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- When Life Gives You Lemons
I’m currently in the process of wrapping up my year, creating lists of the joys, wins, and things I loved that helped me get through this year, as well as assessing what I could learn from my habits and actions this year. Some of this I’ll be sharing here soon. For now, I just want to offer you a poem, first published in ILLUMINATION in July 2021.
When Life Gives You Lemons
Once, the tree sagged, so heavy
with yellow orbs each shake of the branch
would release a thudding
of overripe fruit. Too many to make lemonade,
they sat rotting, turning green
and then gray. Evidence of entropy.
Life is a shifting of present
moment to present moment.
The association of lemons to hardship
is false. Or, true. But no more true
than relating lemons to joy. One puckers
at the sourness of the juice; one also
puckers to receive a kiss.
Once, I watched a friend pluck the curled
lemon peel from her martini glass
and place it on her pink tongue. Her lips
pressed into a mauve-stained smile
as she chewed. My own peel was bland
and bitter, and I could not muster
the same pleasure
I found beautiful in her.
Sometimes the future is too laden
with hopes, I cannot swallow
them fast enough. I forget in stripping the tree
the fruit is already in my hand, the juice
making my fingers sticky,
the seeds rooting into the ground.
Sometimes I forget decay is the prelude,
the slick sustenance of new birth.
What I’ve Been Working On
My poem, “We of the Earth,” was recently published in Space and Time, Issue #147. I’m so grateful to the editors and honored to have my work appear in this respected journal, which is available in both a print and digital edition.
Twist Tales published an interview, in which I get to discuss my “Five Tips on Writing,” including hooking the audience, plot development, world building, character design, and making meaningful choices. Here’s a brief preview of the interview:
Tone is one of the first things I try to get right with an opening, with the aim of creating a sense of mood or feeling that will permeate throughout the whole narrative. Generally, this tone is anchored with a specific character, setting, event, or imagery (depending on the needs of the story) that grounds the audience in the narrative and sets up expectations for the story — while also providing a sense of intrigue that makes the audience curious about what’s to come.
My essay, “Great Indie Games I Played at GDC,” was published at Crossplay — and if you like indie games, there’s plenty to explore and keep and eye out for.
And last, but not least, Necessary Poisons was featured on Reedsy Discovery — and I am so grateful to Jason Arias for his lovely review.
Good Reads
Maria Popova published “An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days” at The Marginalian. She writes about her journey into creating something like oracle cards, blending illustrations from John James Audubon’s Birds of America and then creating found poetry using his descriptions of the birds. Each of card is beautiful and evocative, and I particularly her examination of tarot as a way of facing uncertainty:
Birds began populating my own dreams. A great blue heron glided across the sky of my mind, slow and prehistoric, carrying the world on her back. A million sandhill cranes unspooled from the horizon, turned into the Milky Way, turned into music, turned into time itself. A magpie spoke to me in my mother’s voice.
Around the same time, I was discovering that multiple people I love and respect were fond of tarot — something I had always regarded as an embarrassing echo of medieval superstition, antiscientific and intellectually unsound, devised in a world where Satan was more real to the average person than gravity. But as I replaced contempt with curiosity, I came to see it simply as a coping mechanism for the difficulty of living with all this uncertainty, the difficulty of being so opaque to ourselves — a language for interpreting our intentions and experiences, the way the primary purpose of prayer is to clarify our hopes and fears.
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