On October 10th, 2025, the one-year anniversary of my daughter Abby’s funeral, I awoke at our cabin in Northern Minnesota and got ready to drive the 15 minutes to Balmoral golf course. The year had carved me into an emotional relief of pain, guilt, sorrow, gratitude and wonderment, and I wanted the day to be a reflection on the yearlong emotional tempest that spun my life in all directions.

in this poem i will assess all the winding routes to betterment

examine my inner workings
and optimize them
make another list
a financial report
break down my existence into simple word problems

I read Virginia Woolf’s novels and her famous 1929 lecture, A Room of One’s Own, at the University of Cambridge during my master’s from 2021 to 2023. At the time, I did not realise how deeply her words would follow me into life beyond the classroom. At first, it was simply a part of my curriculum, something I had to study for the exams and pass the course. But gradually, as a writer, it began to permeate my daily existence. Woolf writes about a woman who needs a place of her own to write.

Grandfather’s clock struck at dawn when Father woke me up and said:
“Today you are a man.”
I was twelve years old.
With nothing more to say, Father left my room, leaving me to the morning rise.
I sat up and swung my legs out of bed—my feet had been able to reach the floor in this position ever since the previous summer—and with shaky sleepiness, I rose to standing in my embroidered linen nightgown.

if the world continues on
long enough, past
you and me and everyone
we know, will every
house be a house
where someone famous once
lived, every home a museum, except maybe ours

The unpaved, bumpy red clay roads are throwing dust onto my windshield. The air is thick from the summer humidity. The sweat on my forehead rolls down my nose and onto my top lip. It is July in the small southern town of Leesburg, Georgia. Passion fills my soul. I am looking for a woman. Her name is unknown to me. I will know her when I see her.

Think for a moment of your childhood home. Your bedroom, where you slept, played with your dolls and cars, and sludged through homework. Your kitchen, where your mother hovered over the stove, stirring chicken noodle soup. Your living room, where you watched TV with your siblings, decorated the Christmas tree with both breakable and paper ornaments, and sat in the corner, sulking in time-out.

The waitress didn’t call me honey when she set down my bowl of clam chowder
but said she liked my cheap sunglasses,
and looked at me strangely when I made some graceless joke about them,
utterly unprepared for a compliment

I step out of the doorway of my building onto the morning street under the grey ash-toned sky.
A woman is jogging down the sidewalk, her feet leaving footprints in the ash film which covers everything. A man who I see so often on my street (yet whose name I do not know) waves to me and enters a darkened car. Then he silently goes on his phone, while sitting in the driver’s seat.

When did my hands become my mother’s?
I took the time to really notice them, finishing typing the last words of a text to my daughter’s babysitter to let her know I would be a little late due to a train delay. Smooth and yet slightly leathered from years of harsh Chicago winters and humid summers. Knuckles crosshatched and indented. Small wrinkles appear here and there, wrapping around my pudgy fingers.

My hanging basket of geraniums dies
on my front porch, soil in a pot
surrounded by three sides of bricks.
I leave for work, come home every day,
thinking I should clean this thing out,
put something new in its place.

The family cruise had been Aunt Jane’s idea. Always the organizer, she sent a group text with a link to the cruise line’s website and a caption that read, “Kleinfelters Take to the Seas!” One month later, a gaggle of family and I were booking our passage on the Festivities II for a five-day Caribbean cruise. Including spouses, partners, and kids, there were twenty of us. My sister Lizzie, four years older, had volunteered to design reunion T-shirts

In a low-slung stone building
commas return like monks, slightly
drunk after sipping Trappist Ale.
They have taken a vow of silence
and do not hum between titles of hymns,
films, foreign phrases and blessings.

Conjure a faun in the middle of field.

There’s a cabin in the distance, homespun
& brown, & the thick-torso’d wild turkeys
march a few feet away, leaving dinosaur
tracks in their wake.

Don’t let any of this stop you.

The smoke runs thin
by mid-morning

The river is once again
worth waking for

I approach the water,
spread my arms,

wade,
then rise

Dear,
Do you remember the story I told you about that extraordinary girl I once mentioned? I’ve learnt something more about her and simply must tell you.
She was born into an ordinary family. Everything around her was simple — a kind father, a gentle mother, a small room in a small flat filled with books. She wasn’t beautiful, only quietly remarkable

My mother does not approve of off-color language. But she is going to tell the story, the whole story and nothing but the story, even if she must reference her own hind parts.
“Have I told you about Mr. Warble? George Warble?” she asks my sister and me. We are on a conference line. She has called this meeting, not a good sign.

You belay each old conception
Clean into the next room.
Meanwhile, I turn my heart over
To some crooked star. It burns

“Buy the dip! Buy the dip! Buy the dip! Buy the dip!”
With steepled fingers and crossed legs, Charlis Yano beheld the gaggle of coveralls-wearing fishers slamming their fists onto desktops while chanting the very words one latched onto whenever the Halifax Stock Exchange found itself in a tug of war between red and green digits. On the one hand, turning challenges into opportunities could pay off further down the line.
On the other hand. Or rather, on the other side of the room…

Maya almost missed the turn.
The GPS told her, in a voice that sounded both apologetic and bored, to take the next right. Only there was no next right, just a paved shoulder and a strip of sand where grass tried to grow and failed. The sign itself appeared at the last moment, a rectangle of worn blue metal almost the same color as the January sky.

I was standing in a line that stretched out the door and down the sidewalk as we gathered to clock in. It was only 6:15 a.m., but already it was over eighty degrees. I could see sweat stains beginning to form on the shirt backs of the few men directly before me in line. Ahead lay nine and a half hours upstairs, on the second floor of the old factory building

This morning the divine is wearing my Land’s End robe
and demanding chai. It seems unwise to deny her appetite,

given I don’t often wake up with her, but usually spring
from my bed like some ludicrous toy that hones

Light, shadow, and sometimes color are used to layer dozens of carefully edited images together, which echoes an altered reality of both truth and illusion. Each newly created configuration becomes much like a shadow box of my most cherished treasures, symbolizing my desire to protect the natural world I so revere.

The Petrov’s are a married couple who built a biotech company in Boston. The CEO, Dimitry Petrov, 45, a doctor, was born into poverty in Russia. His wife Anastasia Shevchenco, 39, is Ukrainian and considered a genius in math. She is heavily involved in AI research. She is also a vocal leader in the global efforts to convince U.S. and foreign governments