Your love enters me like light into leaf, and I give it back as breath.   It thickens my veins with green hope, turns hunger into sugar stored deep.   Years later and still, moisture rises unseen, your gift turning my heat into rain.   I lean toward you, my body remade in colour, until even my shade shelters other.   At dusk you linger, a glow held under. In storm you steady, my stem refusing to sunder.   Sometimes, I return your love as blossom, fruit in hand, seed for tomor

Do not burn me to ashes then pour me into a vase. Let my body be food for life-giving worms.   In place of my bones  a mighty tree might bloom, and every time you eat from its seeds and fruit   my atoms shall find a loving home in you, and in the rhythmic throb of your beating heart,   you will carry the pulse of a million lives, for the fruit of me is of a million more—   each will have eaten the seeds and flesh of a fruit once fed by those before. First place in the 2025 Ri

Maybe, the bright flash of light and the feeling of ascent that some people sense   during a near-death event   is the universe when it was just an opaque gleam and electrons emitted photons every way they beamed.   Maybe, memory of this is encoded in our brains from when we were particles with no stars to name,   floating freely as quark and lepton through the molten hush of the space-time dawn,   and it is this we glimpse when death comes around to shroud our eyes in i

There is a room beneath the noon—no clocks, no sun. We fold morning into a coin, slip it under the tongue, enter with pockets full of hours. Outside, the city bargains with horns and flyers.   We learn the economy of absence: how to make a day vanish between two breaths. Sometimes, life asks for me back: I hand myself over as a crumpled note.   Though I carry in my chest the debt of having been gone, I like the red lights that rain, the downward spiral, the velvet dark that m

When I think about having it all, I think of my big sister planting a fig tree in her garden. I see her there, in my head— knees in the dirt, hair tracing her face in arched streams like a water sprinkler, hands patting the soil while Poppy, her pup, digs chaos in the mud.   I remember her saying, ‘To make it bloom, you must keep its roots in check, press them into the curve of a pot.’   Unfettered, the tree will squander itself on leaves, wood reaching farther than sweetness

Light came through the window above the sink, pale and clean. The city below was hushed by glass and the weight of sleep. On the sill, a tangle of ivy and wilting basil caught the wind, their leaves trembling faintly in the draft. I watched the street fill with its usual delivery vans, cyclists weaving between cars, and a woman in a yellow coat hurrying her child across the intersection. Near them, other kids clustered by the school gates, some chasing each other around a ben