scribblings

april 12

the writing

Kayla hovers between sleep and waking, when she suddenly sinks—her spirit, that is, falling through sheets, bedframe and floorboards, until she floats in the living room where the television is on, but muted. She rights herself, assuming she’s already dreaming, and with little thought about getting back to her body, drifts through the front window into the night…

~

texting with my friend: 
did you see the blossoms? 
reply: eating petals.

~

Hana wasn’t sure what she was expecting, but it wasn’t the sight of Skye walking on water. The moment was ruined when Skye spotted her, and splashed down gracelessly, soaking them both.
“So…you’re a witch,” Hana stated, when Skye reached the shore. Before her friend could answer, she snapped her fingers, and a small fireball formed in her palm. “Me too.”

~

overcast days 
& foggy thoughts; drag me 
back to bed, summer…

the reading

Poem: “Vita Nuova” by Kevin Young (from “Darkling, Part 3: Resurrection City” in Night Watch)

“I want to name 
     my daughter Winter. 
I want to be in love 

with what comes, not 
     wish for whatever lies 
over the next hill. 

I want to be bothered 
     by God again. 
I like the science 

of silence, how it 
     never is. There’s always 
the wind, that lilac 

I planted in the heatwave 
     & later managed 
to save. Keeping alive is brave.”

Essay: “Have a Good Life” by (from Best Canadian Essays 2026)

“I was reminded of this incident after a recent conversation with a friend. We were talking about how so many writers and artists—most of us? all of us?—revisit the same material again and again. We all have our preoccupations, our obsessions—those things that haunt us and that we spend our lives trying to exorcise through writing. Think of Dickens and his orphans; Kafka and his existential dread; John Irving and his bears and dysfunctional families. What’s yours? my friend asked that day. Without pausing to even think about it, I answered: absent fathers, missing fathers, dead fathers, children without fathers. And it was really only as I said it, as the words left my mouth, that I realized how true this was. Fathers are everywhere and nowhere in my work.”