This essay was commissioned by Emergence Magazine. In it, I consider why it might be difficult to consider "natural" burial, the ages-old practice of returning the body directly to the earth. "Conventions contain our messiness" I wrote. "We lean into frames and they hold and direct us. Until they don't." Some of our most common practices no longer sustain us or the earth. "Responsive imagining" might make it possible to see the beauty, holiness, sustainability, poetry in giving ourselves back to the earth, and understanding the creatures and systems that make that possible. "Though it's a hovery state, this being neither-created-nor-destroyed", we are, all of us, born to it."

Our received ways of seeing offer us binary choices or lenses. Lichens (scruffy, magical beings that they are)  reject all that. Lichens take up their position as edge-dwellers, reconstituting what we see as "waste"  and making it available to us as sustenance -- and they do so under immensely difficult conditions. In contrast to our often lavish ways of describing beauty, lichens are quietly stunning, refuse the conventional terms of beauty, and suggest a sustainable aesthetic.

These new poems will be published as a portfolio in Plume Magazine. I’m interested in the way brevity can be an experience of depth and significance, and not merely brief in terms of time-spent; it often feels like the shortest poems can work with the biggest subjects.  Charles Simic once called poets who worked in short forms “miniaturists whose secret ambition is to write an epic on the inside of a matchbook cover.” Small things encourage attention, and suggest that there’s much to miss if we don’t look into them with patience, a stance with ecological implications that many of my poems and essays take on directly.

“Owl: An Imaginary” will be published in Agni Magazine. I’ve long been interested in the literary establishment’s dictum against “anthropomorphizing” – a rule that works to keep empathy at bay, and keep us all in our emotional/experiential lanes. In this essay. I’m interested in the ways imagining into the bodies of others, and paying attention to that drive, might create more space for relationships and reciprocity between us and the other than human world.

This essay is forthcoming in Orion Magazine. The detritus around us -- evidence of our beliefs, ethics, priorities, loves, failures, ambitions -- has stories to tell.  I'm interested in listening to those stories and trying to learn how to live into the coming ruin and the coming unexpected light.  We humans have irrevocably hurt our life-sustaining systems; we'll have to start figuring out how to talk about that with future generations, and how to keep open our capacity for tenderness, and their capacity for hope.