​Why I write Why you tie a balloon to a string — To stay. To be. To hold onto something: A string of words, taut with grammar’s gravity; pulling down the up of the soul; keeping life, gently, to the place, and in the shape of a hand. A red balloon: urgent yet delicate — and difficult to miss, should I lose my language and drift, lift, sentence-less, syntax-less, into the open poem of the sky.

​CoronaVirus is a disaster unfolding fast: on our screens if we’re lucky, before our eyes if we wait long enough, and eventually in our bodies if we’re admitting to the reality of this disease. But it is, at the same time, infecting large groups of us with an essential instinct: a desire to walk, think, make, create, connect, that (in the long term) could cure even as it kills. My fourth day spent strictly at home, all of the nature around me feels bigger, more here. There is