After spending a year away, I’ve recently returned to New Orleans with a different sense of place. I spent the first stretch of 2025 in De Pere, Wisconsin, living with my mom and working briefly as a postal worker. The days there were quiet and structured—held together by routine, long walks, time at the Bay Beach Wildlife Sanctuary, and a stillness I hadn’t felt in years.
After about six months, I moved to Tulsa to stay with a friend, carrying with me a restlessness, a feeling of being in transition—between homes, between directions, between versions of myself.
When I finally came back to New Orleans, the first thing that surfaced wasn’t an image but a poem. It arrived almost on its own, shaped by the months of drifting, returning, and relearning how to move through this city again. The poem felt like a pressure valve opening—an early articulation of everything I couldn’t yet say in any other form.
In a way, it became a map: a small, intuitive record of where I was emotionally and creatively at that moment of return. And it’s from that poem, “I’m back to you” that I’m beginning a new body of photography and poems. The poem is the threshold I’m stepping through, the first marker in a longer process of seeing what’s changed in me, and what the city reflects back.
Everything that comes next will grow out of the tone and texture of those initial words. This project starts with poems, and with the recognition that returning is not a single moment but an unfolding—slow, subtle, and still in motion. I will periodically add and subtract poems and photo from this page as this body of work ebbs and flows.
I’m back to you
The magnolia smells of
The real earth
Is a well known fact
To those that
Walk by magnolias
Subtle sent
Now lodged between
Our petals
Excavations to keep
Us full of nature's vivid lives
I locked away in
A chest
Caught by a fisherman
Who opens it
To become a tree on
The banks
Of the Mississippi river
Sprouting flowers
Yes I sprout
This time living in New Orleans
My beloved
I have come back to you
My beloved
To turn a man
Into a flowering tree for you
Ode to Live Oaks
When you see a live oak branch skirting the ground
What do you think about
Branch shoring our complexity
With memories entangled
In its 300 year old self
Tree rings tucked away like a secret
But felt when the hand touches bark
A historic sense like a torrential rain
An ant crawls on your skin
Will be added to the trees database
Remembering itself in you
How you both need to sit silently hugging the soil
As the earths heart beats
Putting us into a state of ease
