For the box of illness:

A Box of Illness, Photopolymer Etchings, Knotted Thread, Polymer Clay, Wood, Resin, 2026

I wake in the wrong environment 

Soft sterile light and no sound.

Here, the rules change quietly.
Gravity favors nothing,
words drag, vision edits out
what I thought I knew.

The woods are inside now,
branching scars,
misfiring paths.
No one sees them
but they keep rearranging the map.

Some days, I pass for a native
in the kingdom of the well,
my body a counterfeit,
my gait almost fluent.

Other days I am stopped by a tremor,
a silence between words,
too long to explain away.

The illness is a red string
threaded through my days.
Not a destiny, just insistence.

It knots at the hinge of my knee,
tightens at the base of my skull,
snags on the word “normal”
until the word frays.

Loss arrives in increments:
a staircase,
a walk at dusk,
an invitation declined.

Each small surrender
carves out a new version of me,
less visible,
more real.

I am not who I was
before the woods moved in.

I carry an identity
spliced with scans and flare histories,
resistance in the margins.
Resilience is a flicker, a low glow that refuses to disappear.

The world likes clean binaries:
sick / well,
able / broken.
But my days are noise:
static between categories,
a body that pulses
between functioning and failure.

Here, in this other space,
I walk the dark perimeter
of what I can no longer do,
then step back
into what remains.

A small, stubborn territory
of making.

I am still here,
even if I can’t remember
where the woods begin and 

cannot see where they may end.

A Box of Illness, Photopolymer Etchings, Knotted Thread, Polymer Clay, Wood, Resin, 2026