love

  • Raw Materials

    ByKristen Holmes

    The real subject of this poem is less about romance and more about the trade every act of preservation makes. An album, a pressed petal, a poem, even a field note like this one…none of it is the living thing. It’s what’s left after you decide the living thing was worth keeping, in whatever form keeping is possible.

  • Ripples

    ByKristen Holmes

    You cannot ruminate mid-plunge. The nervous system doesn’t have bandwidth left for anything but the here and now. That’s the same demand Ripples makes of love: not a state you ease into, but a shock you enter fully, which is precisely what clears the noise and tells you, unmistakably, that you’re alive in it.