There are words I love for their sounds, like pixelated, Appalachian, alchemy.

And names I love for their looks, like Dierdre, Ariadne, Fizzy Dianthus, for instance.

And then there’s phrases I swoon for thanks to texture and taste, like green glass goblin, mist-spangled sea oats, and bumblebees tumbling through wildflower banks.

They all tickle my brainstem like mothwings in incomprehensibly wonderful ways, so I collect them like fireflies, then leave them floating like flotsam in a file — a file I call “poetry snippets” — thoughts fleeting, but recorded, pinned in a dark corner, piled up in heaps of broken images. I round up the parts, construct nothing of substance, then go out and gather some more, flitting through fact and fiction storehouses in my mind, snatching scenes, sketching silhouettes, silent stacks clustered in the cloisters of my laptop:

the dried and pressed blossoms of innocence,

               the reclaimed wood of childhood,

                              the trawled testimonies of trauma,

                                             all the tapestries woven not even half-way…

sonorous symbols, signifying nothing.

I so want to craft these trinkets into treasure… but like a painter who never paints her own house, it seems I’m a writer who never writes her own world.

I want – I need — to give them a home. Is it possible for me to rearrange and repurpose them, strip and paint and polish them ‘til the treasures I’ve stored up adorn every floorboard, enliven each corner and window and door? So, when I’m done, I’ll have erected the coziest, most comfortable little work of art with carefully crafted characters living in whimsy and purpose, surrounded by gleaming pewter sentence sets and winks of wisdom?

Where they’ll flourish and feel at home — my characters, yes, but my readers too?

That’s the prose and poetry I pray I can piece together in this next chapter of my life. A collected space – my favorite kind of space — that visitors will return to year after year with a cup of coffee and some introspection.