to be local means to memorize water and compare individual waves
to shapes ur hands make.

—Karolina Zapal

The touch was too personal, condescending, audacious, and misogynistic. But more than anything, it was lonely and kind.

“There is a wideness in God’s mercy, like the wideness of the sea.” I thought of our lake that couldn’t wash away the filth of this city. Of our river that burned so many years ago and still seemed to burn.

To mislabel the promise / of honey as merely something added to enhance / flavor is to disrespect its viscosity and heft as existing / in our tissue, in our animal body.