I said I am not your flower

Poetry

Oct 3

I said I am not your flower.
Not one of your saints in gold,
not bred for beauty
or held in soft hands.

I crack sidewalks.
Feed on rot.
Grow where the ground has failed.

You don’t want what blooms from that.
Don’t touch it.
Don’t name it.
Don’t kneel like this is sacred.

My roots remember the blade.
My leaves keep score.
I’ve outlived the trowel, the drought,
the boots of better men.

Still you hover.
Still you dig
with those careful hands,
like this was love
and not hunger.

But I am not yours to rescue.
And if I turn—
if I open—
know this:

It is not forgiveness.
It is a warning.

Something in me survives
by consuming the light.

Reflections, Rebuilding Home Series

The Price of Shelter: What Survival Teaches Us About Systems

Reflections, Rebuilding Home Series

There’s a kind of stillness that comes when you’ve run out of plans. It’s not peace. It’s a forced quiet, like when the body shuts down just enough to keep you breathing. In that silence, you begin to see how a system really works—not from the diagrams or the policies, but from the vantage point of the people it’s supposed to help.

Reflections, Rebuilding Home Series

Fiction

Orange & Amber

Fiction

Grey doesn’t scare me like it used to.

Fiction

Three Birds

Fiction

Sade is woken by the sounds and motions of a struggle next to her on the mattress. With what shadowy vestiges remain of her sight, she catches a flurry of movement as someone disappears into the bathroom.

Fiction

Reflections

The Woman at Midnight: Rage as Data in a Collapsed System

Reflections

Why can’t I do this?

Reflections

Poetry

Recoil, Regroup

Poetry

Just to move away from

this space this place

This gap in the forest walls

Poetry

Reflections

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Reflections

A meditation on the thin line between having a home and losing one, and how the light still falls evenly, even when the world doesn’t.

Reflections

Fiction

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Fiction

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Exhausted by the “I’m sorry you feel that way” Olympics?

Fiction

Reflections

The Physics of Holding Together: Lessons from a Women’s Shelter

Reflections

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Reflections

Fiction

Treading Water

Fiction

Peter Ganglidge knows he is starting to lose control. Every day the pain gets worse, his energy is waning, and things are becoming harder to keep concealed.

Fiction

Peaches and Pearls

Fiction

Trails of dried tears ridge her cheeks, though she doesn’t recall why she was crying.

Fiction

Reflections

The Rooms That Rebuilt Me

Reflections

Then one afternoon, rifling through a stack of papers I wasn’t supposed to see, I found some official looking paperwork and—

Reflections

The Invisible Work of Collapse: Is Your Endurance Just Burnout in Disguise?

Reflections

Pain is feedback—the body’s alarm system for hidden stress. When we normalize that pain (“everyone’s exhausted,” “that’s just the culture”), we mute the signal.

Reflections

After the Implosion: How I Built a Life That Stands

Reflections

Seven years ago, my life effectively ended.

Reflections

Steel Logic: How Prefab Teaches Us to Design Better Systems

Reflections

Prefab LGS isn’t just a building system—it’s a structural metaphor for systems that are light, strong, repeatable, and resilient.

Reflections

Poetry

Borne of the Winter

Poetry

and what a time
to be wrought
from bleak skies, from
forlorn magpies.

Poetry

Poetry, Reflections

Scratching - the Scar Skin

Poetry, Reflections

You work the day shift. You work the night shift. You don’t sleep. You sleep too much. You eat. You don’t. It doesn’t matter. You keep scratching for life, hoping like hell the light returns.

Poetry, Reflections