winged missive

I sent this moth-missive to Sean a few years ago, before we met. I gave my words wings to make sure they could make it north to Manchester from Oxford, a steep flight straight up the map, like flapping from the window sill to the top of the pane; sheer altitude on sheared wings.   I like the…

my life in labels

I was skimming through the labels for my posts recently and was surprised to find that there were hundreds. They read like a long list-poem. A found poem. A poem with hundreds of labels tied to it. The labels provide an accurate map of my mind, and my life, from A to Z; aestheticism to…

arabesques and coquettes

This is my Viennese door for a week, guarded by a lion and a mystical symbol of some sort that I pretend means, “Kindly fuck off, Jalina is hard at work in here.”  All of Vienna is splayed out on top of the desk, and my pen reaches from the old town to Yppenplatz, the…

stitching the soul to the body

  Henry Miller wrote:   Whether we enrich or impoverish, we who write, we authors, we men of letters, we scribblers, are being supported, protected, maintained, enriched and endowed by a vast horde of unknown individuals–the men and women who watch and pray that we reveal the truth which is in us.     In this…

the lucky earth

                                     It all started in Japan when my kiddos were six and four; the earth was embroidered with luck, a veritable harvest of it. We plucked all we could find, the four-leaf clovers barely missed amongst such abundance. I was afraid the frail symbols would tear, or wilt, pin-wheeled between summer fingers. I taped it into what…

Celtic Infinity Knots

I was scrolling through old photographs today and realized how strikingly similar my recent black & white paper-cut artwork is to the Celtic-inspired ink drawings I made ages ago, before I had kids. Artistic affinities and resonances run deep and surface again and again like runner roots. My artwork even looks like roots, in a tangle, an…