Kitschy & Banal, Our Beloved Modern World

Jeff Koons is an artist in which I’ve wanted to hurl small, edgy pebbles at him during my undergrad education. I know slightly aggressive, however look at his infamous art and then watch an interview. Gah.
He is, well, arrogant first of all, but I suppose one must be in order to create his excessively banal [...]

Moor This Vessel

my fictitiously non-descript cavity
emits
confusing tales 
void of compasses and skylines
the more told,
the more my cavity fills up
with dried and wilted
reveries and dreamscapes
describing what once 
pulsated
inside this null space
will the anchor tie itself to me?
pulling me downward
onto the dry, dusty, brightly definitive
land, vast and comprehensible
by the human eye
torrid and palpable
to my expanding pores
the dense anchor 
keeps this body
still
the enormous star
ignites [...]

Loss

My newly post-teen brother on Loss, written for Wheaton College’s newspaper:
 
Mortality came as a shock to me this summer. I had returned home from the Wheaton in the Holy Land Trip that took me all the way from Israel to Rome. On my trip, I experienced people groups I had never experienced before, new foods I had [...]

The Duncan Phyfe Sofa: Guilt’s Rest Spot

As a lass, with a Scottish name and maternally Scottish heritage, I became quickly aquainted with an heirloom from my mother’s mother. 
The Duncan Phyfe sofa. She is a He and He is a She. I see this long upholstered seat with a back and arms, for two or more people, as bearing both qualities of [...]

Foolishly Smart

Bon Iver found Sarah Siskind’s Lovin’s For Fools and now they perform it together, occasionally. Together with Bon Iver’s magical harmonies and arrangement and Sarah’s hearty voice, they make ecstasy…I can’t contain my tears, the ducts get too full for this song…

Extraordinary Beauty

While in a common reaction to seeing a thing of beauty is to want to buy it, our real desire may be not so much to own what we find beautiful as to lay permanent claim to the inner qualities it embodies…What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically [...]

Blustering White Flags

If,
I
Listen to your letters
Which form small, slightly insufficient words
That take up linear space,
describing bits of me
Then,
I
Will have to cast off
the whole of her
Letting loose all the glimmering
Shards
of which I held
in my protective bag with my hands clasped
Tightly around it
And now my soul is
Littered with,
Splintered driftwood
And I can embrace only
That which calls for
Gnashing teeth
Angels
The angels are [...]