So Mom, if you come there are rules: no talking about grandpa’s big C or making up your wacky stories. When you pack Christopher’s school lunch, don’t make peanut butter sandwiches, one of his friends might die, and no chocolate.…
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My husband and I recently took Grace, who is seven, to see The Avengers. She had never seen a super hero movie before, and within two or three minutes, she was completely hooked. She reached her hands out to “touch”…
I am a maker. Thoughts are words, words are the building materials. I hesitate to say bricks as they, the words, I mean, are as malleable as play-do, as changeable as water. I am, though, inert. My being is set,…
Hire the twelve year old from next door: Helen of Troy with azure eyes rimmed with black lashes. She loves kids, her mother says. She cuddles the two-year-old, Invites the five-year-old to build puzzles And ram cars against each other.…
I dream I walk through a desert of stone. It once took months for letters to reach their recipients; packages of supplies to pass foreign customers – worlds gone by. Bananas were posted to prevent scurvy and luck-charms embroidered slowly.…
An afternoon curling around us, not my house nor yours for tea– we sit in a borrowed mansion, the two grantees—one a painter trying to stop nomads from running. the other a writer talking about eyes, how they show what…
In the midst of slicing onions, the poet Receives a message from her Kitchen Witch In almost-iambic-pentameter. Anxiously she searches for paper and pencil Before the elusive language Falls away like the peel. While she scribbles a furious shorthand, A…
“Mommy!” “Don’t step in the paint!” “Mommy, look – look!” “Shhhh. I’m working.” …. right in the middle… Lost the line, color’s mud. “Alright, what?” Ow, too sharp! “Never mind.” “Whoa. OK. Where’s Margie, isn’t she taking care of you?…
Summer already and too hot, time for movement, blowing left or right even, if forward is too much to ask, hips shifting, knees flexed like basketball players, ankle-breakers, fast and then gone, a going somewhere, not just out, but an…
Seven years ago, we left our Upper West Side co-op for many reasons. My husband needed a driveway. My toddler deserved a bedroom with windows. I had to get out of the kitchen — that narrow room, where, cramped in…