BRUISE CLOUD, RUBBLE, and TUMBLE

A three-book poetry series. Coming soon.

These books trace a personal and spiritual journey through identity, loss, love, and the messy in-between. Some poems rhyme. Some break apart. All of them come from the deep places—the ones I didn’t know how to name until I wrote them.

BRUISE CLOUD

This one is about coming back to myself.
It’s about identity and healing, depths and awakening—
trying to figure out who I am after everything fell apart.
After the emergency decades.
After I was “okay.”

My bruise cloud was where I held everything—
every feeling I didn’t know how to feel,
every ache I absorbed from others as I floated through the world.
All the things I stored instead of expressed.
It got heavy.
And eventually, it stormed.

There’s tenderness in here.
There’s anger too.
And glimmers of joy I didn’t expect.

This is the seeking, and the finding, of me.
Just the beginning of the rest.

RUBBLE

This is the book I wrote while I was losing my dad.
While I was losing a lot, actually.

It’s about mourning—but also about surviving living.
The slow, quiet kind of grief.
Not just the big moments, but the daily ache.
The aches that pile up over a lifetime.

There comes a time when there is too much ache within—
and it must flow out
to heal.

And maybe, in time,
we pick through the broken pieces
and find something worth keeping.
A gem in the rubble.

TUMBLE

This one is all about love—
how wild, necessary, confusing, painful,
and spectacularly beautiful it is.

Romantic love.
Divine love.
Self-love.

Love in nature, too—
the kind that doesn’t ask you to perform,
just invites you to be.

It’s about the mess of it.
The beauty of trying.
The way we hurt each other—
hurt ourselves—
and still stay.

The way a tree or a field or a coastline
can sometimes hold you better than a person.

And then there are the moments—
when love takes over completely,
and the world becomes only
the cyclone of us.

I didn’t write these to explain love,
but to explore it...
I wrote them because I couldn’t hold it all without writing.

OVER UNDERHANDLE

This is a book made from the year I thought I might not make it.
It was before the poems.
Many years.
Before I could make sense of anything.
A year of silence, heartbreak, and deep illness.
A year where my journals were the only place I could speak.

I didn’t write this as a story,
but a story revealed itself anyway—
in pieces, in prayers,
in meditation,
in a lemon orchard in my mind,
in pages written from bed
when everything else was gone.

In that stripped-down space,
I met God as Mama.
She held me gently and fiercely,
while I remembered the girl I left behind,
and began the slow return to my body,
to breath,
to self.

Over Underhandle isn’t a linear memoir.
It’s a lived document. A spiritual record.
A companion for anyone walking through
the unraveling,
the remembering,
the re-making.

“She didn’t give me productivity.
She didn’t give me restoration.
She gave me lemon trees and stillness and shade—
and told me it was enough.”