I arrived into my 4th year of sobriety! There was once a time when I could never have imagined that to be possible. I clawed my way through one day, one week, 30 days, 60, 90–all those fragile but miraculous milestones, fearing the power of this disease every step of the way. And I still…
Purpose. I think I’ve hated that word all my life. But I realized tonight that I’ve been setting it down in the context of “doing” and in the doing should be all sorts of evidence of how much I am getting it right. Family. Career. Goals achieved. Accolades received. But tonight, through a little bit…
This day is soft and quiet. The kind that has weight, soundless sound. I don’t want to leave the warmth of my comforter even though the cats are all staring at me and I have plenty of things to do around the house before I enjoy a dinner out with my parents. Every day we…
With every milestone I walk up to with my admittedly goofball, clinically introverted 🤣, yet stout determination, I am thrilled to report that I still fear the hell out of alcohol. There is no softening to the idea that, hey, maybe I got this sobriety thing in the bag. I know what waits for me…
We decorated our Christmas tree today and it was the first time in years it felt like Christmas. We listened to music and giggled and took turns pulling the cats off the tree. God, my blind one is an unspeakable nightmare about the tree. As I type, I am keeping him company/holding him hostage in…
When grief unseats my soul within the world, adrift and shining, searching for a home, I lift my face to night’s sky of star-pearled signs, crying out I am never alone. Love’s bond is the bridge to the other side. It always finds me in my time of need. And holds my heart, arriving like…
Do not be afraid. It’s just God, fanning the dark train of his blue gown over the forest floor, taking his seat, sifting for his mark in that secret book on his lap, from where he’ll read to us, and to the animals that stayed behind, blinking inside tree hollows, or yielding their bodies under…
Our love has made eternity and in it we will spend, long-armed days that stretch o’er sea swells, whose rolling never ends. I come to you like a sunrise, you hold me like the moon. One heart imbued with forever, One soul to light the fuse. What wealth abides as we stay here, What wealth…
She spent years underwater, feeling God prepare her body below the sensible bulrushes, below the savage certainty of need. She made a home there inside that holy hunger, her terrible jaw a bloody cup filling over and over again. One day it would all make sense. One day— just before dawn, on a reed, she…
I kneel over the Walden Pond in me, a deep green Earth’s eye into which I see the secret of the poet’s sacred art of striking at the stone to find the heart. With pen and pad I rise to walk the land, whose pleas roll through my soul and out my hand. I’ll speak…
Sobriety Poet 