I set the trap tonight. Last week I wrote in my journal that life is sacred. Later, I bought the trap. Tonight I read to my child. Do animal mothers love their babies? Yes, yes, of course they do. Animal…
He could do it himself, make his own sandwich, omelette and Monterey Jack in pita bread, no tomato, just a pickle on the side. Could squeeze his own orange juice when he comes to visit. Wash his clothes. I could…
At 2 am I sit in a car in an unmarked parking spot around the corner from the house. Will he escape from his room, jump onto the roof and down to the driveway to run? Earlier, I tell his…
You came when a woman is usually past the messiness of a child with all its evolutionary prized self-centeredness and demand. You came and introduced fear into a life If not well lived, lived with adventure, risk; attempted without regret.…
You would see she exists in defined space composed of small detail: apples, thread, car keys, what’s for dinner Wednesday. If she could move from thread and grocery lists to questions of destiny, love, death— but life interrupts in the…
My name is winter hanging on the hem of spring A mandarin red My mother’s name is long road blues A scattered red My father’s name is twisted psalm A gospel / not red I come from a shouting /…
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.…
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…
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…