On a Lonely Day, I Drive to Target
Do not pretend like I am the only mother who funnels her toddler’s chunky thighs into the holes and snaps the buckle snug. Do not pretend like I am the only one who weaves through the aisles, lifting items I will look at but not buy. Do not pretend like Target is not full of mothers who are hungry for faces and eyes and just one intelligible word. Every mother has had this moment, and every mother has, at least once, met an angel in the cereal aisle. Mine is a woman my grandmother’s age, sitting in a cart with a seat just her size, the buckle fastened snug around her own belly. She, too, seems hungry for faces, for eyes, so we smile at one another for a long moment and I think about how we all end up where we begin— dependent on those who love us, offering nothing to the world but our own warm gaze, and still, how this is enough. All the way home, I take back every desperate thing I’ve ever said about the world. All the way home, I try to name the thread that pulls together tight all our humanity. All the way home, I feel for the hollow ache I brought through the automatic doors and find that, even now, it is being held by the kindness of a stranger.
Conversion
I fly too close to the sun to maintain my figure and forgive my sins. The meat of my Fridays just burns away. And the ashes say something about where I’ve been. I kneel less. But I pray more. I raise my hand. Divined by light, I reach. Because I don’t have the answers.
Home
“Where are you from?” the woman at the store asks. An innocent question, but I hesitate before I answer. Because I am from the plains not far from here where I ran with dirt on my knees and roots under my feet. But I’m also from the mountains that gave me escape and adventure. Then there is the sea - the water that healed and renewed me - the sand that grounded me But this is too much to drop on a stranger in the bread aisle so I just smile and say, “Oh, you know, I’m from a little bit of everywhere.”
A dirge of chattering birds
My boys gift me strips of fine paperbark, and I hold it up to the golden evening hue, behold a filtered light shine through. I’ve been alive twelve thousand, five hundred and eighty one days. As the day flees my frail fingers, we lay fleeting paperbark upon the little creek, watch it mould to the mottled ripples, fold with the breeze, and be farewelled by the trees. It floats downstream like a flimsy Viking longship. The dirge is chattering birds. And there was evening, and there was mourning, my twelve thousand, five hundred and eighty first day.
When my Daughter Says Sometimes She Smiles So Hard Her Face Hurts
I know what she means Maybe joy is a supernatural thing An experience too big for our humble bodies Like young love and triumph and sunsets and new babies and the perfect pair of jeans Or warm bread with salted butter and toddlers dancing and a big stack of library books and when the tulips are in bloom What about enduring love and French braids and a text from a friend and live music and standing on top of a mountain to realize your smallness in this vast beautiful, world A smile can’t hold all that
Baby Teeth
Each morning, I lift my son’s cracked molar from my jewelry tray, rub my fingers against the pearled enamel, thumb catching over the ridges. I find teeth everywhere, these days— castoff shells as he ebbs and flows through the house like a tide. One on his desk, another in a plastic bag on the kitchen counter. You’ve heard of mothers-in-law gifting their sons’ brides with boxes or baggies or necklaces of teeth, passing the torch of loving his body, shaped so carefully in the womb’s oyster shell, the grit of morning sickness and sciatica rolled into a priceless pearl, fashioned cell by cell. My mother kept my umbilical stump in a plastic case on her vanity— a wizened raisin, leathery with old blood. I tell the story to laugh at the absurdity of mothers, our stubborn clinging to the driftwood of the past. But here I stand, unable to cast off his relics, watching him grow tall and untethered.
If God Was a Florist
If God was a florist He would gift me a magical bouquet of fulfilled hopes and dreams, instead of creamy pink peonies and roses the color and scent of blood. Am I too old for this fantasy? The idea roots like a weed in the sidewalk’s crack, desperate for light. Grows in the dark space between my amygdala and prefrontal cortex. It would be guaranteed heartbreak but sometimes it’s fun to pretend a fistful of weeds is still a bouquet.
A Prayer for Remembrance
(Or why I let my son run around with his shirt off, even though it's a douchebag thing to do)
My six-year-old has a thing about taking off his shirt whenever the weather is above seventy degrees, and I can’t help but cringe, can’t stop myself from remembering a boy I knew growing up who always had his shirt off — his oozing arrogance outshined only by that chicken pox itch of desire, my very first exposure. I can still taste the want in the back of my throat. Can still remember how he kept his chest bare, but our love covered like it was some kind of secret thing best saved for shadows, patches of dark wood, brambles of thornbush. Already, the fairytale was fractured. Already, I accepted the break. I swear that back then, my heart was a windshield, and this was the very first crack, spiderwebbing across my ribcage until the whole thing shattered in on itself — a mess for someone else to inherit down the line. And maybe that’s dramatic, but do you know how many tears I have shed over that boy? No, not him. Mine. The boy with the grass-stained pants and the wild smile that is already buckling knees. The one who smushes his face into the hollow of my shoulder with each and every hug, who tells me he loves me more than anyone in the whole entire world. The one who rips off his shirt on the first spring day just because he likes the way the sun feels on his skin. Lord, let this boy – my boy — be the handsome prince, not the monster in the woods. When it comes time for him to uncover love, let him be the one who knows all things deserve to be held in the light. Lord, when it matters most, let him remember the sun.
Are you a member of The Tortured Poets Department?
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Delightful! 🔥
Stunning, every single one.