a front-row seat to someone else doing it for us.

This week, because I’ve been feeling low on energy and a bit unwell, I binge-watched Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette and American Crime Story: Impeachment, both part of the American Story franchise created by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk. (Of course the binge-watching only made me feel more tired and unwell.) The former focuses on Carolyn Bessette - specifically, how her relationship with JFK Jr. caused her to withdraw from the world, forcing her to give up her cool, self-assured independence and fierce ambition, the precise attributes that made him fall for her in the first place - while the latter focuses on the fallout of 49-year-old Bill Clinton’s sexual encounters with 22-year-old Monica Lewinsky.

Part of the draw to these two shows in particular is that I’ve always been very into the 90s (never ask a man his salary, a woman her age, or Francesca Marie Kritikos how many Nirvana biographies she read in high school - I even won a free trip to the Sub Pop HQ in Seattle when I was 17, and got a picture with me, my mom and Mark Arm; long story). But the other part is my undeniable interest in star-crossed lovers, doomed romances, or, to put it less romantically and possibly more accurately, inappropriate relationships. There’s nothing sexier than a forbidden liaison; isn’t this, essentially, the premise of the whole entire world?

So imagine my surprise when neither of these shows felt at all, well, sexy.

On July 16, 1999, the Piper Saratoga aircraft that JFK Jr. was piloting crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, instantly killing him, his wife Carolyn, and her sister Lauren. The National Transportation Safety Board determined the crash was likely caused by Kennedy’s “failure to maintain control of the airplane during a descent over water at night, which was a result of spatial disorientation.” He was seated alone in the cockpit, while Carolyn and Lauren were behind him, facing the tail-end of the plane.

Of course, on Love Story, history has been rewritten so that Carolyn is sitting in the front with him, holding his hand and telling him to breathe. This nurturing, placating version of Carolyn is in all likelihood completely fabricated, given the intense marital issues that they were, by all accounts, facing at the time. Perhaps the producers of the show thought it might be more soothing to the audience if we were instead given a more optimistic, comforting end to their story. They had worked it all out! Everything was going to be OK!

In fact, the show makes no mention of the fact that JFK Jr. was cheating on Carolyn, and that they were more likely than not heading for divorce. Did the show’s creators think we couldn’t handle that kind of outcome? Is the truth too brutal for TV? That we in fact, more often than not, die alone, without making reparations for the hurt we caused one another?

I can’t help but find it sort of funny that every week there’s a new horrifying movie or TV show with countless scenes of gratuitous gore (I mean, look at American Horror Story, also created by Murphy and Falchuk, which I was always unable to watch more than a couple episodes of per season), yet when it comes to love, we get only the most sanitized of endings, a story that has been purified beyond recognition.

Similarly, in Impeachment, we hardly get any scenes of Clinton and Lewinsky’s actual relationship, not even the buildup to it: The show is almost entirely focused on the fallout. The result is that the audience is left without really getting it: Why would the leader of the free world risk it all for this? Why would a promising young woman put her entire future in jeopardy for him? The result is a husk of a story, drained of all the meat, which, yes, is bloody, syrupy, disgusting, even, but without which life and meaning cannot be borne. For a corpse to rot it must have once been living. With Impeachment, I feel neither pulse nor putrefication. Both of these components are necessary to understand why the story we’re being told is one worth listening to, why the lesson of this myth is one worth heeding.

I suppose what I want is to watch an erotic scene that convinces me. Convinces me that there are forces beyond our control, and that they come from within us. Convinces me that of course this had to happen, it couldn’t have been otherwise. Convinces me that this would be the worst possible thing I could ever do, and that I have no other choice but to do it.

Written during ’s generative writing workshop with for Morning Writing Club

Sunday, May 24, 2026

Yesterday at 5:30 a.m. I went to the emergency room because I couldn’t stop throwing up. It started Friday at 6 a.m. Today is Sunday. I couldn’t keep anything down, even teaspoons of water or Pedialyte. I thought it would go away after a few hours but it didn’t. By nightfall I was crying hysterically. I was so thirsty. At 9:15 p.m. I tried dissolving a Zofran under my tongue, and threw it up at 9:30 p.m., like clockwork. Overnight I became delirious, was talking to myself, to God. I was drenched in sweat and shaking and smelled horrible. I sat on the bathroom floor with a metal bowl between my legs. My chest ached from throwing up foamy yellowish bile. I tried to pee but I couldn’t. Finally I told my mother that I had to go to the ER so she drove me. At the ER they gave me Zofran but I threw it up again. I managed to piss a dark-orange fluid into a cup and while it sat on the counter to be collected, all I could think about was how much I wanted to drink it. I was so thirsty. My mouth was totally dry, my tongue pale. They drug-tested me but I was negative for everything. They gave me a shot of Tigan in my ass and finally the nausea stopped. They hooked me up to an IV and gave me one bag of fluid, then another. It made me feel cool and calm, how I imagine heaven must be. Still I was so thirsty, but they told me I had to wait until the two bags were done. I missed water so much I told my mother I would kill someone to have some. I prayed to God and thanked him for saving my life. When the second bag of fluid was done, my blood started to flow backwards up the IV tube. I called for the nurse and she said it was fine. I called again and asked if I could have a cup of water now that I had finished the second bag, as promised. I was so thirsty. The nurse brought me a plastic cup of cool water and two little plastic packets of Kellogg’s saltines made with wheat and corn syrup. I ate and drank as slowly as I possibly could, which was not very slow at all. A Russian doctor came into my room. She said that she suspected what happened to me could have been caused by my accidental ingesting of a dangerous amount of or combination of supplements, given the list of supplements I’d told them that I regularly took. She gave me a kind-hearted lecture on the dangers of taking supplements in America, due to the unregulated, Wild-West market. She said my ashwagandha could have been grown in a field with toxic runoff and industrial waste and I would never know. She said I was healthy and young and asked me why I took so many supplements. I said I didn’t like eating meat very often. She told me she was also a vegetarian for 10 years, but it was difficult to do it right in this country. She advised me to eat red meat every so often, or, less often, organ meat, which she admitted was an acquired taste. Upon discharge I was prescribed a course of 300-mg capsules of Tigan, which I was to pick up from my local Walgreens. My mother called Walgreens and a robot informed us that the prescription would be ready at 11 a.m. Shortly after 11 a.m., my mother and I pulled up to the Walgreens drive through to pick up the prescription. The pharmacist told us the prescription wasn’t ready. We told her it was after 11 a.m. She told us to wait. When she returned she said that this Walgreens did not have the prescription in stock; in fact, no other Walgreens in the area has it in stock, and they are not allowed to order it. In the end, there was nothing to be done.

Updates

• A poem from my book The season of lilacs is monstrous was featured earlier this month on Poetry Daily

• My musings on The Night Porter have moved off Substack and onto the Michigan City Review of Film

• The next book forthcoming from my press, SARKA, Every time I meet you feels like doom by , is now available for preorder and is being released this October

My sense is that poem meditates on paired-ness, the dyad, two-ness. When the speaker is talking about God, he’s also talking about the two-ness of the mind and God. And there’s the lover and the beloved. It’s that two-ness I’m curious about, where the mind meets its source, which is God. That between-ness—between mind and God, between lover and beloved, somehow gets enacted in the material world in that love.

Li-young Lee, interviewed by Image (2015)

The soul too
is a debasement
of a text, but, thus, it
acquires salience, although a
human salience, but
inimitable, and, hence, memorable.
God is the text.
The soul is a corruption
and a mnemonic.

Li-young Lee, The Cleaving (1990)

I wake with blood smeared across my pillow, a thin crimson brushstroke. It feels as if I am the artist of my own death, which leaks from me slowly and always, the way my bathtub empties while I’m in it from the tiny gap between the metal stopper and the drain. I’ve picked at the small wounds on my face again, while I slept; as conscientious as I can try to be in my waking life, in sleep I have no masters, so it seems, least of all myself.

The wounds will dry into scabs and, one day, heal, leaving a small pink mark on my pink cheeks. But what does it mean, to heal? The verb feels too smooth and easy, like a lie. The past doesn’t fall away, Li-young Lee writes, the past joins the greater telling, and is.

I have just finished reading Lee’s collection The City In Which I Love You, which I picked up at a used bookstore recently on the recommendation of a friend. I read it exclusively in bed and in the bath, having been sick. It reads more as a book of music than a book of poems, with infectious sounds in lines such as The sun is / God, your body is milk . . . / useless, useless . . . / your cries are song, my body’s not me . . .

It’s difficult to say, but I think the poem from the collection that will haunt me most is The Cleaving, which could possibly be described as the speaker’s potrait of a butcher in a grocery store as he chops the flesh of pigs, ducks, fish, and ends with the line this man with my own face.

I think of how each time we write a poem, we are writing about ourselves, even when we are writing about someone else. Is this because we can’t help but view the world through the filter of the self, or because, like a gemstone ground beneath the heel of God’s boot, there is no self, only sharp little fragments that refract light and darkness off one another because they are, really, only one thing?

Was it me in the Other / I prayed to when I prayed? Lee asks in The Cleaving. Do we pray to a higher power because we come from it or because it comes from us? Does it matter? Or is it simply human nature to be in conversation, to be unable to exist as something singular? Do we have to imagine that there is something there, always, besides the self? Is the abscence of a greater Design so deeply terrifying that it cannot be considered?

In a poem I wrote years ago, from my book SWEET BLOODY SALTY CLEAN, I gestured, or attempted to, toward this concept:

Every purchase serves
the same economy
e.g. I see you
even when I’m not
seeing you

There was a time in my life when I couldn’t view the world except through the system of currency, but I think that system I am attempting to expose still holds when translated to the system of the spiritual. Each of our actions like curls of smoke from the same candle. We melt down together, eventually into nothing. God as the mound of wax we drip into, or the candleholder, or the man who lit the match that birthed us, or the man who licks his fingers to clamp down upon the wick. He could be so many things, none of which are certain. A shadow in our periphery, there in every sense except the tactile.

At least we aren’t alone, not even in Death.

Did this animal, after all, at the moment
its neck broke,
image the way his executioner
shrinks from his own death?
Is this how
I, too, recoil from my day?

The Cleaving

While it seems to be commonly understood that the body is an extension of the soul, or something that is a reflection of it, I tend to believe that the soul is an extension of the body. All of our human parts come together to allow the soul to breathe: this seems to make sense to me on an intuitive level.

I eat when I’m starving and then I eat quickly and whatever I can find. Peanut butter spread onto almond cookies my grandmother made; cold leftover soup; rusks soaked under tapwater. It is the body that forces me into action, and when its needs are met I can finally feel my soul, something greater than myself, not-quite myself.

Yet this raises the issue of the faults of the body, its predestined failure. Its compulsions toward pleasure which are also invariably its compulsions toward death. The body’s love of poisons. The body’s need for pharmaka. The body’s desire to open itself up, make itself vulnerable to violence, disease, disfigurements. We are nothing if not contagious, and health is the before period that precedes a long after.

From The Cleaving: O, nothing is so / steadfast it won’t go / the way the body goes.

If our bodies are so susceptible to innumerable corruptions of various natures, what does that mean for the soul?

And what if our souls were dirtied by time, by ourselves, by each other? By misadventure, illness, violence, vice, hunger, even our own evil? Would it be so bad if they were unable to really heal themselves, the way nothing really can?

If we are harmed in a way that leaves us separated, forever, at a small or great distance, from purity or from health, what happens to us then, I mean, to the soul?

I do not believe cleanliness is next to godliness, for God is neither ignorant nor vain.

I thought the soul an airy thing.
I did not know the soul
is cleaved so that the soul might be restored.
Live wood hewn,
its sap springs from a sticky wound.
No seed, no egg has he
whose business calls for an axe.
In the trade of my soul’s shaping,
he traffics in hews and hacks.

The Cleaving

So what purpose, then, could our corruption possibly serve? Other than to stain our white cloth red. Other than to remind us of all that we will never be again.

Like a tree needs to be tapped to gush its sweet inside part. Like summer must die for autumn to start. Like an egg must be cracked to feed us, like an animal must be skinned to shield us. Like the trees must be burnt so that the forest might survive, like stone is grated down to sharpen our knives. Like the lake is emptied so that we might drink, like the light is killed so that we might sleep.

And so forth.

Every morning my grandmother makes me oatmeal, puts it in a little bowl, and calls my name to come down and get it from her. The oatmeal is thick and creamy, with soft chunks of apple, and surely made with full-fat milk and spoonfuls of sugar the fine texture and color of driven snow.

I normally don’t eat breakfast, certainly not as early as she prepares it for me. She’ll be 92 on either April 30th or May 1st, she has different dates on different documents. I carry the thin porcelain bowl, which she nestles in a tea towel to make sure I don’t burn my hands, upstairs, place it down to let it cool.

A few hours later, she calls my name again. She can’t hear very well, so there’s no conversation to be had between floors; she’s summoning me. I go. She’s prepared κρέμα, which she’s made for me ever since I can remember. It’s made with farina, sugar, milk, topped with cinnamon. I thank her and take it upstairs.

The bowls cool while I work. Sometimes I take a spoonful or two. Sometimes I eat the entire bowl, one or the other. Sometimes, I hate to say, I empty their contents into the garbage.

Recently I have started thinking of my behavior in a more simple langauge. This is because I had been, have been, feeling very lost. My lostness, the nature of being lost, seemed to replace everything that I was before. I never felt that there had been much of me to lose, tenuous and slippery as I’d always been, but locked in my dark room I began groping around me, unable to see anything for what it was. If my hands were not dirty, they were bloody. If they were not bloody, they were dirty.

I’ve been staying at home, in my family home, for a little bit of time. There are many reasons for this, but it is rarely far from my mind that there may not be many years left for me to spend time with my grandmother, as well as our beloved little dog, who will be ten years old this May, though he looks and acts like a puppy. My bedroom is filled with childish things, floral bedsheets and pink stuffed animals and Margaret Keane paintings, with their big, cloying eyes. It’s comforting to me, in the way that I had a lover who smelled sometimes in the mornings like sour milk, or like a bowl filled past the brim with soft, rising dough, like something a baby might’ve spat up, and I loved to smell him.

I wouldn’t say that I’m a lazy girl, although I would say that I subscribe, if nothing else, to Occam’s razor. After an unhappy and rather sterile season of darkness, I realized that, if I was to see again, I would have to make it easy for myself. And I would have to make it hard for myself to sabotage my own vision, wont as I was to blot it out with the spilled ink of my fear, writing out word after word after word, each one on top of the other until nothing at all could be ascertained.

The dog likes to sleep burrowed under the covers, until his head is near my waist. He curls himself into a ball and pushes me until I’m up against the edge of the bed. Sometimes I stay up at night, worried that he’ll suffocate, but when I force his head up toward mine, out from under the blanket and into the cool air, he becomes angry with me, and returns to his previous position, completely ensconced.

I am jealous of the animal that knows what it wants, and fights for it.

I have no faith in my intuition or my instincts, but I do have faith in my attunement to beauty. I told someone on the phone that I was sick of myself, that I was tired of acting against my own values. As soon as I said the words, I thought to myself, but you have none.

Is it foolish that a crumb on the kitchen countertop or a stray piece of paper on the floor offends me more than my own folly? That I would, and do, spend my days straightening out my closet and folding and refolding my clothes, rather than take real action to make my life better than it is, or, if not to improve my life, then to, at the very least, propel it forward?

Yet as I become older the urge does seem to be sinking inward. My skin seems drier and thinner than it used to be, my undereyes more purplish. Sometimes I wonder if my ugly actions have made me ugly, not as a punishment from some higher power for my sins, but rather the natural result of my lack of intention or understanding of myself, as if those things could be and were the causative bacteria of my disease, which gnaws at me consumptively.

If nothing else, a disease is information, and I have to be grateful for that: I take data where I can get it, so rarely is it available to me, or so it seems.

I throw a dinner party for my friends, and take what feels like an obscene amount of pleasure in arranging and rearranging pieces of dried fruit, cheese, jam on a cutting board. Ladling soup into bowls and slicing up cucumbers, red onion, tomatoes, and peppers for a salad. Placing the wine glasses carefully on one table, then another, in one formation, before settling on a different one. Choosing which music to play, which no one hears anyway, because we are all talking, and the speaker isn’t loud enough.

The entire night I watch others, hardly thinking of myself. Before everyone arrived I glanced at myself in the mirror and was unhappy. I can’t help but pick at the scabs on my arms and face, and I wonder if others can tell that I’ve covered up blood with cheap drugstore concealer. I dyed my hair a few days ago, and my grandmother tells me every time she sees me that it’s too dark. I am wearing my mother’s camel-colored cashmere sweater and wonder if it doesn’t match with my skin tone, which is paler than hers. My high-waisted jeans emphasize my belly, and my lipstick rubs off too quickly.

Yet I don’t think of any of that, not once, when I have made a beautiful table for people who I think are beautiful, and make me beautiful by the grace of the contagious nature of things.

Is beauty a virtue? I’m hardly one to speak on virtue, but what I can say is that now, when I’m unsure of what to think, feel, or do, I weigh each option with the question, Is this beautiful?

You’ve lost the lofty, easy currency of being in your twenties, and haven’t yet unlocked the confidence, elegance and certainty of your thirties.

They were both myths to begin with, but they were something, at least, to believe in.

You understand now that the currency of youth was lent to you, on credit, and you’ve overspent it, you’re carrying debts that aren’t so easy to get rid of.

You owe people things, and you owe things to yourself most of all.

You’re definitely not a girl anymore, but you still feel like one, although other people would think this is pathetic if they knew.

You don’t feel, by any means, that you can refer to yourself as a “woman.”

You feel on the precipice of either marriage and children, or dedicating your life to your art. Either way, it’s a long, dark fall, with no sure outcomes, no guarantee of survival.

You return to the same places in your art, you begin to realize. The same lightless corridor. You speak, and you hear the same man’s dark voice. You haven't been separated by it from time, by any of it. This realization makes it feel all the more cruel. That time is in fact passing, and quickly.

You have less energy than you used to. Not in a physical sense, necessarily; less energy to degrade yourself in the ways you used to earlier in your twenties, in the ways that, as much as you hate to admit it to yourself, helped you get ahead of others.

You used to let people define you in ways that were advantageous to you, although it could be difficult at times to let them do this to you, because when you were in bed at night alone in your small apartment you knew who you were, and you respected her.

Her cunning. The laurels of the sickness she wore so well. The strength of her will. Her stoicism, which men envied, and hated her for, because they wanted it for themselves, and couldn't get it.

You used to laugh to yourself, sometimes, when people cried; now you cry, too.

You wonder if the best art you will ever create is behind you, barely recognized by anyone, least of all you.

To put it simply: You miss doing bad things to yourself.

You miss when doing bad things to yourself had positive results. When contradiction served you. You miss when you had an appetite for doing bad things to yourself.

You miss when other people thought it was OK for you to do bad things to yourself, or even if they didn’t think it was OK, there was a place deep inside of you where you knew that it was, but now that place is gone, or you’re wondering if it was ever really there, or if the joke was always on you, and everyone else knew it but didn’t want to tell you.

You wonder if you will be able to accept it, the joke being on you. You feel like the punchline of a bit you haven’t even begun to understand.

It seems as though everyone is one step ahead of you. You didn’t think you were cool then, and you don’t feel cool now.

You don’t really think anyone is cool now, but it was fun, when you used to think other people were cool, because you admired them and so had something to emulate, to work toward.

You have people in your life who you love, but you are more afraid than ever that you are capable of doing something that will make them stop loving you, or that you already have, like a poisonous seed that you planted in your sleep, its little head readying to sprout from the dirt of your body, creating in a physical sense the hole that was always already there.

You have people in your life who you love, but you won't pick up the phone when they call you.

You don't really like the taste of food anymore. Your face loses some of its fullness, your eyes wrinkle when you smile. If this isn’t death, you don’t know what is.

You didn’t think it would be so slow, a lazy sloughing of blood.

There is a heavy steel chain around your neck. Someone placed it there for you, and at the time you thought that this was an act of love. That it meant they truly understood you, and that you were born just for this chain to be placed around you, as if it were a natural extension of you, or you were an extension of it.

Once you thought it was beautiful, but now it’s just a chain.

If I could sum up my affliction in this life in five words, they would be “afraid of getting in trouble.” Or maybe “in constant fear of punishment.” Or, “I can’t do anything right.” Either way, they are inextricably linked to my upbringing in the Greek Orthodox Church.

I will start by saying that I don’t believe the church is all bad, or that really anything is. I also am not saying that I no longer believe in God. The Orthodox Church was my community growing up, the “village” that raised me, and to this day I know that there are people in the church who absolutely would not hesitate to help me if I needed it. The church is filled with good people, who just want what they perceive to be the best for their families and friends. And it doesn’t hurt that the churches, decorated lavishly with stained glass, gold foil and Byzantine iconography, are absolutely beautiful.

But there is a lot that unsettles me about the surge in converts to the Orthodox Christian faith. In the wake of the “tradcath” epidemic, there has now been a dramatic increase in the number of Orthodox Christians in America, according to research by the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies: the number of members of Orthodox churches in America has grown from 700,000 to 6 million in the past four years. The average number of conversions to Orthodoxy from 2013 to 2021 was about 89 people per year; this surged to 155 people for 2022 and 2023. The true increase in the number of converts is hard to quantify, per the BBC, but another alarming statistic from the Pew Research Center showed Orthodox Christians are 64% male, up from 46% in 2007.

I think part of what gives me pause is that many of the converts are part of the heteronormative, conservative, individualist, MAGA/MAHA wave, seeking a “return to tradition,” or an idealized “simpler time” when society was homogenous (e.g. segregated), people went to church every Sunday (and followed patriarchal rules), men married women, and women married men and had their babies, stayed home, homeschooled them, and had the time to clean and cook healthy meals from scratch, alone, for the entire household. The problem with this picture is that it doesn’t exist, and never has.

Anyone who was actually raised within a religious, traditionalist patriarchal structure (like the Orthodox Church, and most churches) knows that what really happens is more like: women are abused by their husbands but can’t or won’t leave because it’s socially frowned upon and most won’t take their side or believe them. Parents hit their kids and try to control their lives. Discussion of politics is discouraged, unless your view is socially conservative. Priests tell women they have to keep the baby, even if they’ve been raped.

To a less extreme degree, I will say my childhood was marked by being told my skirts were too short, or I shouldn’t cross my legs in church (because this was somehow disrespectful to God, as if He’d ever care), or if I was on my period, I couldn’t take communion that Sunday (and so then it becomes obvious when one is menstruating). Boys could, obviously, basically do whatever they wanted, but girls, obviously, couldn’t. Entire lives were dictated by the fear of what other people would think. Church was for mostly pantomiming prayer, while rude comments about other people were whispered from person to person in the pews. Priests cheated on their wives and emphasized the importance of not celebrating Halloween.

It always made me sad when I met people who were actually from Greece, and not Greek Americans like my family and the people at my church, because they were never as strict with the faith as we were. None of them were conservative, in fact the opposite. (I doubt that the conservative male converts to Orthodoxy in America have much, if anything, in common with their counterparts in socialist countries such as Greece.) They interpreted the word of God as it was meant to be interpreted, loosely and extremely personally. They understood, I could tell, what it was to give one’s self over to pleasure, to live a life that first and foremost fulfilled them, to not give a fuck, at the end of the day, what other people think, because no one else but you has to live your life.

My family, my church, America, was so different.

It was almost as though by emigrating to America we had stopped or even turned back the clock: Greece, and their Orthodoxy, moved on without us, while we clung to a homeland and a faith that no longer existed, unintentionally bastardizing it in the process. I fear that the move toward Orthodoxy in America today is a repetition of something that happened in the Old World hundreds of years ago, something that they have learned from and moved on from that we, by separating from our native land, have not. Are we doomed to repeat the battles and mistakes of our ancestors, unable to grasp a lesson unless it’s firsthand?

In Orthodoxy, at least in practice, as I have known it here in America, nothing is private, nothing is beyond scrutiny. The body is turned into a vessel for the judgment of others, public property. Priests govern by fear and marginalization. Before communion, the priest at the church I went to as a child made sure to remind everyone that not even the Assyrian Orthodox could take our communion with us, because it was supposedly too different from Greek Orthodoxy. Rules and wars from hundreds if not thousands of years ago, made by people who couldn’t possibly understand the conditions we live in today, are treated as the only final word.

Adherents of the Orthodox Church as it is today are proponents of a narrow and static world. But life is cyclical, and change is inherent to it. The world is growing; the universe itself is constantly expanding, accelerating. Aren’t we being dishonest to ourselves, to the true spiritual nature of humanity and of the universe, by pretending that isn’t happening?

The idea of the tradwife, married happily to her man of faith, flourishes in an idyllic, utopian world. But the world is complicated, and unfair, and dark, and ugly at times. And traditional organized religions are, for the most part, totally unprepared to handle the reality of existing today. (Whether they ever were is another debate.)

I understand the urge to return to the ways of our ancestors. I wrote an essay on ancestral eating, which has scientifically proven benefits. These new, mostly male, converts to Orthodoxy are probably, for the most part, not descendents of Orthodoxy, and instead are turning to the faith so that they can act out their desired fantasy, which is, in a stroke of irony, inherently modern, not ancestral (what is “ancestral” is highly specific to each of us based on what we have inherited, and not one-size-fits-all). I think that this fantasy involves control, the idea that they can transport themselves back to an earlier, simpler time, particularly in a time when so much of what we are exposed to is out of our control.

I understand the fear. Men feel as though they are losing power. Women, for some reason, want to be coddled like children by men (see: the “girlfriend brain” pandemic, which I have a dark theory about, because if you’re a proponent of ancestral gender roles, you would know that women have always had it to keep it together to take care of the house and children, not become so numb to the world around them that they need a man to hold their hand and lead them around, but that’s another essay), while at the same time birthing them lots of healthy, beautiful, uncomplicated, “normal” children. The fantasy involves destroying the modern world and starting anew by turning back. I understand this fantasy; certainly it appeals to me.

But our world just isn’t pure. And really, it never was. If we are so happy to look back to the ways of our Orthodox ancestors (I use the term “ancestors” loosely here, because again, the new wave of Orthodox converts are likely not descendents of Orthodoxy, unlike me, whose parents and parents’ parents and parents’ parents’ parents, etc., were all born and raised Greek Orthodox), why not look to a time before strict, puritanical, patriarchal religion?

The things that corrupt our bodies are what we live for; what, one could argue, humans were made for. Before organized religion, there was sex and alcohol and sensuality, debauchery and touch and lust and love. There was the higher power of the Universe, which communities across the world each interpreted in their unique and beautiful and thrilling ways. Those are what have existed as long as humans have, not rules on who can marry who and who’s allowed to take communion.

And Orthodoxy doesn’t have to be the way it is, conservative and exclusive and heteronormative, homophobic and misogynistic. Many other churches have adapted. I don’t think it’s “woke” to say that if there’s one thing we should all believe in, it is love, and that includes acceptance, and empathy, and care.

I went to a Greek Orthodox church with my family on Christmas Day, and the priest recited Metropolitan Nathanael’s Archpastoral Christmas Encyclical for 2025. It reads, in part:

The Uncreated Light shines in the darkness. Heaven bends low to embrace the earth. At the heart of this mystery stands a truth we too easily forget: God created the world, and humanity in particular, not for misery or despair, but for joy: divine, enduring, and life-giving joy.

From the beginning, creation itself is an act of generosity and delight. Scripture tells us that God looked upon all creation and declared it “very good” (Genesis 1:31), revealing that humanity is not an afterthought nor a mistake to be corrected, but the crowning gift of creation, fashioned in love and invited into communion. As the Psalmist proclaims, “You have made known to me the path of life; in Your presence there is fullness of joy” (Psalm 16:11). We were made not merely to exist, but to live and rejoice in God, for joy flows from communion with the living God.

Yet the world we inhabit is also marked by pain, suffering, loss, and death. Joy can appear fragile or distant in the face of illness, injustice, grief, and fear. The Christian faith neither denies these realities nor trivializes them. Instead, it reveals their deeper meaning. Even suffering, never willed by God as an end in itself, is permitted as a place of transformation, where the heart is refined and its capacity for love expanded. The soul matures not by escaping what wounds it, but by allowing God to meet us within it, transfiguring our wounds into places of grace. Joy, therefore, is not the absence of the cross, but the fruit that quietly ripens upon it.

It is precisely in this light that we must understand the Incarnation. Christmas is not merely a divine response to human brokenness, but the fullest revelation of God’s desire for humanity.

It brought tears to my eyes. Too often these days we forget about joy: our capacity for it, our right to it, our natural urge toward it.

We aren’t something broken that needs to be fixed; we’re imperfect vessels for pain and light and desire and euphoria. We aren’t meant to strive toward some conservative idea of what it is to be “normal”; we are, to put it simply, much more interesting than that. We aren’t meant to be clean all the time; like the sea, we possess by nature murky depths, where the light only sometimes gets through.

Nothing about us, as humans, is not dynamic, kinetic; why should we choose a religion that has turned its back on such a fundamental biological and spiritual reality?

Converts joining the faith want to fix a problem, whether that problem is themselves or the world around us. Did they stop to ask God if it needs fixing?

I’m curious about your thoughts on this too, whether you agree or disagree with me. Though I am wary of organized religion (my press SARKA published a book that explores the dangers of organized religion and blind faith beautifully), I still do on occasion enjoy the ceremony of going to church.

Is there a world in which “anti-purity” and Orthodoxy could coexist?

Updates

• My press/online journal SARKA is open for submissions until further notice, and has other big announcements coming soon; sign up to our newsletter for updates

• I’ve been watching a lot of movies lately; if you are inclined to look at my Letterboxd and let me know if you have any recommendations for movies you think I’d like, I would appreciate that

• I have new poems coming out in the wonderful Michigan City Review next month

• Will also be back in Chicago next month, sad to say goodbye to Philly but also missing home. Hope everyone has been staying safe and warm amidst everything going on lately. XOXO

Silver horses, do they see themselves
in the silver leaves of olive trees?

In the silver locked around my neck,
a bridle?

How long until the taming becomes familiar,
becomes nature?

Becomes inherited,
becomes heirloom?

Pets don’t really know their own names,
only the way you say it.

Silver horses,
if I let you go would you come back?

We say that we want to return to an ancestral past,
but there was a past before that.

The blood under blood
pushes blood out.

I dream of an ocean in Montana.
I dig for fragments on the rocky shore.

I find what I am looking for,
and then I find that it doesn’t matter.

It is, which is to say it has become,
an object of no value.

Some things are pure in image but not at heart.
But heart doesn’t always matter.

In a dream I spoke an apology to you into my cup of coffee,
then left it in a place you would find it.

When I wake up, I remember there is no place
I could leave my coffee where you would find it.

It feels embarrassing, that even in a dream,
I thought life could be so simple like that.

In a dream I’m in the cold basement of my childhood home,
wrapping myself in blankets.

In another dream I’m with a man who compliments another woman
on her beautiful handwriting,

which she ensures is perfectly even with the use of a ruler,
and it makes me jealous.

I know that I could make my handwriting better if I tried,
but I am not that kind of person.

At best I would purchase a ruler and never think of it again,
once I had it.

I am that kind of person; there are many words for it,
but I want to know which one you’d choose.

I see a pale pink engagement ring with a diamond corona
and wonder if I am that kind of girl.

Probably I could be, for a little bit, as I am nothing
if not anachronistic to myself, and always trying not to be.

I visit the 13th-century cloister at the art museum three times.
The decapitated statuettes of Mary and Christ stare back at me.

Stone carried across an ocean,
from Europe to America.

We never should have been able to be here, to see this,
or, I don’t know, maybe we should have.

We lose so much to time
as we survive it.

Silver horses, do they miss their docked tails?
The fragments of bone they never felt until they disappeared?

Or do they understand that there is no going back,
in this life?

The past is our mother who left us,
but we want her to eat us whole.

散るをいとふ世にも人にもさきがけて 散るこそ花と吹く小夜嵐

A small night storm blows
Saying “Falling is the essence of a flower”
Preceding those who hesitate.

Yukio Mishima’s death poem

Paolo Vincenzo Bonomini, a painter born in 1757 near Bergamo, Italy, was commissioned by the parish in his hometown, where he was born and died, to create six paintings on canvas for the Triduum of the Dead, the three-day Christian observance from October 31 to November 2 that encompasses Halloween, All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day. Bonomini portrayed his neighbors as skeletons in the paintings, depicting moments of daily life. In his sketch included above, Death holds a scroll that reads Nemini parco, which means “I spare no one” in Latin.

Death is the least interesting thing about us, maybe, but we don’t act that way.

When I was ten years old, I got pneumonia. At first my parents and I just thought it was a bad cold, then I was having trouble breathing. I honestly don’t remember it so well, but I spent about a week in the hospital, and all told missed about a month of fifth grade.

I remember that the doctor said my left lung was almost completely filled with fluid and my right lung also had some fluid in it. I remember that I could barely sleep because I was hooked up to a machine that beeped constantly. I remember that I really didn’t like spitting my phlegm into a pink basin, which I was supposed to do, so I just kept swallowing it. I remember that the nurse kept trying to give me pills for my fever, but I also refused to swallow pills, so she tried to give me a cherry-flavored syrup, but I hated the flavor of it and refused to swallow it, so she put it in a syringe and squirted it down my throat. She was southern and her name was Fran. I really hated her.

I remember that my best friend at the time came to visit me and was crying, and I told her that when I was out of the hospital I really wanted to go with her to see Happy Feet, which had just come out. I remember my grandmother bringing me food, eggs and avgolemono soup. I remember it was around Christmastime when I was home, and I wore a new green turtleneck sweater my mother had gotten me. I remember going back to school the next month (it was a new school that I had just transferred into, and I barely had any friends there) and a girl telling me that people thought I died. Apropos of nothing, I never did end up making friends at that school; it would be high school, four years later, before I had anything like a “friend group” again.

I don’t really like telling people this, but while I was in the hospital, a man came into my room. He had a briefcase and a pad of paper and some worksheets. He said he wanted me to write a poem about my time in the hospital, for inclusion in an anthology written exclusively by children in the hospital. The “poem” was basically an ad-libs worksheet, like the kind you get in school: there were blanks for me to fill in, but the general structure of the poem was already decided for me. I think most of the lines started with “I feel” and included different qualifiers, like “in the morning” or “when I go to sleep.”

When I finished writing the poem and gave the man back the worksheet, he saw my name and realized that he’d made a mistake. He was supposed to be helping another child write a poem, not me. He seemed visibly upset, more upset than what the situation, at face value, warranted, and that hurt me, because it made me feel like I had done something wrong, even though he had shown up in my room and told me to write a poem; it’s not like I’d asked to do so. At the time I didn’t understand why he reacted that way or how he could have made that mistake, but years later I realized that probably the anthology was for poems solely written by terminally ill children, and maybe he had only been given names and room numbers to go to, and maybe the child who was supposed to be writing the poem had been in my room at some point, but wasn’t any longer.

The poem actually was eventually printed in the anthology, and copies of it were sent to my home. The anthology remained on the bookshelf in the basement of my parents’ old house for years, but I don’t know if they still have it. I can barely remember my poem, but I know that it included the beeping noises, that I couldn’t sleep, and a last line that went something like: “I float away on a cloud again.” The writers of the poems in the anthology were credited only with their first names and ages. Francesca, 10.

Because of the nature of the fill-in-the-blanks worksheet, all of our poems were remarkably similar, with many of us complaining about beeping and not being able to sleep. (It seems that no one in the hospital can ever sleep, which feels particularly sinister when hospitalized patients need good-quality sleep more than anyone else.)

Really, the only differences in our poems were our names and ages at the end, so maybe all that can really be called “my poem” is Francesca, 10.

I think about this experience a lot, because I wonder if this is what made me a poet. It’s also an experience tied up in a lot of shame for me. And I still feel a lot of shame, with regard to my poetry in particular, so maybe I haven’t changed as much as I think I have since then.

My failed death poem: was it a failure because I survived, at least longer than I was supposed to? Clearly someone had had the idea that these death poems for children needed to follow a very specific script, although I think it would have been more interesting to let them write whatever they wanted to. Maybe that would have been too painful, and it was easier to write about the obvious issues that go hand-in-hand with being in a hospital.

Maybe it was tempting to write about the machinery surrounding us, when the machines of our bodies were failing us.

Then again, I do think death poems, and also poems more generally, exude maximal power when they choose to turn their focus toward what we have in common, rather than what sets us apart. (I tried to do this with my one conscious effort at a death poem, “Will I Mourn This Life,” published a few months back by Midcult*.) The grander the scale the better; think classics versus trends, the community versus the individual. It is a common misconception that the result has to be trite greeting-card speak or Rupi Kaur-esque.

Mishima’s death poem uses flowers as a metaphor for humankind’s experience of death, rendering it as something essential (not just in the sense that it is necessary, but moreso in the sense of being of our essence, which is “the intrinsic nature or indispensable quality of something, especially something abstract, that determines its character”); death is at the very core of us.

Yet it also comes from outside of us: the blowing night storm surely has caused some of the flowers to fall, even if we can acknowledge that falling is the essence of a flower, that all would fall eventually. We brace against the storm, with no guarantee of surviving it. And should we survive it this time, it is a question of when, not if, the next will come.

Death within and around us: the first and last contradiction, the one that all of our movements take us further from and closer to.

Bonomini liked to portray his acquaintances, people he knew, even himself and his wife as skeletons in his paintings. When I first came across these paintings, I thought they were tacky (anyone who knows me knows that I despise Halloween, mostly because the decorations offend my sensibilities with their extreme lack of beauty and bent toward violence) yet something about them stays with me. Perhaps it is that the skeletons are wearing normal clothes, amidst a nondescript, if not idyllic, backdrop. Perhaps it is because they seem affectionate of each other, in conversation with one another. Death is portrayed as just another day in the life.

Maybe I shouldn’t feel guilty, still, that I wrote someone else’s death poem, took their spot in an anthology that they were supposed to be in but could not be. That’s just my theory, after all; I’ll never know the truth of what really happened.

All I can say for certain is that my death poem wasn’t a death poem after all; it was a poem of sickness, before it became a poem of survival and shame. One day, it will no longer be a poem of survival or of shame, it’ll be a death poem after all.

Updates

• I’m living in a lovely apartment in Philadelphia for the month of January and am doing two readings, one with Ghost Harmonics on January 9th and one with Discount Guillotine on January 17th (if you’re in Philly and want to hang out or have any recommendations on where I should go/what I should do, get in touch!)

• I’ve been writing down my dreams every morning; to me this is a much more generative practice than journaling and I highly recommend it. For example last night I had a dream that my home was filled with squirrels and rats, and I was trying to kill them; open to your theories on this (though I’m thinking it’s quite obvious)

• The next issue of my online literature and arts journal SARKA is dropping shortly; sign up four our newsletter and follow us on Instagram for updates

I’m a Virgo, and also human, so naturally I’m a big fan of starting fresh: redesigning, rebranding, rebirthing, and ruthlessly culling excess in order to invite connecting or reconnecting with my core values. The new year is a perfect opportunity for this. Sometimes I need to remind myself that I am someone who enjoys living intentionally, especially after a year (like 2025) that felt like surviving one somewhat traumatic event after another.

I also am going through maybe the opposite of an identity crisis at the moment: although I thought for years that I was born at 1:15 p.m., I was actually born at 1:45 p.m., meaning I am not a Virgo sun, Libra moon, Sag rising, but in fact a Virgo sun, Virgo moon, Cap rising, which actually, upon reflection, makes a lot more sense. My indecisiveness and unwillingness to commit is less a sign of people-pleasing or balance-seeking and more an ongoing logical puzzle, where the ever-elusive answer is how to best serve myself.

Armed with this new information, Co-Star gave me some 2026 resolutions, including ONLY EAT FOOD YOU CAN DIGEST, which feels timely after a year I basically spent going along with whatever because I was too tired or broken down to do otherwise.

In 2025 I became weaker by some measurements (lost weight and muscle mass, spent a lot of time in bed, injured myself in multiple ways, accrued some moderately intense emotional scarring, spent too much money, saw my Strava fitness score and Oura activity score decline precipitously) but also accomplished a lot that I am proud of (PR’d in a half-marathon and a 15k, had my collection of poems The season of lilacs is monstrous published by one of my favorite publishers, published Sam Heaps’ amazing novel The Living god through my press SARKA, and traveled to London, Las Vegas, Florida, Vermont, New York, Philadelphia, Paris and Marseille), and now that I am pretty much finished with licking my wounds, I feel ready to weigh my values and design a life that is slightly more in alignment with them.

So what are those values?

Minimalism: I am an easily overwhelmed, highly sensitive person, so I need to return to an embrace of minimalism in all aspects of my life, including physically (home decor, wardrobe, groceries) and mentally (knowing when to say no, being more careful with the digital content I consume, not being so trusting of others, only being friends with people who actually like me, not overbooking my calendar and to-do list). Like Natasha from Sex and the City, I operate best when my apartment is entirely beige.

Health: Without getting into details, there have been several health scares among myself and my loved ones in 2025, some not that serious and some very serious. It’s said often, but health is the most important thing. I am turning thirty in 2026, have a dicey family history, and can’t afford to not really take it seriously anymore and just expect everything to turn out great. Plus, I hope to become a mother at some point in the next five years, and I know the kind of mother I would like to be, which starts with creating the healthiest possible foundation for my child now.

Creativity: It’s easy for me to forget sometimes that I am at my core a writer, that it’s what I’ve always wanted to do and have always done since I was a child, especially when I neuter my own brain with Instagram reels for three hours a day, or rewatch all seven seasons of Pretty Little Liars in two months. I’m taking a break from TV and replacing it with reading, journaling, writing, movement, literally anything that forces me to be in the driver’s seat of my own life and return to myself.

Savvy: I need to stop identifying as someone who is bad with money, stop having a chip on my shoulder about not having inherited wealth, and learn how to be better with money. I’ve always prided on myself on doing everything on my own and being responsible, but it’s been a while since I actually internalized those values which I think of as so intrinsic to me, at least in a positive and productive way.

Empathy: This is a complicated one for me, because I don’t really think of myself as an empathetic person until I’m faced with a situation (which I often am) that is difficult for me to deal with because I can’t help but internalize the feelings of another (person or animal). I love animals and care deeply about their well-being, and want that to be reflected more in my day-to-day actions. I also don’t often take the small amount of time that it takes for me to truly enjoy and understand the presence of a companion, whether it’s because I’m too busy or too preoccupied with my own thoughts. Which leads me to my final cardinal value.

Consideration: I tend to be a hyper-efficient person, focusing on getting things done fast and, hopefully and usually, well, but mostly fast. I don’t think about my actions or interactions, often, until after they’ve happened. The people I admire are really thorough and considered, and live in a way that is slow and deep, instead of fast and surface-level and haphazard.

With all of that in mind, I thought it would be fun to make a little gift guide with some things I’m eyeing to help make it easier for me (and anyone else into these goals) to live in these values in 2026.

(Christmas is coming so quickly this year it hasn’t even registered to me, I couldn’t be further from the “holiday spirit” for a multitude of reasons, I find holiday decorations tacky and overstimulating, and anyway I think of January 2026 as a better time to buy something nice for yourself and celebrate a new beginning.)

Geranium & Vetiver Perfume from Earth Tu Face

Individually poured botanical balm perfumes imbued with the scent of real plants, packaged in precious seashell compacts. A bright mix of geranium flowers and earthy vetiver root and Patchouli lend citrus notes and sweetness to the scent of this balm as well as natural healing properties.

I love the scents of geranium and patchouli (Meow Meow Tweet’s geranium toner is a longtime favorite) for how they ground me, and seashells for reminding me the ocean and its immense healing powers are never that far away. I’m hoping to find a signature scent in 2026, something to give me a more concrete sense of self.

Nutiva Organic Virgin Coconut Oil

I’m back in my era of using coconut oil for everything, and I think this one smells the best. I love putting it on my hair, hands, lips, body.

Sapphire Butterfly Necklace, Etsy

When I was little I had a necklace like this, and sapphire is my birthstone, so I’d love a nice piece of sapphire jewelry. I am also very into butterfly imagery lately (have been wearing this Brandy t-shirt nonstop, sometimes even to sleep) and wing imagery in general. Thinking always of Fiona Apple’s “FHW” tattoo (for “Fiona has wings” on her back) and how I really wanted the same tattoo, for “Francesca has wings”, for a long time.

Wellious Almond Protein Powder

This four-ingredient protein powder is recommended by one of my favorite YouTubers and while I go through phases with protein powders (I lived off Orgain vegan peanut butter protein for 2-3 years, don’t wanna talk about it), I definitely haven’t been eating enough of it lately to support the muscle growth that I want.

RESET by Caroline Deisler subscription

I had a subscription to RESET that expired earlier this year, and didn’t want to pay to renew it (it’s quite expensive), but I miss it a lot and have been making new email addresses so I can keep getting free trials, which is probably a sign that I should just pay for a subscription. I haven’t been able to be consistent with any other workouts. I just love her German accent, and how simultaneously gentle and brutal she is. Her recipes are good and simple, too, and I’ve made a lot of them; she’s the one who turned me on to eating cold white rice with avocado and nori sheets for dinner most nights, although I always add generous amounts of salt.

Journal

I wnat to get into the habit of writing down my dreams again, even though they are usually horrifying and/or disgusting, because I think they have important messages in them. I think a beautiful journal would help to balance out the content of my dreams.

Jungmaven hemp intimates and activewear

Because nothing feels as good as working out at home in my underwear.

archive.today

Kind of a loophole, but sometimes I forget that I can get past paywalls and give myself the gift of knowledge (and saved money) using webpage capturing tools as workarounds. Perfect for reading articles I otherwise wouldn’t read, as one of my goals for 2026 is to switch from consuming short-form content to longer-form content, much of which is paywalled.

Any books I want

It might seem counterintuitive, but I want to spend money intentionally, including on anything that will make me a more active versus passive consumer. (This just happens to be one of my favorite books and book covers.) I love getting books from the library, but also, some books are so gorgeous that I just need to own them. Other things I am happy to spend money on are groceries, nice restaurants, concerts, movie tickets, spa days, etc.: anything that supports an analog way of living. By making other easy changes (like tea instead of alcohol, both at home and at restaurants; renting movies instead of paying for Hulu/Netflix/YouTube Premium; cooking instead of Uber Eats) I think I’ll have the flexibility to spend money on objects of outsized value.

I think this is all I have to say for now. I am in part making this post so that I will stay accountable to myself, but I hope that you find some inspiration in it, too. And let me know if you have any other recommendations in this vein, would love to hear them. I hope also that you have a peaceful and beautiful new year.

♡ XOXO, Body Composition ♡

In the song “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star” from London-based band Sorry’s debut album 925, frontwoman Asha Lorenz sings, “I stayed up all night with a rock ‘n’ roll star / He said you’ve got to dress for the part you want / Not who you are.”

When I saw Sorry perform in Chicago this month, part of a tour for their new album COSPLAY (Domino, November 2025), I got the distinct sense that Lorenz was dressing for a part, although I wasn’t totally sure what that part was: in an oversized hoodie and track pants, she rarely spoke to or even looked at the audience, even pulling her hoodie down to cover her face during the entire performance of their song “Magic,” masking herself completely except for her mouth, which she held a megaphone against.

Yet this show of distance between her and her audience, the loose, opaque fabric protecting her from us or us from her, seemed contradictory: it felt as though it in fact served the opposite purpose. Her desire to, in some way, close herself off from me made me feel more intimately connected with her than I would have otherwise. The act of hiding oneself exposes that there is a thing to be hidden. Vulnerability begets armor, and so armor innately implies its existence. Protection against the wound creates it.

“Every time I made you cry, I was crying, too,” Lorenz sings on 925’s “Snakes,” the first Sorry song I’d ever heard, Spotify’s mysterious algorithm deciding that this was a song I would like. Usually the clumsy “curated” playlists they serve to me are laughably off the mark, but this time I was sold, immediately. Lorenz was vocalizing a playbook I’d been acting out without thought my entire life, that of the scared good girl, which is to say, in simpler if not more reductive language, a bad girl.

In a Guardian profile of the band from 2020, Hannah Ewens writes:

Asha Lorenz, the frontwoman of London band Sorry, used to torment guitarist Louis O’Bryen at middle school. Teasing and cruel comments were easy for Lorenz when in close proximity to someone as shy and awkward as O’Bryen. “She was a bit mean,” he admits.

I’m not the kind of person who necessarily cares what kind of person a musician I listen to is, as long as I like their songs. This holds for my approach to art in general: I am selective with the art I consume, à la Fiona Apple saying she barely listens to contemporary music because she doesn’t want to be influenced. So when I find something that I can’t help but want to read or watch or listen to, I’m already too far gone to make judgments based on the character of the artist.

But seeing Lorenz perform live unlocked something in their music for me, like a screw loosening, or beginning to understand a new language. One of the things that first drew me to Sorry’s music is Lorenz’s childlike voice, which bequeaths a tenderness and fragility upon their songs. Yet I feel now, almost, like I wouldn’t even want to listen to any music by someone who wasn’t, once, cruel.

The duplicities and contradictions inherent in inhabiting a body are a throughline in Sorry’s ouvre, at least for me as a listener, maybe because this is something I think about a lot, and seem to see signs of almost everywhere. Take “Candle,” one of the standouts from COSPLAY:

I don’t burn out
Don’t fade away
Never see the light ‘cause I never see the day

I understood this as a reference to Kurt Cobain’s suicide note, which was referencing Neil Young: it’s better to burn out than to fade away. Here, both choices are rejected, even when, at the end of the day, we do have to choose between the two; we have to lose. Still, it’s fun to pretend to have power.

I am a cunt
I’ll be a cunt again
Left my boy out in the pouring rain
I don’t fade out
I don’t fade in
I don’t need much or feel anything

Another throughline: Pretending, faking it, the pretense of bravado, being someone you’re not, playing a part, or just plain lying. In “Jive,” Lorenz sings, “I wanna move like that / but I only seem to move like this.” In the accompanying music video, we see someone dancing while wearing a T-shirt that says “Scared To Dance” on it. You start to wonder who’s lying, the dancer or the T-shirt, or if neither one is, or if they both are. What’s stopping you from being the person you’ve always dreamed of being?

To cosplay is to dress up as someone who isn’t you. You know that’s not who you really are, and that’s the fun of it, the distance between who you are and who you’re being. But lines blur, as they are wont to do. In the music video for “Jetplane,” masked figures writhe on fake grass and dance and kiss each other. It’s all artifice, and the camera doesn’t stay still long enough to see past the surface presented to us. Here, you can be a person that couldn’t exist in the light, in the real world. It’s the dark inverse of the Instagram reel of the pink Pilates princess with glazed-donut skin and 11-line abs recording everything she eats in a day, from her collagen matcha latte to her yogurt bowl to her air-fried miso salmon. You can pretend to be someone better than who you actually are, in the hopes of somehow, someday becoming that person. Or, you can mask yourself so that you can inhabit who you really are when no one can tell it’s you. Which one is more real?

Back to “Candles”: if I am a cunt, how can I be a cunt again? There’s a glitch in the matrix, as if I’ve forgotten who I am for just long enough to be her again. Yes, I’m digging my fingers in the minutae of language, getting dirt under my nails, but that’s where we find life’s little plotholes, the paradoxes of the body; that’s where we go to hold ourselves up to the mirror, and see our reflections move without us. When we act in ways we don’t recognize, are we departing from our true self, or just playing the tape forward?

At their show, Sorry played samples from oldies and classics in between their own songs, still recognizable but just fucked up enough to feel degraded (in a sexy way). This is the essence of COSPLAY: sometimes it’s only through taking from someone else that we get to be ourselves, if only for a moment. We lie, cheat and steal our way into our identity, and it slips from our grasp just as quickly. You can ascribe moral values to this, but I personally don’t see the point.

While there can be a certain easy nihilism borne from lacking a center, a core tenet by which to leash yourself, by which to ensure that you can always find your way back home, Sorry isn’t so simple. In “Life In This Body,” O’Bryen and Lorenz sing together, over and over:

People will sеll me
Everybody changes
I have loved every version of you

We don’t need to be real in order to be loved, and that makes me feel like there’s still some use for this body, after all.

Monthly recap

• Listening to: Sorry (obviously), THE NATURE OF POWER by Sudan Archives, My Old Ways by Tame Impala, the Babygirl soundtrack (still), Lil Peep

• Reading: American Canto by Olivia Nuzzi, Grand Rapids by Natasha Stagg, Meet Me in the Bathroom by Lizzy Goodman

• Drinking: Dandy blend, aloe vera in my water, good vodka in Diet Coke

• Eating: Cold rice, avocado with lots of salt on it, Erewhon white bean kale salad dupe, Gwyneth Paltrow’s spicy sweet potato soup recipe (always)

• Doing: Recovering from my trips to Paris and Marseille, reading poems with my friends, going to the gym just for the dry sauna, getting ready to spend January in Philly (will be reading with Ghost Harmonics on Jan. 9th), finalizing the next SARKA issue

• Trying not to: Spend all my money, “like” problematic posts on Instagram, stay inside all day because it’s really really cold out, take Benadryl every night

We are continuously living the ancestral life, reaching back for centuries, we are satisfying the appetites of unknown ancestors, nursing instincts which we think are our own, but which are quite incompatible with our character; we are not living our own lives, we are paying the debts of our forefathers.

Carl Jung, lecture, Oct. 23, 1929

Children of apathy
Don’t have a country
Don’t have an appetite
Can’t trust nobody

Okay Kaya, “Givenupitis”

According to my 23andme results, I am 71.4% Greek and Balkan, 15.1% Northern West Asian, 5.7% Italian, and 2.3% Arab, Egyptian and Levantine.

I am likely lactose intolerant, less likely to be a deep sleeper, likely have more than average movement during sleep, predisposed to weigh less than average, more likely to prefer salty versus sweet foods, and more likely to have a fear of public speaking.

I am likely bitten by mosquitos more than others, and I am more likely to experience hair photobleaching. I am more likely to have stretch marks, less likely to experience motion sickness, likely have brown or hazel eyes, and likely have at least a little unibrow.

I likely have light hair and lighter skin. My muscle composition is uncommon in elite power athletes, and I am less likely than average to be afraid of heights.

I likely have no widow’s peak (wrong), am less likely than average to have had a bunion (wrong), and likely have no cleft chin (wrong).

The results of this genetic test, which I did in 2017, have become more specific over time, even without me providing a new sample. Against my will, more and more will be known about me. Most of it will be correct.

I was never really under the illusion that I would be able to choose my own destiny, but now the path appears narrower than ever.

The Greek word for “fate” is μοίρα (mee-rah), which is almost identical to the ancient Greek μοῖρα, a word that originally referred to a person’s “lot” or “portion” (see Oxford English Dictionary).

Our destiny is something that is served to us. It seems that we do not get to decide its composition; all we can do is decide whether or not we eat.

Fix’d like a Plant on his peculiar Spot,
To draw nutrition, propagate, and rot.

Alexander Pope, An essay on man, 1732-34

If your Instagram explore page looks anything like mine, you likely know what “ancestral eating” is. Similar to “eating biblically” or the “paleo diet,” ancestral eating attempts to mimic the eating patterns of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, who had an average life expectancy of about 25 to 35 years.

I love dates and einkorn flour as much as the next somewhat orthorexic woman, but I am more interested in nutrigenetics, which is defined by Luigi Barrea of the University Medical School of Naples and colleagues as “the science that studies and characterizes gene variants associated with differential response to specific nutrients and relating this variation to various diseases.”

“The central role of genetic code in determining genome stability and related health outcomes such as developmental defects, degenerative diseases, and cancer is well-established,” Dariush Farhud of the Tehran University of Medical Sciences School of Public Health and colleagues write. “Genetic variation is known to affect food tolerances among human subpopulations and may also influence dietary requirements, raising the possibility of individualizing nutritional intake for optimal health and disease prevention on the basis of an individual’s genome.”

I believe all humans are more alike than we are different, but I also know that each one of us is inextricably linked as if with a steel chain to our mother, our mother’s mother, our mother’s mother’s mother. I cannot diminish the role of the mother in history, both our collective past and our own personal history. And I believe that history is one of the few parcels of land that can be mined for real wisdom. (Perhaps innocence is another, but that is a different essay.)

I think of Carl Jung’s The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious: “Every mother contains her daughter in herself and every daughter her mother and every mother extends backwards into her mother and forwards into her daughter.”

How did our mothers, and their mothers, and their mothers, feed themselves?

I suspect that our bodies already know.

Greece was under Ottoman rule for close to 400 years, from the mid-15th century until the Greek War of Independence started in 1821.

Though details and accounts vary, and I am not a historian, it is generally acknowledged in history (and by stories passed down in my family) that the vast majority of Greeks became Dhimmis under Ottoman rule, meaning that they were treated as second-class citizens, with severe restrictions to their freedoms.

Passed down through generations, I am told of an ancestor who was given her husband’s head in a bag and told it was a watermelon. I am told of ancestors fleeing Crete, changing names. As recently as my grandparents, who were in Greece during World War II, I am told of being forced to cook for occupying soldiers, of having priceless possessions stolen.

On my last trip to Greece, I swam from a boat to a tiny island where, barefoot, I walked with my father up a rocky path to a small encampment where besieged Greek insurgents lived during the War of Independence.

Extending backward, I touch blood. It dries under my fingernails and is stuck there still.

It is easy to forget history, now.

Our world lends itself to microtrends, endless conveyor belts with new shiny plastic toys for us to play with. Though once relegated to fashion, microtrends now extend beyond that sphere, dictating everything from how we speak to how we eat. Of course humans have always been changeable, adaptable, subject to the whims of their social groups; however, the boundaries of those groups, their interests and markers, and the speed with which all of those characteristics are changing, is unprecedented.

We are told that we can become anyone. This is another way of saying that we can forget who we are. It is easier than ever to dress like another girl, look like another girl. I open TikTok and within a minute of scrolling can identify five girls I would rather look like: she has smoother skin than me, her hair is thicker and longer and spit-shiny, she has a nose without a bump, her eyes are bigger than mine and lake-blue, her thighs could fit in the circle of my middle fingers and thumbs touching, she can afford laser hair removal, baby Botox and perfect, blush-pink nails.

On Instagram I am shown “what I eat in a day” videos probably more than any other type of content. If I see someone who is feeding themselves in a way that seems attractive or aspirational, I can pull up the Amazon app, go to the “Groceries” tab and immediately add the exact products to my cart.

Grass-fed rib-eye,full-fat kefir, golden kiwis.

If I scroll to the next video, and see someone who is feeding themselves in a way that seems more attractive or more aspirational than the previous video, I can go back to the Amazon app, clear my cart, and start again.

Cavolo nero, medjool dates, avocado.

It can be freeing to forget yourself, almost child-like, like playing dress-up. We pretend to be others in order to understand who we want to be. A baby sticks things into its mouth to learn what they are, and if it wants them. This is human nature.

But there is nothing natural about the scale and speed with which this happens now. In ten seconds I can ask ChatGPT to create a customized week-long meal plan, with restrictions on food groups, diet types, calories, specific ingredients and more. I can search on TikTok or Instagram for paleo, Whole30, plant-based, carnivore, keto, unprocessed. I can spend my entire day watching other people eat, or pretend to, and then put my phone down to find that I have only become less sure than ever of what it means to be nourished.

I no longer trust myself. Neither does anyone else, though, so we are left with nowhere at all to turn.

A new study in the Journal of Nutrition by Utako Murai of the National Cancer Center Institute for Cancer Control in Japan and colleagues found that adherence to the Japanese dietary pattern - “high intake of rice, miso soup, seaweeds, pickles, vegetables, non-salty seafood, salty seafood, green tea, fruits, soy products, mushrooms, salt by seasoning, and low intake of beef and pork” - was associated with lower all-cause mortality among men and women.

Anne Mørch of Denmark’s Aarhus University and colleagues recently reported in the same journal that higher adherence to the Nordic Nutrition Recommendations - a guideline that advises a predominantly plant-based diet high in vegetables, fruits, berries, pulses, potatoes and whole grains, with ample intake of fish and nuts, and moderate intake of low-fat dairy products - was associated with lower mortality in a Swedish population.

These dietary patterns, while significantly different from one another, achieved the same result in two different populations. I suspect that similar results have been achieved elsewhere.

Sometimes it feels as though all we need to do is look back to know how to move forward, although that certainly carries its own risks.

I am a self-professed believer in the Lindy effect, which theorizes that a thing or idea’s future life expectancy is proportional to its current age. I have often spoken about how I want to write things that can still feel relevant and fresh to those who come after me. Perhaps that is a silly goal, outsized when compared with my capabilities, but I think it is a good one.

I do not mean to imply that we should ignore the lessons of history, but that we should write them down, over and over, as many times as it takes until they become a part of us, which they always already are.

Perusing a Depth Psychology Alliance forum on Jung, I find that one person’s comment in particular stands out to me:

Since this topic is going all over the place, but mostly in an “I don’t care about my roots” direction, I’ll add something. It seems there is a pattern that the members of this Alliance have liberal political tendencies. Conservatives on the other hand show more respect to their dead than to living family members. I … definitely belong to those who don’t care too much about history, tradition, and belonging. On the other hand, I actually do respect my nation, family, and ancestors much more than mentioned in my previous comment, but don’t (at least I can try) let them reduce my perception and understanding of right and wrong. The crisis we are all facing way or another is an outcome of accumulated history and events. … Perhaps we can recombine our attitude in a way functional to new circumstances.

The commentor then follows up to this comment with a Zen Buddhist maxim:

Without thinking of good or evil, show me your original face before your mother and father were born.

Just as it might be foolish to blindly follow the ways of our ancestors (for how could they possibly understand these new circumstances against which we are pressed?) it feels equally foolish to believe we can truly relinquish the past and begin anew.

Can time simply be destroyed? It does not feel that way, though I often find myself pretending the opposite. It would be so easy, to let go of our accumulated goods and evils, to chisel down the sculpture of us until we expose our original face.

Who would we be, if we could be anyone?

I cannot help but feel like this is a question not even worth asking.

Still, I ask it.

My groceries this week include barley rusks, lemons, apples, dates, red onions, celery, carrots, garlic, dried white beans, fig preserves, Greek yogurt, eggs, smoked salt, bay leaves, sardines, anchovies, crushed tomatoes and honey.

At the beginning of the week I cook a white bean stew that I eat over the coming days with barley rusks. I have yogurt with honey, jam and flaked almonds. Oatmeal cooked in milk with cut apples, dates, cinnamon and walnuts. Sardines with avocado and hard-boiled eggs.

For the last couple of weeks I have been recovering from an injury, and despite not being very active physically, I am hungrier than ever, as though there are subsurface movements that are tiring my body, making it scream for nourishment.

The word nourish has the same Indo-European base as Sanskrit “snu”: to emit fluid, yield milk.

It has all been done before. Time begins and ends with a woman bleeding before the opened mouth of another.

I know better than to think I know best what I need. I move through the world as a player of a game with rules I did not invent.

It has all been decided. Will I follow the footsteps back, enter the bright new world through the moonlit ones that have already passed us by?

Years into the future, when my daughters do the same, will they find the seeds that I have planted to nourish them? Will they know that I tried? To nourish them despite it all?

Our modern culture believes in nothing if not brute force. The subtext of We can have it all is that We can take it all from someone weaker.

It can feel empowering, believing this. But God did not drop us into a boxing ring.

In my darkest thoughts I imagine that the only nourishment I am able to provide is the trickling of a river of poison into the ages to come. That I have reduced my womanhood, my personhood, to this.

This is not a treatise against agency. Sometimes I feel as though I do not owe anything to anyone except myself.

But that is not the life I want to choose. I cannot abide by this contemporary ideology of anti-nourishment, cannot close up my fluid-emitting body to the expectant mouths surrounding me, mine included.

We care for ourselves well out of respect to God. And if God has abandoned us, our bodies become even more rare and precious, as they are all our own, which is to say, our own to share with each other, in every direction, forever.

For the first time in a long time, I think, there is no way to lose.

If it were physical, it would show

If it were spiritual, I would know

Tennis, “Bad Girls”

Though I love all animals, I have always considered myself a “pig girl.”

When I was around five years old I made the decision to stop eating pigs. I hated the smell of my parents frying bacon on Saturday mornings to eat with our Bisquick pancakes, and the pale-pink color of pork on my dinner plate made me sad. It was too similar to the color of its living counterpart. I suppose I was learning in some distant way that not all prey grants its predator the mercy of becoming unrecognizable once killed. Some force us to remember what once was. What we have done.

I remember my mother cutting cooked pork into little bits and shoving it inside penne pasta, then serving it to me as if I would not notice. She claimed later that she never did this.

I also remember her telling me, when I said I did not want to get my ears pierced, that she would pierce them for me with a needle while I was sleeping. I can still picture what she looked like standing in the doorway of my bedroom one night, when I was sure that she was going to come in and poke my earlobes with a sharp needle. I remember that she saw I was awake and left, and soon after that, I got my ears pierced by an older Greek woman at a jewelry store. My first earrings were studs, little gold spheres, although they seemed so big at the time.

Thinking back on it now, I wonder if I imagined her in the bedroom threshold that night. I still have the tendency to see things that are not really there when I am scared. In crowds I often imagine that I am seeing the face of someone I do not wish to see. My heart races, my underarms become damp as if I am something hunted.

I no longer believe in the succulence of my flesh.

Pigs are thought to be filthy in part because they will eat anything and everything, even each other. But to me, this only makes them more similar to us. We too are “opportunistic omnivores”: infinitely adaptable, cunning. We too can bend toward depravity when pushed by the right hand. We can eat anything, and do, when the walls of our pen begin to close around us. There comes a certain point when you become OK with anything.

America was born with cannibalism: I think of the Jamestown Colony, the Donner Party pioneers.

We too want to survive more than we want to be good.

Well, maybe I am only speaking for myself, now.

A certain point when I became OK with anything.

I wrote a poem recently that includes the lines “No longer interested in being good / Too lazy to die / You know how it goes”. But this is perhaps an oversimplification. I do not think that I am lazy. I think that I am tired, and I think that this kind of tiredness precludes goodness, just as fortitude might beget it. This fortitude was accessible to me once, but seems to be no longer.

We ascribe the sin of gluttony to pigs. But we are cunning with our language, too, and we seem to know just what to say when we are trying to get away with something. To convince someone of our sick little version of the truth. No prisoner gets a feast.

We would rather be evil than extinct. What would God say to that? I wonder.

In Albrecht Dürer’s Adam and Eve, the only animal closer to the titular subjects than the apple-bearing snake is a boar. It is also the closest subject to us, the viewers.

It watches us as we commit the original sin, which one could interpret as the sin of gluttony.

We could never help ourselves. Even in the most gorgeous of cages, we want nothing more than to eat our way out.

Monthly recap

• Favorite books: Molly by Blake Butler, Sleeveless by Natasha Stagg, Because They Wanted To by Mary Gaitskill

• Favorite movies and TV shows: Fire Walk With Me (rewatch), Pretty Little Liars (rewatch…the idea of watching something new is completely unbearable to me right now)

• Favorite songs: The Wannabe by Okay Kaya, You got time and I got money by Smerz, Shameless by Nilüfer Yanya

• Favorite foods and drinks: Soy milk cappucinos (bone dry), sardines with avocado and salt, soft-shell crab sushi

• Favorite memories: My trip to Philadelphia and NYC for my book launches, before I broke my toe, got an infection and became bedridden for a week (as I’ve been telling everyone, c’est la vie)

Looking ahead

• I’ll be in Paris and Marseille for a few readings in the first week of December (see my Instagram for details)

• I’ll be reading in Chicago with some of my closest friends, including Emma Burger, whose Substack I love, on Friday, Dec. 12, at my friend’s apartment in Albany Park (details here)

• The new issue of SARKA will be out in January 2026 (follow us and sign up to our newsletter for updates), and all our books and merch are 20% off until Jan. 1 using the code “HOLIDAYSALE”

“You don’t think she saw your remoteness as a defense? When she uses remoteness herself as a defense? Didn’t you just tell me? She never looks back?”

Dr. Roger A. MacKinnon, Joan Didion’s psychiatrist, in a conversation with Joan in 2000, quoted in Notes to John

I was eleven or twelve years old when I first seriously thought about what it meant to get married. It was nighttime, I was lying on a mattress on the floor, in a suburb of Athens, at my grandmother’s condo. Probably we had too many people staying there and not enough beds. I was trying to sleep but could not. Instead I imagined the man I would marry. He would be older than me, I thought, and maybe from a country that is not my own: he will know things that I don’t know. He will take me to places that I can’t even imagine.

I never got beyond that, though. When I tried to picture his face, or the color of his hair, I couldn’t see anything, as though the image of him had been smudged with charcoal. I tried, but I couldn’t get to him.

But he wasn’t real, it was I who had made him. I couldn’t get to me.

Women wear beautiful, delicate silk scarves, riddled with imagery of locks, shackles, horsebits. Threads of gold, so many lithe little chains. We want to be brides, so we want to be bridled. Truth is found in sound; truth can be found nowhere else but there; truth is, actually, secondary to it. The way temperature, when it continues on its course in either direction, has no choice but to become pain, has no choice but to turn into torture, like the horrific hatching of some murky chrysalis, this is the way women grow.

“I can deal with the little expectations - the stated ones. I could meet them or refuse to meet them. But the others - the ones you don’t know the reasons for - they have to be met. I can’t refuse them. They become a necessity.”

Joan Didion, in conversation with a psychiatrist in 1955, quoted in Notes to John

In Notes to John, Joan wrote that she told her psychiatrist she generally did not experience stage fright, and even enjoyed public speaking, except for a handful of times where she had intense fear before an event, throwing up before taking the stage. She didn’t realize until later that for each of the times when she experienced this acute fear, one or both of her parents were in the audience.

I can relate to her struggle with expectations, with the difficulty of squaring the demands of others with our demands for ourselves, of understanding which of our desires come from within and which are bestowed upon us like an inheritance. It isn’t that which we know other people expect of us that terrifies us. Like the oft-memed Freudian iceberg, it’s what we can’t see, that which has crystallized in the depths of the wine-dark sea, that stops us in our tracks, freezes us like deer bewitched by headlights. Not only obstructs us as if physically but actually becomes physical, turns our bodies against themselves. Purging: anxiety manifesting as the body emptying itself, ridding itself of itself ritualistically, obsessively. When I am having stressful conversations with other people, I pick at my skin until my nails are stained with red, sticky little crescent-moons. I am never really healed, not fully; I keep parcels of myself on call for this express purpose.

Shame needs meat to feed on. And we are not the kind of girls who are bent toward satisfaction.

What torments me is not, exactly, the idea that the movement of my body in this world can be, and at times is, displeasing to those around me, although that thought, of course, crosses my mind; how could it not? More than that, though, it is simply that I know that to feel shame, to feel displeasure, means I have failed myself. It means I have lost who I am, by letting my own actions take me to a place that threatens me, which is to say, the idea of me.

Who else could, in the truest sense of the word, take me there?

What else do I have, in the truest sense of the word, besides my shadows, flitting on the wall of my cave?

I don’t let anyone in, not really, not totally. Perhaps this is so, like I explained above, I know that the pain I feel is mine. It would be easier to blame my problems on other people, and I do, every now and then, for a little while. It seems like this is something that is done in this world. But, I think sometimes that when you look to some other person for something, for anything, you give them the script of your life, and you give them the pen.

And then it all becomes so predictable, so rote, because I can understand the patterns of behavior of the people around me easily enough; it’s my own patterns, in the end, that elude me.

I’d rather write it all myself.

I’d rather not know what happens.

Monthly recap

• Favorite books: Notes to John (obviously), A Promise by Christine Shan Shan Hou, Little Rich Kids by Emma Burger, Perfection by Vicenzo Latronico

• Favorite movie: Charade (1963)

• Favorite musical artist: The Strokes, especially “You Only Live Once” (2005)

• Favorite food: Sun-dried tomatoes (I eat them by the handful out of the bag like chips; I like the dry ones with no oil because they remind me of beef jerky, although I have never eaten beef jerky in my life)

• Favorite memories: Going to the beach to celebrate my 29th birthday with my friends, and getting sushi and cocktails after

Looking ahead

• I’ll be in Philadelphia on Oct. 4 to celebrate the release of Sam Heaps’ debut novel The Living god, which my press SARKA is publishing

• I’ll be in New York on Oct. 9 to participate in a “Poetry is Famous” reading hosted by Ben Fama and Naomi Falk

• I’ll be at the Ruth Stone House on Oct. 11 for a “Beer and Broadsides” reading (am excited to visit Vermont for the first time ever)

• My book The season of lilacs is monstrous is being released from Blush Lit next month, and I’ll be in New York on Nov. 15 to participate in a joint book release reading at Friends and Lovers in Brooklyn with some of my all-time favorite writers, Christine Shan Shan Hou, M. Elizabeth Scott and Courtney Bush

Other updates

• Two of my new poems were published by Midcult* recently

• Broadsides of my poem “Poem for my Redeemer” are still available from Wonder, one of my favorite presses

My legs are covered with cuts and bruises, summer collateral that I pick at endlessly, won’t let heal. My body takes its time these days, healing itself more slowly than ever before, though I am not yet thirty. I am drinking a cold drink made with collagen and cacao powder, a potion intended to restore my energy and strength after a period of unrelenting fatigue.

Though I pride myself on my productivity and efficiency, it’s true that I’ve always moved slowly in subtle, quiet ways. I only just started having dreams that take place in the apartment that my family moved into in 2016. Usually, my dreams occur within the structures of where I grew up or where I spent a lot of time, like my cousins’ house, or my high school; even some of my elementary schools make regular appearances. My subconscious, it seems, is many, many years behind, walking cautiously along a dark and dusty path while my waking form has sprinted miles and miles away. Uninterested in the dark, in its secrets and its complications. Perhaps it runs in my blood; my father once told me he dreams in black and white.

But last night, I dreamt of myself reciting for an audience a poem I wrote only one year ago, incredibly recently for that part of me that does not exist in the waking world, which is how I know that I am either much too deep inside myself and falling ever-deeper, or that I’m ready.

The poem is from a collection I wrote called The season of lilacs is monstrous, which is forthcoming this October from Blush Lit and is now available for preorder. Each limited-edition preorder comes with a gorgeous and unique lilac cyanotype, made by the poet and photographer Juliana Ward. I couldn’t feel more ridiculously, undeservedly lucky to be working with a publisher who believes my work is deserving of such individual care and attention.

And it’s even more unbelievable to me to have had so many writers I adore, admire and obsess over write kind things about my book. Lamb, who for me was one of the highlights of my participation in the Storyfort literary festival in Boise, Idaho, this spring, wrote of my book: “These poems come from the bruise of the fruit.” I couldn’t think of anything more true.

In my season of fatigue, I also haven’t been writing much. I recently stopped taking all of the medications I was taking, including one for a physical condition that makes me, sometimes, tired and slow. But I am determined to touch the earth with gloves removed from my hands. If this means I am cut, if this means I get dirty, if this means blood is drawn, so be it.

I signed myself up for a poetry workshop last month to force myself into productivity, and ended up writing four new poems, most of which many of the other women in my workshop seemed to dislike. Here is one of them.

Black sugar

My mottled pink skin
Cracks
Like black sugar

Under my fingernails
Which are, like me, ugly
And, unlike me, not yet useless

Blood splits
Like custard
Into its constituent parts

That which gives life
That which infects
That which dries into air

My sticky fingers
Hold a wedge of apple
Its center cut into angles

Like a gemstone
Only worthless
Only mine

Things are bad
When you're just waiting
For life

To be more
Fun

I think I am ready. To let myself heal, to begin again. To write again, to pretend I’m someone I’m not until I become her. One of my fatal flaws is that I wake up every morning truly thinking it is a new day, that I can be someone I’ve never been before. Or I can go back to being someone I used to be, as easily as slipping into an old dress. I still think this is true, although my dreams scream otherwise, drag me back.

I’m planning to start releasing new poems through this Substack, in addition to essays, which is why I opened up paid subscriptions and pledges. Your support, paid or otherwise, means everything to me.

Lastly, some final updates:

My press, SARKA, is publishing a stunning novel, The Living god by Sam Heaps. Preorders are now open.

SARKA is also taking submissions of poetry, prose and art for the next issue of our online journal. Send us your work.

I have signed copies of my first book, Exercise in Desire, for sale after receiving a shipment from my publisher. Details are on my Instagram for anyone who is interested.

Thank you, and more soon!

XO
Francesca

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I'm right over here
Why can't you see me?
Oh oh oh

—Robyn, “Dancing On My Own”

From mid-June to late December of 2024, I wrote a 68,000-word novel. I was quite diligent about it, with the exception of mid-July to mid-August, a period in which I was occupied with packing, and moving, and unpacking all of my belongings and my boyfriend’s belongings. In the chaos of so many boxes stacked precariously atop each other, lining the walls as though they were closing in, I began to see those boxes as little parcels of my own meat, separated from me and conglomerated into some terrible beast. But I digress.

I woke at 6:15 each morning for work - my “real job” at which I earn wages - and finished at approximately 2:30 each afternoon. I ate some forgettable, not very good meal. I perhaps did some stretches on the floor. I went for a long, aimless walk that ended up being too similar to the previous day’s long, aimless walk, frustrating me deeply. A little rat in a little cage. I undertook some kind of errand, maybe picked up a few groceries from the store. I returned home.

And then I started my second job, writing the novel, which I always did in bed. In some inexplicable way it did not feel proper to me to perform this kind of work from the desk, which is where I did and still do all the work for which I am paid.

I wrote a novel lying down. I forged connections between sentences with my mind until I was too tired to continue. There was a point each night where the connections would simply stop, as though I had approached a vast white wall.

I wrote a novel lying down. And each night when I considered my work to be at an impasse, I rose quietly from bed, ate and washed up, folded laundry, wiped down countertops, cleaned myself in the shower, and returned to my bed, where I watched ASMR videos until I fell asleep. Like clockwork.

I wrote a novel lying down.

When I think about it now, my body had no part in it at all.

I ask you to punch me
In the stomach

Like my father used to
To show he could take it

—Me, in a poem I wrote in December, “Boxer”

I finished my novel on December 20th, 2024, at 5:26 p.m. A Christmas present to myself. I saved it to my computer as a PDF. Now my downloads folder says this was “A long time ago.”

I have not edited it since then. I consider it complete. (I took a writing workshop in November in which Charlene Elsby said that she writes with a sheet of paper covering the screen of her computer so that she cannot see what she is writing, and this will forever validate my tendency to write without ever looking back on what I have written, as though I am setting a fire and sprinting from it in order to escape accountability from the damage it causes, mostly to me.)

Also in December I wrote a poem called “Boxer.” It is the longest poem I have written in a very long time, at three pages. It is many things, but first and foremost I consider it an ode to how fucking strong I am. Physically. It is, literally, a celebration of my muscles.

I have not written another poem since then.

Last month I signed up to run a half-marathon later this spring. I texted my friends “it feels so good to have a goal to work toward that like doesn’t involve my brain.”

I got a gym membership. I started running on the treadmill and in the park. I started going to the sauna. When my body was soaked and I could not take it anymore I stepped out of the sauna and drank water and went back in. It felt like there was something murky and insidious beneath my skin that needed to be excised like malignant tissue. I waited and waited for it to leave me. I am waiting but I think it is starting to. To leave.

When I try to pinpoint where it is I think of my face - behind it, as if it has some kind of interior doppelganger. She thrives in darkness and shadow. She is ever-fertile like bacteria, like fistfuls of wet black dirt.

Perhaps she served some purpose to me once and that is why she exists. But I tell her, you are not needed now.

Now I need my arms and my legs. The sun and my sweat.

I do intend to write again, I think. I am not so naive as to think the face behind my face will disappear forever. The hardest lesson I have had to learn and learn and learn is that I think temporary things are forever and forever things are temporary. But it is good to think that way, I think.

It is good to believe in myths, for they serve the purpose of augmenting our purpose.

Perhaps by mythologizing my body its decay will feel less tragic.

No performance can last forever.

One day there will be a punch I cannot take.

It is likely that I won’t see it coming, but even if I do, I don’t think I would try to duck.

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If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two——

The vampire who said he was you

And drank my blood for a year,

Seven years, if you want to know.

Sylvia Plath, “Daddy” (1965)

He detests men, detests all that they are. His belief is that women are the true creators: they are motivated to give, and in the generosity of their creativity they inadvertently make themselves slaves and henchmen. The creativity of men, which is not creativity at all but a mode of conquest, disgusts him.

Rachel Cusk, Parade (2024)

He really believed in this girl. Or else he just wanted to screw her. I'm still not sure which.

Star 80, dir. Bob Fosse (1983)

To say it plainly, these last weeks of summer have exhausted me. I haven’t been seeing very many people or doing very many things, other than the simple tasks I must accomplish if I want to keep my hands’ clasp around this little world from slipping.

I go for long walks alone along the river. The music I love has begun to bore me, so I listen to what’s around me, which is mostly the sounds of children playing.

When I walk by men, more often than not they look at me, size me up. Sometimes - more often than you’d think - they pucker their lips and make kissing noises at me, and sometimes this is paired with telling me I am beautiful.

When I walk by women, they do not smile at me.

I’ve had a poem by Sylvia Plath stuck in my head - you know the one. And it doesn’t help that I just finished reading Parade, another brutal examination by Rachel Cusk of the specific and evil ways in which women find their freedom compromised by the machinations of men.

The other day, walking in the park, I approached a quieter, less densely-populated stretch in which there is a nice little fountain, a fountain that runs only in the summer. As I walked toward the fountain from the south, I saw that the only other person in the area was a man standing solidly like a pole next to the fountain, looking at me.

It crossed my mind that it may not be in my best interest to proceed. Imagining further than that was not necessarily what I wanted to do. If I am to be tortured, I will be tortured, but I refuse to do it to myself.

Then I saw a woman in running gear who was approaching the area from the north. She was clearly tired, slowly walking off her run, and I saw her pause as she spotted the man at the fountain, clearly debating turning around.

We locked eyes for a moment.

I continued walking forward, and so did she. We walked towards each other, glancing around, knowing that projecting our awareness was our only available means of protection, and a meager one at that. When we met at the fountain, we walked together down the path to the west, out of the park.

We said nothing to each other. I couldn’t describe, really, what her face looks like.

This is not a treatise on gender. I know nothing, least of all myself. If I were to bet on one thing in this world, it would be on the capricious nature of my beliefs and opinions.

But something is wrong: How is it that I fear the man who compliments me, praises my beauty, while I lack the instinct to acknowledge or even appreciate the woman pushing her child in a stroller next to me? How is it that I see the end of my life in him, and none of my life in her?

To look him in the eye is to make to him an oath, the periphery of which I know not. To look her in the eye is tantamount to the one thing I most loathe and covet: to look in the mirror.

Is every woman the loneliest girl in the world?

I’m not really someone who ever feels the urge to watch a movie.

I have, however, been deeply affected by a select few - The Fox and the Hound, Lost in Translation, American Beauty, Vicky Christina Barcelona - when I let my strong desire to avoid the visceral stress that perceiving unhappy situations causes me be outweighed by my slightly weaker urge toward grasping some form of new beauty.

Earlier this year, my boyfriend and I watched Star 80 together; I had never seen it before, and was not at all familiar with the true story it’s based on.

In a few words, a pimp-slash-con artist turns a substantially younger girl into famous Playboy model with the promise of love and the actual goal of money, specifically money for himself, and fame, specifically fame for himself.

By the time she realizes their relationship is not symbiotic but in fact parasitic, and tries to pull the leech from her skin, it’s too late. He shoots her and then himself.

As if to say, if the party’s over for me, it’s over for you too.

They were not on good terms when he murdered her, but she met him at their formerly shared house willingly, telling her manager I’d like to stay his friend.

Women were made with one fatal deficiency in constitution: We can fuck the Devil without knowing we’ve fucked him.

Yet, I love men.

Ever since I was a little girl I imagined myself in a wedding dress. When I was a bit older I often imagined myself in the embrace of a man, a man whose face was dark and obscured, for I did not yet know him; still I viewed him as fundamental to my safety and security, which were at that age starting to become threatened in vague ways that I did not yet know how to comprehend.

I adored no one’s company more than my grandfather’s, who complimented me on my jangly bracelets, and cooked me perfect eggs, and toasted Eggos for me, and told me to wear my jacket before I went out in the cold, but was otherwise a quiet man, who kept to himself. I realize now that I loved him so much because I could feel his love without feeling suffocated by it. Perhaps I thought all men would be this way; perhaps this made me more trusting of his gender; still, I think, that’s OK.

For much of my teenage years I read, avidly, books almost solely by men. I not only read but devoured them, devoted myself to them. I was enamored with Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Kerouac. My favorite band was Nirvana, and yes, I thought they were much better than Hole.

I divulged to men secrets and vulnerabilities I wouldn’t have dared tell my few female friends. When I graduated from high school, wanting to get rid of my dozens of journals but not wanting to throw them out, I gave them to a member of the male sex, not trusting them with a woman.

At university, I dated a man who, over a year into our relationship, mockingly and derisively called me stupid; I cried from the sheer shock of it, and then again from the hurt of it; I didn’t leave him, and did many things for him after that.

Yes, I love men.

I don’t really believe that any single man has power over me. The dynamics of my adult life and relationships have taught me that I have as much control as I take for myself.

If I have felt a lack of agency it was as a child; if I have opted for passivity as a woman it was a knowing choice, one that I likely thought would be advantageous in some way.

But the problem with power and choice and agency is that I can only learn how to shield myself against the horrors I know.

I love men, but never let me say I know them.

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It’s hard for me to articulate even to myself what I want myself to be, the way I see myself, or, to put it simply, who I am. This is not to say I don’t have a purpose in life, that I don’t have ambitions, that I don’t want things or actively seek them out, but perhaps it is to say that to define the kind of person who does the things I do has always evaded me.

In school I was neither popular nor unpopular, quiet nor loud, top of the class nor bottom. I dress in basic, neutral colors to avoid a commitment to something I’m not sure I want to say; I’m not sure I want to say anything.

I’ve never felt high enough for high culture, low enough for low culture, I’ve never been balanced enough to toe the line in a real way. Everyone seems to know more about everything than I do: yes, I can be willfully ignorant, there are things I’d rather not know, many things I just don’t care about. Yet more than anything I want to be a person who considers things, who lives a deliberate and intentional life, though I resist every opportunity to do so.

More than that: I have squandered every chance I’ve had to be someone who is measured and careful about who they are, about who they let others believe they are.

My life feels like a constant suspension between Walmart and Whole Foods, the crunchy, stark-white granules of Domino’s sugar I loved to crush in cubes between my teeth and the soft and generous give of an expensive medjool date; a warm sip of collagen-rich bone broth and a can of beans with a spoon for dinner.

I’ve done both, I’ve done it all, I’ve made no pledges of allegiance to either side, I spend all my money in all the wrong ways and on nothing at all, I have forgotten money exists while my debts await repayment, I have taken from others shamelessly, ravenously, terrified of lack.

Since I was a child sitting before my first flatscreen TV there was something I felt within me, a giant gaping hole in the center of me, only wet, too, cold and wet and somehow empty, even though I knew logically, physically, that couldn’t be. But it made me feel unbearably sad when I noticed it.

I guess this could be defined now as girlhood melancholia, or maybe, to be clinical about it, the seed of some future depression, but I don’t think that’s exactly correct. I saw women on the screen - girls, really - and I felt acutely that I was not them, would never be them. This discrepancy served to negate me and manifested as a psychosomatic coldness: I had nothing inside me to keep me warm.

I don’t know if it’s as direct as that, but the feeling I remember like it was yesterday, because it was yesterday. It returns like a seasonal virus with a new mutation, and I can see myself, as I was then, which is also as I am now: there is an austerity, a poverty, in my constitution, and to avoid sensing its unpleasant presence, which is cold and wet and dark, in precisely the part of me that should be the warmest, I will stop at nothing to fill it, or pretend to fill it, or distract myself from its existence.

I became a girl-cave, or, in that moment as a child, I recognized for the first time that I always was one.

And I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that almost all of my actions since then have been motivated by the desire to fill myself back up again, or, should that prove impossible, become such a good actress that I myself forget the cave is there.

But I’m bad at acting, even worse at simply lying, which is ironic, because my constant state of being is searching for a constant state of being, and pretending should be easy for someone who spends their life trying others’ lives on.

This is not to say that I don’t have certain preferences, habits, desires, personal beliefs, morals - only that I have always struggled to place my body in a broader context. My emptiness resists filling and grows deeper, colder, wetter at each failure to integrate myself into the world, a world.

From as young as eight years old I specifically remember dressing to look like someone else, wanting to be someone else, with the belief that adopting another person’s physical attributes would work to my advantage, give me the key that would open the door to somewhere warm and solid.

Joan Didion wrote that as a journalist she dressed so she could pass for either side of the “culture.” She knew that anyone, everyone, could be branded, herded into an area with clear borders, and in each area one would be given certain opportunities and cut off from others, one would adhere to certain inclusion criteria and in turn be understood by others, given context, given form.

I have never known such a border, have never been able to believe in one enough to watch it solidify. This has manifested in transience, in never having a clear-cut friend group, always going through a phase. I try things on and find nothing fits, I get the thing I want and realize the target has shifted out of reach, over and over and over again.

To have a brand you have to believe in the product, and what do you do when the product is your body, a body you are unsure of how to move and place and clothe and feed?

If I sell myself to anyone I feel like a con artist, if anyone believes a word I speak - even if it is the so-called truth - I feel like I got away with something.

Like I could be a girl on the TV.

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Πιστεύομεν εἰς ἕνα Θεὸν Πατέρα παντοκράτορα, ποιητὴν οὐρανοῦ καὶ γῆς, ὁρατῶν τε πάντων καὶ ἀοράτων.

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.

ποιητής | poiētḗs

Koine Greek (ἡ κοινὴ διάλεκτος), used 300 B.C. to 600 A.D.

• a maker, a producer, author

• a doer, performer

• one who obeys or fulfils the law

Modern Greek

• a poet

The Nicene Creed, or the Creed of Constantinople, is recited in Greek Orthodox churches each Sunday, once in English and once in Koine Greek, or the Greek spoken after Ancient Greek and before Medieval Greek and Modern Greek.

In this stage of the Greek language, God is often referred to as ποιητής, or creator; this word later came to mean poet.

James 1:22 reads:

Γίνεσθε δὲ ποιηταὶ λόγου καὶ μὴ μόνον ἀκροαταὶ παραλογιζόμενοι ἑαυτούς.

But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves.

The poet is not content with passivity; the poet acts.

In a kind of righteous violence, the poet substantiates the word into the flesh. It is not sufficient to listen.

The curse of the poet: there is always something to be birthed.

The curse of the poet: there is always pain in the birthing.

The curse of the poet: maker of heaven but confined to earth.

Last week, I recited my poems for an audience for the first time in six months. The poems were older, ones I had read aloud many times before. Yet I hadn’t sufficiently practiced, hadn’t anticipated the vulnerability I would feel, one that I was desensitized to and unfamiliar with.

The feeling isn’t identical to dread, but perhaps adjacent to it. What am I doing? What have I done?

It was as though I had allowed a room full of strangers to watch me eat a meal - no, to watch me sleep. Or to watch me shower, or fuck, or fight. The intimacy burned my cheeks like a slap. It was not quite embarassment; it felt closer to purposeful self-degradation, a sought-for violent act. Bending over.

I looked up at the audience: women smiling at me kindly, with understanding. Men laughing, maybe smirking.

I didn’t mind it, in fact I liked it, but it was unusual to me, paying such close attention to them. I always told myself that I wrote because I need to, not because I need an audience.

My translator, reading my poems in French, told me she was warned ahead of time by the editor of the magazine in which my poems were appearing that Francesca reads in monotone, so that she could adjust her voice in accordance with mine.

Why, for so long, have I distanced myself from my writing, and, in doing so, my audience?

I should have been a doer of the word; instead I had been hearing my own words as though someone else had written them.

The answer is always fear. We play it safe, hedge our bets.

Why did Judas betray Jesus?

Why do I kneel in church and beg God to forgive me, protect those I love, not let anything bad happen?

Why did I turn the act of poetry - a holy, godlike act - into a way to violate myself into feeling nothing?

I am afraid of what happens if I don’t.

I have always thought I felt too much, even while those around me have no clue what I’m feeling. I have rightfully been accused of telling lies - big, terrible lies - via omission, silence.

As Frank O’Hara wrote: You do not always know what I am feeling.

But is this not the antithesis of the poet’s duty, as the doer of the word?

Am I not also deceiving my own self?

We recite: God, the poet, made all things visible and invisible.

The curse of the poet: turning the invisible into the visible.

The curse of the poet: creating light where there was once darkness.

The curse of the poet: nowhere left to hide.

I’ve been so busy with SARKA (we’re preparing to open novel manuscript submissions on June 1) and getting ready for a trip to Paris to read with Revue Transat that I haven’t had much time to write, but my friend Nicolette (author of ) suggested I put together a list of book recommendations, so here it is: my “classics” as well as new favorites, in no particular order.

A Bad Girl’s Book of Animals by Wong May

“I’ll not leap / the full length of / my chain to you. / I’ll sit counting links / like a miser his gold”

The Defector by Monika Maron

“The brain began to mistrust the body, it accused it of being ugly and undependable; it denied it by carefully covering its nakedness even in summer, not even allowing bare arms to be seen by strangers. The body revolted in illness against the imposed lack of freedom, or, as soon as the tired or intoxicated brain slackened its attention, took revenge with unpredictable outbursts that brought nothing but sterner supervision. The impulses from body and brain to a third being within her, which Rosalind was inclined to call soul, were so disparate that Rosalind often believed she would have to divide herself in two if she were not to go mad.”

Pig Tales by Marie Darrieussecq

“If all men are pigs, then what can a woman do but turn into a sow.”

Homerica by Phoebe Giannisi

“so come eat a cuttlefish at our table but afterwards I want you to fuck me the way I deserve”

Little Book of Meat by Selima Hill

“My nipples tick / like little bombs of blood. / Someone is walking / in the yard outside. / I don’t know why / Our Lord was crucified. / A really good fuck / makes me feel like custard.”

Coventry by Rachel Cusk

“Once it has shown itself unwilling to be free, you can treat that dog how you like: it won’t run away.”

Trouble in Mind by Lucie Brock-Broido

“I was a hunger artist once, as well. / My bones had shone. / I had had rapture on my side.”

What Are You by

“So alone, so alone, you say - you’re so so alone. I wonder if you remember that I once loved you, you and only you, with all the force of me, and you threw me away. You are the logical conclusion of you.”

Animal Triste by Monika Maron

“He told me the story of Paolo and Francesca. For all eternity, said Franz, they are condemned to fly through hell chased and pushed by violent gusts of wind. But they don’t let go of each other. Despite the torments of hell, they never cease loving each other. Animals don’t go to hell, said I.”

The Setting Sun by Osamu Dazai

“God killed me, and only after He had made me into someone else entirely different from the person I had been, did he call me back to life.”

Democracy by Joan Didion

“Perhaps because nothing in this situation encourages the basic narrative assumption, which is that the past is prologue to the present, the options remain open here. Anything could happen.”

The Joy and Terror are Both in the Swallowing by Christine Shan Shan Hou

“A prison is a / prison and the beginning / of my love for you”

Collected Poems by C.P. Cavafy

“Even if you can’t make your life as you want it, / at least try / as much as you can: don’t cheapen it / with too much contact with the world, / with too much activity and talk.”

Selected Poems by Yiannis Ritsos

“Night arrives / speechless / with her hands under her armpits / immersed in our fear’s dimness. / All suspicions are realized. / Darkness hides nothing. / A bat came through the window. / This has no meaning.”

Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq

“the permanent look of panic that the chickens gave you, that look of panic and incomprehension; they didn’t ask for pity, they wouldn’t have been capable of it, but they didn’t understand, they didn’t understand the conditions in which they had been called upon to live.”

Loose Woman by Sandra Cisneros

“My neck is thin / You could cup / it with one hand / Yank the life from me / if you wanted / I’ve cut my hair / You can’t tug / my hair anymore / A jet of black / through the fingers now / Your hands cool / along the jaw”

In the Margins by Elena Ferrante

“Beautiful writing becomes beautiful when it loses its harmony and has the desperate power of the ugly. And characters? I feel they are false when they exhibit clear coherence and I become passionate about them when they say one thing and do the opposite. ‘Fair is foul and foul is fair,’ say those extraordinary narrators who are the witches in Macbeth as they prepare to hover through the fog and filthy air.”

Animal by Lisa Taddeo

“May you not go around the world looking to fill what you fear you lack with the flesh of another human being.”

Beloved by Toni Morrison

“Touch me on the inside part and call my name.”

Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami

“If the love is true, then treat it the same way you would plant - feed it, protect it from the elements - you must do absolutely everything you can. But if it isn't true, then it's best to just let it wither on the vine.”

Path of Totality by Niina Pollari

“Every day brings a new tyranny. / I’m on my knees, just like the devil said.”

Stray by Stephanie Danler

“The Monster: I’m sorry. The Monster: Steph. Don’t, I say out loud. Do not. The Monster: It goes without saying that I love you. Does it? I wonder. Go without saying? The Monster: Please.”

A Symmetry by Ari Banias

“I had a body and it was good / until you gave it meaning. / Meaning ruined pleasure / and created it / so ruin creates / and pleasure’s meaning”

The Complete Poems by Anne Sexton

“Your head is what I remember that August / you were in love with another woman but / that didn't matter. I was the fury of your bones, your fingers long and nubby, your / forehead a beacon”

Poems of Akhmatova by Anna Akhmatova

“Wild honey has a scent – of freedom / Dust – a scent of sunshine / And a girl’s mouth – of violets. / But gold – nothing. / Water – like mignonette. / And like apple – love. / But we have learned that / blood smells only of blood.”

The Sacraments of Desire by Linda Gregg

“The polar bear hasn’t eaten since November / the television says . . . She rolls over / on her back and slides a little more.”

The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg

“Our dreams are never realized and as soon as we see them betrayed we realize that the intensest joys of our life have nothing to do with reality. No sooner do we see them betrayed than we are consumed with regret for the time when they glowed within us. And in this succession of hopes and regrets our life slips by.”

Selected Poems by Lucille Clifton

“now i watch myself whenever i enter a room. / i never know what i might do.”

The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson and Issa edited and translated by Robert Hass

“In this world / We walk on the roof of hell / Gazing at flowers”

Selected Poems by Kiki Dimoula

“Lord, could it be when you approved / these merciless contradictory psalms / you were still a man?”

White Girls by Hilton Als

“Are you hoping that one day she’ll stop acting and love you as herself forever? You might as well give that idea up. A mother doesn’t give that part up until God yells ‘Cut!’ Neither does a junkie. Neither does an actress. The hope you all have that women will act differently - somewhere, somehow - is just that: your hope. Actresses are themselves, if only they had one. Women are themselves,if only they could stop acting.”

I’m sure I’m forgetting so many books I love - expect new iterations of this list in the future. I’m working on my next Body Composition essay; in the meantime, you can follow me on Instagram @fmkrit to keep up with my trip to Paris and other projects. And you can email me some poems (send 3-5 poems and a biographical statement to fmkrit@gmail.com) if you want your writing to be considered as the subject of a future newsletter. Thank you for reading!