Daffodils This Early? What a Scandal.
Another frost is coming, doesn’t she know?
There’s no way she’ll survive.
She peaked too early, spoke out of turn.
It’s not right to flaunt her vitality.
How dare she unfurl green leaves
when the trees are still barren?
Don her best golden yellow
when the grass is still hibernated, brown?
She’s too much, a show-off.
But she continues to grow, giggles gasping
from her corona. She is a queen.
Maybe she’s not provoking but inviting you
to notice
to delight
to cackle at the absurdity that she dared bloom at all?
To The Stranger Who Pitied My Son for Having Two Sisters
I wanted to tell you the world could use more men who have spent time as the only male in the room / hold onto softness / feel their feelings / admire women their senior / look out for women their junior / aren't afraid to occasionally wear pink socks / because they recognize there aren't girl colors and boy colors / they're just colors / who know what periods are / see women as powerful / understand their small place in this big world / who lead with kindness But all I said was he's a very sweet boy / he adores his sisters / because the thing is / that's true too
Poetry and Other Insurrections
after Michelle Awad
There is no better way to protest
than putting pen to paper.
The world is a maze. This life,
a labyrinth. We are stuck
trying to find the center.
Wall-follow your words
and write your way out.
History scratches her nails
against the cheek
of the world, but wars
are often won in verse.
Twist propaganda into poems.
Salt the wound and prepare
the prose – there is no balm
like beauty, no sanctuary
better than a simile.
The muse shrieks
in my sleep, she screams
till her voice runs hoarse.
Give her a pen.
She’ll go down swinging.
My Sixth Grader Takes a Winter Walk
My son slams the door and goes out into the snow, wearing my pastel blue boots because he’s already outgrown the manly ones I bought him three months ago. I encourage his long walks. I say it’s because it regulates his ADHD, but it’s also because he isn’t fighting with anyone. I need to go somewhere before he comes back. My van rumbles over the slush, and I see him in his hoodie, face flushed in the way that has always meant he’s been crying, so I pull over in front of some stranger’s house and ask what is wrong. It’s something about his classes and not finding his friends at ten-minute break that day and feeling generally out-of-sync with everyone and everything, and I get it. My day has been drawn-out meetings and evidence of everyone hanging out without me on BeReal and I want to bury my face in my pillow and cry but instead I’m driving my ugly old van to hang out with some women I know whose faces have been cosmetically perfected and whose homes look like Restoration Hardware catalogs. At least I was invited, even though I feel like my life is all wrong. In some ways, middle school never ends, and in others I am tough enough now; I can shake my head at the daily papercuts. In any case, we’re both fragile and raw, asking to be scraped clean by the snow.
The Hearing Test
In the soundproof room, everything bland and beige, headphones pressed tight against my ears, I sit swinging my feet. The man behind the glass mumbles a word that doesn’t sound like a word— garbled, underwater, just out of reach. I am supposed to hear what he’s saying, supposed to hold it in my own mouth and repeat it, but I can’t. I can’t and I don’t. My therapist wants to know why I am angry, and I think of the soundproof box. I think of men. I think of sitting in pews, straining to hear a word, any word, in the place where I am supposed to hear the voice of God most clearly, but I can’t. I can’t and I don’t. And then I think of this—my mother opening the door, letting me out of the beige box, the world suddenly becoming full and resonant in an instant, every word crisp and vibrant and holy. Listen, I am trying to tell you that nothing is wrong with my ears. I am hanging my headphones on the hook. I am showing you I can hear just fine.
If I was Nora Ephron
after Michelle Windsor
If I was Nora Ephron, I’d quip about bouquets of pencils. I’d tell you that if you slip on a banana peel, but find a funny story about your flip, you’re the one who wins. But I am not Nora Ephron. I can’t wear black turtlenecks, don’t live in an apartment, and don’t feel bad about my neck (yet), but I dream of pencil quips.
Quiet Sounds Like
Inspired by the quiet machine by Ada Limón
Being on the road in the early morning. The sunrise chatter of birds. The fog that hangs over the river. Lying in bed before falling asleep. The steady hum of the shower. Waiting for the French bakery in town to open. Summer thunderstorms. Wandering around the library. Writing on a keyboard. Deleting social media from my phone. The warmth of the sun on my face. My daughter splashing in the pool. The fall of snow in the winter. Crunching leaves in the fall. Curling up with a book after everyone else is sleeping.
A Motherlode of Onions
Can I bother you to take some onions home with you? I have too many onions.
Um, sure, I guess, but how did you wind up with too many onions?
Your father and I were short on time, got to the grocery store, went separate ways to be quick, guess we both crossed onions off the list, checked out, got to the car with more onions than we needed and said, “To heck with taking them back!”
Oh, okay....
I mean, what would you do with all these onions?
Make onionade?
Netflix and peel and peel some more?
Cry me and you and you a river?
Google “when life gives you onions” to learn about onions for better sleep (don’t tell dad), plus debunk any curative beliefs you unlikely ever held about onions and the bubonic plague (we know how that went), onions and the flu, onions and smallpox, or onions and in-laws (made ya look).
If it were up to me (and it apparently it is), I would grab butter and balsamic and herbs de Provence and my biggest pan for making onion jam (right after googling “dancing in the kitchen”).
I mean, what would you do with this sweet lode?
Call your mother for yet another?
After all, she knows best
when it comes to
excess.
Department of Human Efficiency
Everyday I break open. Let my bruised, bandaged heart bleed out all over the hurt I have no power to prevent. I am not a billionaire. I am spent. But I will give what I have. See? See this brave, beating thing in my hands? Take it. Take it and use whatever life is left.
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So good, ladies! Amy, I am nodding along to your brother to two sisters poem. Couldn’t say it better!
All of these… so beautiful. Amy, as another mother raising one boy alongside his two sisters, I absolutely adore your words!