Category: creative writing
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This week brought the twenty-third anniversary of my mother’s death. The morning of the anniversary, I woke gently. I felt so peaceful, as if I had been rocked in my sleep. It reminded me of how I slept on the day she died. I was a new mother then, my firstborn just five weeks old.…
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I’m no scientist, but still, I’m fascinated by the process of scientific exploration and discovery. I enjoy reading non-fiction written by scientists, like Michio Kaku, Hannah Holmes, Candace Pert; my favorite column in the New York Times Magazine is “Diagnosis,” where there’s a patient who presents with mysterious symptoms who is puzzled over and prodded…
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Invasion Oh, I love the honeysuckle sucking the air from the mouths of tenderer locals— love it though it overtakes, sprawls without shame Oh, honeysuckle, I breathe you in. It’s an awful love. In your exhalations I smell my own perfume thick foreign scent Oh, I try not to overshadow but like the honeysuckle, I might,…
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I’m not religious, and I hope I don’t offend anyone by saying what I believe. I believe in a higher power. I believe that higher power is manifested most purely in love. I don’t mean only romantic love, though that is one form. In our culture, that kind of love is held up as a…
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Poem-sword in one hand, packing tape in the other, recycling bin in my third hand and tissues in my fourth. (For the dust. It makes me sneeze.) My fifth hand is clutching a steaming mug and my sixth hand is wasting time on Facebook. My seventh and eighth hands are clasped in some kind of prayer,…
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That May the peonies were my countdown— I knew they would bloom when she did. That heady hot spring of unfurling expectation, of watching marching ants making their incredible journeys across Planet Peony while I marked the days. Oh, the heaviness in my ankles, the humidity, the wonder of my belly swelling like a bud…
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Like star charts inside my brain extending to the edges of me; electricity— constellations conducting current, leaping synaptic gaps to link thought to action in my dark interior
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Broken or not? At snack time or lunch, that was a favorite game of my daughters. One would hold up an apple slice or a Ritz cracker or shiny orange Clementine and demand of the other, “Broken or not?” They were both pretty masterful at holding a broken cracker or piece of fruit in such…
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That voice Sinking into my gut like a spire into a low sky it walks with me, or used to— maybe that’s why I learned to walk so fast, shins burning hot uphill, it always beat me… until I learned not to hear.
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Another 7×7 poem (seven lines, seven syllables per line.) This one inspired by endings—of seasons, of eras. MarcescenceSometimes we hold on too hard;cling to what should be released—old, winter-worn, transparentfrom time and weather, rattled,beaten, tattered— it’s hard tolet the familiar fallaway, let new growth emerge Note: Marcescence is a botanical term that refers to trees…
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