Last year I became a parent for the second (and last!) time, and my writing practice slid from slow to nonexistent, which is why I’m so grateful to my friend, Anthony Garrett, who I met at Tin House Winter Workshop last year, for allowing me to submit work previously published at a now defunct, beloved journal, Entropy, to the new literary magazine co-founded by himself and Joely Fitch, atmospheric lit. A literary journal devoted to cloud-like writing, in the inaugural issue editor’s note, Anthony writes, “atmospheric quarterly arises from a craving for writing that reads everything other than the borders drawn on literary maps, from an excitement about literature that refuse its own calcification.” If you know me, you know that’s my writer’s siren call.

Please read the whole gorgeous issue at the link above! My three micros can be found here. It is a special honor to have the first piece, “the moon is far away yet it sways the tide,” selected as the April 7, 2024 featured poem at Poetry Daily.

If you know me very well, you know I love a tiny thing that won’t die. For years, “moon” has been my tiniest and favorite piece of writing. It is so small and I have avoided being online for so long (that will change one day, I promise!), it never got much attention but I’ve been turning it over in my mind for years. With the help of other Tin House beloveds (Tin House gifts keep giving!), LiXin and Diann Leo-Omine, I edited this piece to a place where it finally feels done enough, and most importantly, I know as much as I can know about it. I feel very lucky and grateful that this more realized version made its way to atmospheric lit from where it was chosen to be featured in Poetry Daily among the work of real, actual poets (!!).

If you know me from the writing world, you know I don’t consider myself a poet. To me, to know a form is to know how to teach it–I have never taken a formal poetry class; I couldn’t take the form apart and put it back together for someone else–but I think the time has come to accept that I am enough of a poet–if I don’t believe in hemming writing into genres, why deny myself any genre I can fit into? This is the first piece I’ve published that I’ve added line breaks (of a kind) to. I still consider it a prose poem born of a prose tradition but I feel braver than I used to about stepping into a kind of light, which is how line breaks and being online feel to me. I’m currently working on pieces that I won’t pretend aren’t poetry–I hope to announce their publication at some point.

In the meantime, please take a look at “moon,” republished on the eve of the latest eclipse, it too, is about a solar eclipse, based on a memory my mother told me so often, the telling has become my task. It is about the things we can’t, or wont, see, and about generational unknowing passed down mother to mother like microchimeric cells in the body. The second micro, “Solastalgia,” is a sunny, tiny piece about climate grief, which is a loss so large I don’t know how to approach it any other way. The last prose poem, “to my community,” is written by the spirit of, and in honor of, a very young part of me, whom I’m trying to know better.

Thank you for reading. I hope the clouds where you are, are serving today.