I’ve been wanting to upgrade to a paid subscription to Jeannine Ouellette’s “Writing in the Dark” Substack for awhile now, and was finally pulled to do so when she announced her current six-week intensive WANTED, which focuses on desire as a force in writing and in life.

Desire is something I’ve been thinking about a lot in the past year. It was one of the things that brought me back to therapy in January 2025. I’ve felt aimless for awhile. Both in life and in my writing. And one question that seems to keep me from moving toward anything is: what do I want?

I imagine her ribcage an icebox swollen with freezer burn; her heart— once a blooming geranium—glazed with dry frost, black with bite, the candlelight of her aorta having gone out with the last crimson petiole of the season.

I imagine her pupil swallowing sweet slice of winter’s tangerine sky—her one eye unblinking—in empty hope of efflorescing jade, pine, pistachio out of slate. I imagine sun dripping into ink, blue pond black with it, swan stained with it; Sylvia plucking one of the fouled feathers, now useless to him—the poor thing—but a bottomless well from which to scrape endlessly the poetry of December’s brooding sunsets.

I want to swallow you whole—the seeds, the rotten pieces, the pith. The days keep ticking down and time is never going to stop. Might as well use fingers over forks, teeth over knives. Plans to devour you are always in my pipeline. I want you flossed in the split of my tongue, tethered to me indefinitely. I want everything, or nothing at all. You are at my mercy, signing the deeds to your heart over to mine. I am not thawing into a new year—I am reviving old ghosts in unfixable fixation. I am roles in reverse in reverse in reverse, drowning you in tides of uncertainty. December is for forgiveness, and I have absolved myself of self-induced starvation. I will do anything to make me happy. I will bleed my hippocampus of memory just to gorge myself on you.

after Taylor Swift

I see you in my rearview mirror outside of nowhere and everywhere.

My heart has become a broken home for no one. I burn for you. Trail embers

and ashes like a wedding train over burgundy, dress the seeping wounds

with tinsel. Am I supposed to go on without you? Cut caffeine for hot chocolate?

Benadryl for snickerdoodle? Yesterdays for tomorrows?

Snow falls like memories—seven inches of heartbreak and regret and boy grins

Night unwraps herself of paperwhite and cellophane. The smell of winter’s arrival lands like a starling on my shoulder, lingers like chimney smoke in my hair. Permanently branded in a script rehearsed too many times to be true, I bury the echoes of my sorrows in the quiet. Snowfall and nostalgic lamps cradle me to sleep. Winter blanket as a sacred rite. Instead of killing myself, I wrote this poem. I silence the porch light. I hope you get what you deserve.

A white expanse can either reel in a lion fish or a sturgeon from a deep well, or baffle the poet to her knees.

If the latter, the poet freezes solid, waiting for spring to thaw like a miracle, a hole in the ice, an aha! of house sparrows returning home

to rebuild their nests. The tomb-bound poet confides in the moon that listens but offers no answers. Silence beckons like a small mercy.

Rest.

To give to dark tides, take advantage of more time spent with the stars, tune in to one’s circadian rhythm, and turn in early, lulled to sleep by lunar lullabies and celestial noise.

​​        (My secret is a weighted blanket, ​​        a low-spun ceiling fan to ebb the heat, ​​        a pair of crew socks, ​​        a Benadryl.)

Retreat.

To build a nest of fleece and pillow in front of the hearth fire, circle three times, and settle down with a fantasy fiction, knitting needles and yarn, a bowl of yam and lentil soup, one’s own thoughts and a pen.

Little Beast (Riot in Your Throat, 2023)

From the opening poem “Wolf,” Sara Quinn Rivara’s Little Beast reads like the fairy tales we know flipped on their heads. And I don’t mean the watered-down versions. I mean the Brothers Grimm versions. The fairy tales elders once told children to scare them into behaving. Only Rivara is a witch burned at the stake returning to teach women how to misbehave, thus coming home to themselves.

Every man was a weapon. I, a vegetarian turned cannibal to survive their machetes and unzipped denim.

What does it mean when the dream version of a gentle lover from your past hunts you with a knife and a Bible

in a war-torn country? Who can you trust in a kidnapping when everyone giving you orders—even the one begging you to trust them,

eat the plum you’re supposed to feed them but hide the pit—are men? In the dream, I eat fried octopus, and I like it. In the next dream,

I am unbearable and unhinged. I cannot hold my tongue back from its urge to mock and trill, my throat from spewing its song vomit of improvised musicals—so one-note and limited in vocabulary, but a songbird all the the same. I am made of maybe and almost, saving all my finish lines for overdone daydreams and underdeveloped poems, but I can entertain myself for hours and long weekends with only my words and imagination. I’ve lived such a fortunate, average life, I have to rely on secondhand sorrow for a good cry, someone else’s someday-maybes to convince myself to stay. My seasonal affection disorder never really goes away, which is to say, I can burn like the last candle on the longest night of the year and blizzard in July. I am heart-shaped marshmallow twinkling in a coal eye. I am a broken clock refusing to be abandoned. I am setting down the minutes in my own time, never caging the barn swallows and loon songs that bloom like arias from their seeds.

after after Kate McCallister in Home Alone

Cinnamon stains for life, so tip it over, wet your hands, coat your fingers in the umber, and trace me from freckle to freckle so I become a sky of constellations on nights when the moon hides her face from the stars. There’s a fine line between poet and muse, and the dark laid out like a sequined cape on snow skates right down the middle. If the perks of long train rides are setting albums to the shifting countryside or tucking into a Victorian gothic novel, the perks of longer nights are more hours to dream of sun. More time to catch the starlight beading in a metallic tang on my skin and seal it in a jar before it vanishes into dawn’s dull grays and watered down tangerine. I’d live in winter’s oil fields forever if it meant holding onto these auroras, these death lamps, this lunar lantern in my palms for a thousand graves and thousand and one lifetimes.

after Mary Oliver

Every morning unfolds itself, first in strips of charcoal linen,

​        then swaths of slate, gauze of gold.​        The great unwrapping.

And I don’t want to get out of the bed that has cocooned our body

heat—and the dog’s—into a furnace, ​        but there is the kettle to warm,

the gingersnap Chai tea for tongue to try.

​​        The poem will not write itself!

I’ve been reading about shadow and evil in fairy tales and greeting mine

after Ellen Griswold in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation

So let’s cry out our pine needles into the carpet. Take advantage of the longest night of the year and swap our conscious for shadows—who can tell God from a devil in the dark? The stars blink out. A mouse stirs just to prove a point. Roaches scurry to the bulbs to subvert the plot. No heartbreak’s killed me yet, but morning might if I don’t take the snowy path home and dilute my dreams with fire— my unconscious the only safe place to keep a flame burning from dusk to dawn. I would dampen my clothes and succumb to the cold if it meant I could escape the slow agony of a mall store’s ten-track Christmas playlist, become a ghost, and haunt you year-round with Mariah Carey and Wham!. If you’re not miserable, are you even whole? I am a sleet storm of sorrow, and it’s not even the solstice. The best of myself is yet to come.

after Love, Actually

Tilting your head away from the sun to greet your shadow like a long lost twin. The moon is a silver ornament, an old lover’s name you can’t stop calling out in the dark. A mug of tea can fix everything—or at least, makes morning reading a little more cozy, tongue a ballroom of twirling ginger, cinnamon, blue cornflower gowns. The first snowfall is a slow dance in the oven bulb of midnight. The wind searches for a weakness, but you did your due diligence: the boots, the coat, the yellow mittens, all good money spent. You’re running out of time to spend it all in the past. Sweep this year right under the rug and stamp on it. Zip and tie your armor. Lose yourself in winter’s froth. You have such a beautiful life to live.

Coughing Up Tinsel & Crystal Flakes by the Open Fire I Saw Mommy Burying Santa Beneath the Snow Baby, It’s Cold Outside, But I’m Safer in the Blizzard Chronically in Love (but Only Under the Mistletoe) O Naked Tree (Let Your Freak Flag Fly) Lips Like Agony & Cranberry Velvet It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like a Crime Scene One More Dose of Eggnog and Xanax Handing Out Presents Wrapped in Secondhand Prose Black Ice, Blacker Hearts Jingle All the Way (Out of My Responsibilities) Laughter & Cheer Swells (with Spiked Tears & Seasonal Affective Disorder) O Holy Marijuana Cross! All I Want for Christmas Is Silent Nights & a Lobotomy

after Iris in The Holiday

And I’m not even playing the best friend. I’m a background extra, a passerby across the street from a coffee shop window, a grey-clad office cog hidden from the nose down behind the boundaries of her cubicle. If snowfall is a confession, I’ve been holding in a blizzard of alone time, lights off, avoidance, if only. For god’s sake, if only I were more brave! If only I were snowflakes and starlight, self-portrait of a dining table center piece, a thing that doesn’t need fixing! It was a game all along, and I was playing the thimble when I should have been the race car. For god’s sake, tear loose the unopened letter! Burn the things that took me from me: selfish man, corporate conga, realists sucking the lore from my palms like fairy tales are poison, my fingers the wounds. For god’s sake, hold the embers carefully in both hands! Ignite them with the waxing sun, and see what birds fly back!

after Susan Walker in Miracle on 34th Street

In a woman’s power to bewitch the weather. In feeding a ghost back to flesh with enough candlelight, crackling vinyl, and poetry.

That the moon is an eye witnessing oceans leached of life, earth heave its battered lungs, the trauma of it all, and waiting.

In the childlike wonder of dormant dreams begging to be unstacked of brick, untangled of ivy. In the body’s ability to carry

after Frosty the Snowman

falling like repeated documentation of a funeral flowing underneath frozen film. Winter, a widow grieving with frozen tears. Her face, a pale sadness; but how can I not mistake her saltwater cheeks for celestial objects, collect the glistening on my lashes like light-catching ornaments? Outside, brumal wolves howl their pellets of ice, and I hold the moonlight between my teeth. I am a garden of recovery, nestled beneath amber fireplace flames and blankets of white, so viciously understanding the need to bury and blanken, bleach the blood out of the sheets. We won’t survive life, so we might as well grasp tinsel in a blizzard. Even when the cold chases off the wild geese, the daylilies, the monarchs. Even when the wind rushes its own tail with a knife.

I don’t want to eat you, I just want you wrapped in wool, caradamom, and candle light.

I want you to break free from the prison of night into a vanilla maple London fog, white-laced

and gold-bowed. If I can’t have you warm by the hearth, I will have you for dinner,

and I don’t have a taste for snow angels frozen in time. I want you to be the prey

I only come out in the rabbit hole of night.                 It’s not a miracle.

​        We no longer align. You want to lay shadows to rest in the ground.

I want to wear them like a cloak.

​        When I was human, I wished I was the moon. Only the walls listened. Only the endless blue horizons

carried me through the night-blooming jasmine landscape of girlhood, the claws of the one

No spotlight, fanfare, point to pushpin on a map. It happens quietly, the way you write a poem like robbing a grave, guided only by memory and starlight, metal muffled in the loam. Every year becomes a footprint in the snow. There are still good hours left when sun sets before afternoon has finished its tea. Fireworks turn into candlelight, the wax weeping rivers for you so that you can forage for joy where, once, the fog refused to lift. Pumpkin spice no longer aftertastes of existential dread. The woods scream at night, and it’s just the coyotes. You learn to embroider without patterns. You know exactly when to leave.

pair of jeans, early-aughts-Renaissance-style corset top, grey military blazer that’s been making me look cooler than I am since the twelfth grade

no longer fits is always met with denial. I squeeze my shoulders into the armpits, loosen ties, hold my breath, limit the constricting garment

to morning outings, change back into sweats after my second meal, when the buckle can no longer contain my hunger. A few more tries before I tuck it back

Maybe we were never star-crossed, flames tossed over skies drowning in indigo and Jupiter’s moons. I don’t know if I knew that it would be love or heartbreak or roadkill stranded on asphalt, but I knew it was an asteroid, meteoric impact, apocalyptic collision. The first moment I saw him feels more like an omen I never saw coming until the prophecy laid itself out like a soiled sheet on the yellowed mattress. His red t-shirt an expanse of warnings I disregarded for the kaleidoscope hazel around the black holes of his pupils. Maybe I give the heavens too much credit. Maybe I died when I was nineteen, and the ghosts inhabiting my body are echoes of misremembering. Maybe we were just reflections on black ice, bad timings, misplaced mistletoe in August.

The birds are singing at night, in silent snowscapes where touch is the only color left.

Ghost stories rise with decaf steam and smoke from candles I’ve left burning.

Even solitude has a hum to it, and I carry each small catastrophe like a violin string

against the bow of my breastbone. Does time open up old wounds too?

Do I linger like an old lover’s perfume? You want the moon? I spend my days

Kissing under a maple leaf, amber as the ghost of sunlight in November. I want to press it between pages, memorize it by hand and midnight.

Barren trees claw at the sky line like hell’s sinners grasp at heaven. The world outside is dying, while something inside me wakes. I adorn myself like an altar

for the dead, fill my hollow heart with chrysanthemums and marigolds and frost bite. I’m dreaming of mornings that rain teeth, nights like mulled hauntings retold

December defaults to fields of frost. Distant lanterns glow in the apocalyptic fog spread over the prairies like puddles of blankets on childhood’s living room floor. I bake sugar cookies for my inner girl, cradle her with clammy hands like a gentle reclamation. When the temperature drops and the nights yawn early, I salt solstice oil in stars, glaze the walls in bonfire hues, sun catchers hooking the hearth fire and casting out homemade auroras across the table wearing rings of kept vows and formative years. December, they call you a slow death, slick street on a starless night, but you are the foundation in my architecture of growth. You made me pick up my pen again.

The long walk home is a lip’s distance away, mere breaths between greetings and goodbyes.

I wear the forest like armor—a ritual that keeps me soft on these endless clean days. There is a sanctuary

of stillness in the midwinter wolf song, a blank page on a cold, velvet throat. My memories of younger

days are scars that keep me warm while snowed in at the metro station: a sun-child born on the apex

I lock my sadness in a storage box with a bedsheet that knows, too well, the architecture of my body. I hold the chill in my lungs a little longer, exhale at the boarded up house on the edge of town, a light left on like a Yule flame, nasturtium bookmark tucked into the loam of a silent night. This is how you survive yourself: you gather your aches and rebuild them into a bonfire, let the warmth hold you like soil hugs the roots of a grave under haunted prairie grass. Sometimes it’s scary, but you can douse long drives and longer silences in starlight. You can bury a memory in the perfect shade of walnut and dirt and wait for spring. Dawn always cracks like eggs on cast iron. Your reflection always smiles before you do.

They tell me not to romanticize ghosts, but you are the celestial break in a black night, iridescent spill of aurora borealis over snow, and I am a deer in the glow of Christmas lights, willing our shadows to touch what our flesh won’t. They tell me not to dig up graves, but I am filling your head with tomb-laid forget-me-nots. I am a rain-soaked notebook confessing soggy truths in a ceremony of flickering candles and cracking roots, mistakes I’d make again if it meant tethering my moon to your night. You taste like cinnamon and bad decisions I want to wake up regretting. They tell me not to raise the dead, but your eyes are blurred and beckoning, and I am starving for the haunt.

I was trying to survive the misty melancholy mornings of an ancient anguish like a third marriage breeding children of ink. I was lethargic with seasonal transition, yet restless with becoming, inspired by the cadence of sleet turned flurry, harmony of the quiet, eyes in the cornfield flickering like fireflies now almost extinct.

If sorrow is a sickness, I am terminal with constellations of sadness. My winter coat has more structure than my life, but feather and thread can’t type, can only keep me upright for so long, and I cannot waste a rare moment of golden apricity, cracking December’s cardinal egg shell, bruising in the brumal lake of your email.

Nightbitch after Rachel Yoder’s novel Nightbitch

I would stain December gluey red. I would bring you rabbits in my teeth. The frost has bite, and so do I.

I don’t owe the world my lungs, but I howl the quiet out of the milk-blue morning anyway, sprint peppermint spirals in the indigo mists

of my own breath. I would curl up in December’s furrowed brow, smothered in the comfort of fur and raw satisfaction. I am learning to love myself

We trim the tree of its evergreen and dance with moons between our palms. We cloak our summer freckles in wolf skin, slip on our rabbit feet, speak in Morse code to the snow. We plant soft magic in ordinary hours, bleed out over silver lawns. Bruised knees, raspberry mouths, violet bellies— every bloom’s a shadow after midnight. Every woman behind glass is an animal waiting at the shore of attempt between seasons’ breaths. We lie down in the hollow of the darkest night, where sleep-leaden thoughts can constrict and sprawl. We are scars softened by rain. We are nearly dead, but we have each other. Together is a beautiful place to spend the long way back.