Open Letter To My Children on the Fourth of July, 2020

I’ll have to do this work someday, too, and I hope I handle it with the grace of my parents, for whom exposing me to brutal stories was an act of love. Brit Bennet, from “Addy Walker, American Girl” 4 July 2020 Dear Daughters, 364 days ago one of you—the only one who was speaking…

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Messy Beginnings

June 23, 2010 I sat on the cold floor of the airport as my last day living in Seattle changed over to my first day of living… away. It was past midnight, and I leaned against the wall, having just checked my carry-on at the gate so as not to have to bother with it…

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Of Braiding Hair and the Privilege of Worry

It is what would have been Breonna Taylor‘s 27th birthday, and I am braiding my daughter’s hair when I am struck for a moment with the desire to write a poem about braiding hair. I think about braids around the world, braids throughout history, different colors and textures of hair plaited together in different sizes…

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All These Treasures

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass, the same hips and haws…

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On This Year Without A Spring

As far as unpopular opinions go, I’ve never been terribly shy about disliking spring. It’s nothing personal; it’s not even universal. I don’t like spring in Seattle, and it’s all about the weather. Dreary autumns and rainy winters feel appropriate, but when spring declares itself with still mostly rainy days that are maybe five degrees…

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Sleeping The Time Away

If you poke around the internet for long enough, you may discover a set of confessions that include the phrase “I think about this a lot.” The objects of this thinking vary widely, from Ina Garten declaring magnanimously that “store bought is fine” (referring, I think, to chicken stock and breadcrumbs) to the shocking fact…

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Reimagine.

Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us, even in the leafless winter, even in the ashy city. I am thinking now of grief, and of getting past it; I feel my boots trying to leave the ground, I feel my heart pumping hard. I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I…

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Bones

“Mom… when are we going to get a book about the body?” It’s a frequent refrain these days, a question that has blossomed into our lives like the pink flowers on the tree outside our bedroom window. What we need, Luci decided some weeks or maybe a month ago, is a book. A book that explains,…

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Strength In Striking Root

In college, I read a lot of poems. Long and short, rhyming and not, epic and lyrical and imagist, poems dashed in and out of my academic life for four years (and still several years before I would begin to actually enjoy them). With the great abundance of good poetry in my life at the…

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Dans ses écrits, un sage Italien Dit que le mieux est l’ennemi du bien. In his writings, a wise Italian says that the best is the enemy of the good. Voltaire I don’t remember quite when I decided that a flawless report card was going to be my “thing.” I didn’t go to elementary school…

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