Blue Gray Rose Gold Wine
I was offered two goblets. I chose the smaller, luminous one.
Dear Eavan Boland
I pitched something to Lit Hub and they took it. A dream. But bittersweet. Because it’s for Eavan Boland. It’s about motherhood, and middle age, and passion and confusion and regret. So it’s also for all mothers who have art stirring, and waiting, inside them. Go be you. I know it feels hard. But do…
On History, Patriarchy, and Possibility, Too (With the Help of Virginia Woolf and Facebook)
I do not work in higher education. I work as a mother. I work as a poet. I work part-time as a copyeditor. I work on my children’s school board, as a political activist, and for my rural, collectively-owned community. All those things are work. But because of the society in which we live,…
Silent Night
Things can be crappy (you want a better word but that’s really how it feels) — crappy, top-of-the-line, end-of-the-line crappy, nothing the way it’s supposed to be, including your feeling of dissatisfaction with words, and then you just go, you go out alone into the dark night and walk up the road and the air…
Interlude – for San Bernardino
Let’s make him fly, says Milo, about his foam board Santa hitched to tottering, prop-legged reindeer when we get out the Christmas decorations. And I believe him. I believe in him. I have to. Because more people were gunned down today. People who help people were gunned down today. So sweet five-year-old boy, I will…
On Remaining Neutral While Your Five-Year-Old Handles a Gun
Because I am finding my way through this fear of routine massacres in America. Because it is so mysterious to me to raise a son. Because I really have strong feelings about guns— here’s a poem: ON REMAINING NEUTRAL WHILE YOUR FIVE-YEAR-OLD HANDLES A GUN It takes practice. It must, to find just the…
Walking through Waste
I spent the weekend raging. Beginning on Friday night, glued to the links I’d followed from Facebook about the Charlie Hebdo murders, I raged against the simplicity of media analysis, raged against hatred, and then, at midnight, sitting up in bed, I raged against my husband for not “getting” politics and race in precisely the…
Thanksgiving at the Church of the Whole Thing
Yesterday, after my husband and I woke to the sound of our children giggling in their bedroom, but before they came and crawled into bed with us, I turned to him and asked, “What are you thankful for?” He answered, “Pretty much the whole thing.” So there you go. Thank you, whole thing. I guess…
Start With Yourself (A correction, and a riff)
A few days after I published my last blog post, I met a good friend for lunch. We sat in the creeping April sunshine in downtown Santa Rosa, over a shared plate of quesadillas, and talked about children, school, writing, and degrees of uncertainty. She told me she read my latest post, and that she…
Sit Still, Stand Tall, Live Your Life
The first day of this month was the 54th anniversary of the first day of lunch-counter sit-ins in the segregated South. At the very tail end of January, in the course of my volunteer book-shelving at one of the Sonoma County libraries, I came across a children’s picture book called Sit-In: How Four Friends Stood…