Underneath the Cottonwood Tree In My America Autumn Wins In my America only the seasonsrun for office, and they always winwith campaigns as honestas snowflakes, as sharp aslightning, clean as a mama loon’scall, each heart-rendering notea sincere promise sure to be keptas colorful as laying beneatha Cottonwood in Octoberall complication naked, abandoned,just a couple twigs... Continue Reading →
Charged My daughters have each accused me of this: Slut-shaming. I didn’t really know the term, but I knew exactly what they meant the minute they said it. And they were right. Proud I was embarrassed, and this was not a case of someone calling the kettle black. I raised these smart feminists, and they... Continue Reading →
Soup is truth. Soup is simple. Soup is not pot roast. Or scrambled eggs. Soup is honest. Soup keeps our oldest stories. Sings them in the choir. Soup has an open mind. Soup does not mind all the leftovers in the fridge. Soup loves all things fresh from the garden. Kill the bugs first,... Continue Reading →
Oh how the blood stories continue. Here are two pieces that look at the fiction around menstruation, and the truths. My own poem "All the Protection You Need", which quotes a litany of sanitary product packaging text, and I've re-posted right here beside today's book review "New Book Busts Myths About Menstruation Spread by... Continue Reading →
Poetry Month, Poem A Day Challenge, Poem No. 5 Explaining the Election We are a people who, in 1964, when Rudi Gernreich, Austrian fashion designer, invented the topless bikini and called it the monokini,* went for it. Well, half of us did. "It is feminist." "It is objectification." It is an etymological error. Gernreich received... Continue Reading →
blood moon red cavity in the sky a missing molar lunar dentistry children release teeth win fairy tale prizes, proud of the gap imagine that just dropping a limb a digit or a hip, a wrist, a twisted ankle and blooming a new one eclipse yourself become a shadow a hole in the western sky... Continue Reading →
Time for a little nostalgia, and I can't look back at one item, without reminiscing about the other. Thongs, the kind we used to wear on our feet, that evolved into something else, well, the word did anyway, and blood. Bleeding to be exact. Menses. Messy menses. And the whole bit. So here we go. When... Continue Reading →
This is the promised partner poem to "Glass in Our Tortillas." An old poem, that tells the story of food, friendship, and having daughters. Three Variations of Raspberry Jam for Julie Each afternoon we drank atole, Julie and I, in the shadows of the descending sun and laughed, at our lives, ourselves, at her intolerance... Continue Reading →
It made for a pretty sweet parenting pleasure to arrive home to a house where I could see the vacuum wheel tracks running across the carpet like directional signs saying 'This way to clean!' And to smell the fresh red chile pork in the kitchen. 'Are we at your mom's?' I asked the girls' dad.... Continue Reading →
“And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” So, on one of the first nights of my first job, outside of babysitting or cleaning houses, when I was all of fourteen years old, I was trapped inside a walk-in cooler by the chef at a popular restaurant in Detroit. A... Continue Reading →
pocket poet 