I am an achy woman.
In another universe, I cry often and loudly. I sit with grief. I am in love and working on the love. I do not need its perfection to stay.
In this universe, I am diplomatic. I strategize in relationships the same way I strategize through a completed to-do list. I struggle to let a man open the door or carry the bags.
In this universe, I train myself to be alone in anticipation of loneliness.
We learn to anticipate unfavorable conditions when we’ve known them before. One of the most persistent is separation. For some of us, separation is not just emotional; it is systemic. It lives in our housing, our grocery stores, our schools, and the books we read. In more ways than one, we become accustomed to lack and attack. Perhaps we don’t quite say it, but we think to ourselves: I wish the sidewalks were wider. Why aren’t the parks as clean? Why is our street synonymous with danger?
Don’t they see how beautiful we are? Don’t they know we’re worthy too? We learn how to defend ourselves before we’ve even taken the time to observe what is threatening us. And eventually, we learn to strike first. When we learn to strike first, we begin to treat everything we do not yet understand as dangerous—even love.
Throughout the Love Trilogy, bell hooks repeatedly writes that love is a combination of care, commitment, trust, knowledge, responsibility, and respect. A practice. A doing. And while I deeply identify with her work, I keep returning to that idea—not in agreement, but in resistance. Because I am already practiced in doing. I know how to produce, how to perform, how to meet a deadline, how to carry a vision forward. My life, especially now, demands it. As state poet of Nebraska and a full-time artist, I am constantly in motion—traveling, writing, speaking, building something that sustains. Time is not something I have in abundance. It is something I manage. And so while I agree with bell hooks’s analysis and research regarding love, I still find myself asking: Why would I choose love as another site of labor?
It is through this lens that I applied for and received the Generator Grant, administered by Amplify Arts in Omaha. I wanted to explore my relationship with love and the unhealthy patterns I often deploy to protect myself from it: a pattern of avoidance shaped by survival. At the time of my application, I was beginning to fall into a joy I had not experienced since I was a teenager. It arrived through jazz at North Omaha Music and Arts (NOMA) and through dance at Omaha Jitterbugs. In these spaces, I swayed to the beat, clumsily traversed a dance floor, and became more familiar with my own laugh. These moments ushered in a joy that reinvigorated my interest in love—the kind I want to believe we all recognize eventually, when we begin to understand how deeply our relationship to love is shaped by what we’ve endured, which is to say, survival.
That realization did not arrive cleanly. It came with friction. I approach love the way I approach work: as a destination, a goal, a thing to be had. I measure it. I assess its return. I ask what it is producing, what it is costing me, and whether it is worth the time. When it asks for a patience I cannot quantify, I feel the urge to leave. And often, I do. Not because I do not care, but because I do not know how to stay inside of something that does not offer immediate clarity. I cannot afford for that clarity to arrive decades later in a conversation, urging me not to rush. There is a part of me that believes I already have enough to build, enough to carry, enough to create. And love, in its messiness, begins to feel like another job. Another thing to do.
And still, I tried. I found love, and I stayed for as long as I could. I loved in ways that required endurance, in ways that demanded commitment, in ways that asked for sacrifice until it became erasure, on both ends. This love was love until it was not. Until the doing was reduced to routine. To cohabitation and chores and unvoiced expectations, unmet needs, and silent pleas held in the eyes but never spoken. I’ve heard that when the doing stops, unhealthy dynamics take root, and absence fills the space of consideration. When devotion becomes consuming instead of sustaining.
Eight years into a love that had begun to unravel, I left. And though there was love, there was also grief. So much grief. Days and days of therapy, where I began to understand that while some of my needs had gone unmet, there were many I had never clearly named. I did not yet understand how simple it could be to say: Please, walk the dogs. Wash the dishes. When you wash the dishes, it takes so much weight off. When the house is clean, I am calm. I am home. I did not know how to say: I need more help with the bills. I am drowning. I cannot breathe. I did not yet know how to name what I needed without feeling like I was asking for too much too late. And so what I carry now is not the question of whether the love was real, but whether I was equipped to sustain it.
While writing this, I wonder how many others are navigating similar questions as they try again with new lovers. How many blame themselves for the loss of the old? I wonder if this is too vulnerable, but for me, poetry is an exploration of the human condition. Vulnerability is my condition.
After two years of grieving and trying once more with a man I had known for nearly a decade, I met someone new. He introduced me to a kind of joy I did not know I could still feel. He introduced imagination in a way I had long dismissed as impractical. Until I saw it working. Until I realized he was a living example of an adult who still knew how to dream. And then, I began to dream again, fearfully. Wondering if this kind of joy was sustainable. Wondering if it was even appropriate to feel this free. We shouldn’t be having this much fun, I would say, half in awe, half in suspicion.
What is shifting for me now is not the presence of love, but my willingness to engage with it differently. To speak sooner. To remain present a little longer. To resist the instinct to anticipate its ending before it has had the chance to fully form. I struggle with knowing that all things end, while still believing the experience is worthy of my full participation. I fight the urge to withhold love simply because I know it could be lost or could have never existed. I try not to take from myself a beautiful possibility simply to avoid being taken from.
Many of us have always known lack. Even the most fortunate among us know pain, loneliness, and loss. I am inherently afraid of the things I want because I understand, at a fundamental level, that all things must end. And the grief that follows can feel endless. I do not fully trust ease. I do not fully trust steadiness. I am always listening for disruption, preparing for confirmation of what I already suspect about the fragility of things. When people speak of “the one,” I feel outside of that language. I have only known “the one” to be the one I choose, until I don’t. I always have a feeling. I don't always believe it will hold.
This is the tension at the center of my current project. When I present this exploration of love through jazz and poetry, this three-track EP, I will not offer a conclusion—only an experience. A process of grieving, of moving through, of trusting, of trying again. This project is an ongoing negotiation between survival and openness. A conversation between the version of me that has learned to protect at all costs and the version that is curious enough to try something new. If love is a practice, then it is one I am still learning. Without a clear system. Without a guaranteed outcome. Without the structure I am used to relying on.
When people encounter this work, in publication and in performance, they will not receive a roadmap to loving without fear. They will receive something honest: a woman trying to learn how to receive. A woman resisting the urge to rob herself of something beautiful just to avoid the pain of losing it. A woman practicing communication, trust, and presence in real time. And maybe, in witnessing that, others might recognize themselves, and pause their own self-protective instincts long enough to experience joy as something that is still available to them.
I am beginning to understand love not as something that happens to me, but as something I participate in shaping. Those moments of discomfort are not always proof that the love is not real or is not being worked on. Love is not proven by intensity or longevity, but by the consistency of care and the courage to provide opportunities for repair. Like jazz, it is improvisational. It demands that we listen, respond, and remain present to what is unfolding rather than clinging to what we expected. It asks us to participate, rather than manage, or leave before the discovery.
And for someone who has built a life on anticipating what comes next, that may be the most difficult practice of all.