L U M I N A * N O S T R I

The man you've been seeing- six months in- brings you breakfast in bed.  Bacon, eggs, french toast with powder sugar strawberries and orange juice. And coffee Don't forget the coffee. You don't notice the foil on the pan,  or the tension between his brows as he eyes the bed-comforter. All you see is bounty--sugary,  starchy, bounty with a dash of protein,  topped off  with all that tart. You think this is love like you read about in children's books. The kind where even before  you wake up, there is so much   to say thank you for.  So when he proposes, five days  later, on a mountain top, what can you say?  Who would say no to a meal like that? 

 Anger She’s a sly dog, but no fox. Anger’s got no burrow, no furtive fleeting feet. She helps herself to treats that lay in wait for finer company then cutely covers her warm, wet nose with goofy-clawed paws, as if to say Oh dear. I just couldn’t help myself.

 Baptism In these parts the power goes out with out warning often enough,  we’re no longer alarmed. The kids and I just look at each other, shrug, and shove off  to our collective imagination isles. Me? My notebook. Them? Everything else. Today though called for something sweet something to ease the hankering anticipation of something godly. Brown buttresses over green frocked Episcopalian priests Permission to say Jesus Christ and mean it. We sit beside the salted water Throw rocks against rocks, see if we have what it takes to break them. Faith and hope and Emily Dickinson   later, someone was baptized, but it wasn’t us. 

 A List Of Things To Try Before Smoking A Cigarette 1. Meditate 2. Do a headstand 3. Draw something. Anything.  4. Write something you can then light on fire (wishes, burn letters, whatever.)  5. Take a shower. (No one want's to smell like cigarettes after a shower) 6. Sign up for an exercise class. (The thought of moving will make you want to protect your lungs). 7. Put on a face mask. (It'll remind you that skin ages on it's own fast enough, no need to encourage it.)  8. Brush your teeth (similar to five, but not quite as dramatic.) 9. Go for a quick walk.  10. Change your bedsheets. (Even more effective than 5 and 8 put together. Think of all the work!)  11. Write a good things list (David Sedaris calls this a "Reasons to Live List." Tomato, tomato.)  12. Read things (that do not mention cigarettes).  13. Pick a chore and do it start to finish. Better yet, write all the chores you have to do, put them in a hat, and then pick one. Chore Roulette...

If You are Going To Marry A Poet Be careful about the day you choose.  Dooms Day, for example, may be the day which  allows your brother and her brother in law, and the family from Canada to be there, even though you gave far too little notice. But in year seven, when she's tired of breeding, of changing, of boundary setting and shifting, a poet will look at that day and go "See? We were doomed from the start." 

A Small Gift From Our Neighbor Shameful, really,  how I can't remember the first time.  I think it was chocolate- I know  it was delivered in a tight, clear, pyrex with a purple lid. It always is.  The children raise squeals like piglets at the trough, and I rummage the cabinets for the silver moon-shaped scooper. Our neighbor's small gift? Homemade heaven  on our tongues. 

 Far From Perfect In another life, I was a Latin teacher, and I have a sneaking suspicion I was the bad kind. For example, I'd  tell the students perficio was Latin for I thoroughly do, to show off, a little, but also to pontificate about my theories on life and meaning.  Like a math teacher, I'd scribble down my proof-  each red principle part with it's English meaning in green. Then, woosh! I'd spin toward them with a ring-master's enthusiasm,  after having underlined the past participle, and offer a little dramatic pause.   "So you see, class," I'd say, as if presenting the verb’s final trick to a room full of…well, teens whose hormones raced due to anything but Latin, whose eyes darted to the clocks  hidden in their pockets, tucked under their desks,  sometimes boldly behind their books, "you never want to be perfect- because having been thoroughly done ,  if you really think about it, would have to mean, obviously,  that you'...

 Souvenirs I am a things person. Give me an experience,  wide and vast, porous and leaking,  and I'll bottle it up. Shape it  like a little boat. I'll go find  a mold to withstand that-one-time's heat.  I want to put things on the shelf,  heavy in my palm, where I might pick them up from time to time and feel the wind of it, whatever it was, blowing through my hair. Wouldn't you rather something textured, sized, with weight?  A bobcat figurine or a coin.  So much heavier that unreliable collage of Memory— the one that shows up  when she wants to, the one who makes an Irish exit.

Our House (Draft 2. Final draft on substack ) A house starts as four lines, a red, crayon, box shape with my five-year-old hand's signature stroke. Three decades later, my eldest daughter would switch to green to draw her triangle top. Her younger brother will add twin teal smaller squares, will divide them into fourths.  My mother's eyes should recognize how these windows represent the promise  of known depth, but they don't. The only thing I know? My youngest, a daughter, will not be satisfied. Not until, passing that five-year-old-threshold, she scrawls pink and purple flowerbeds on the right side, on the left. In time, for all of us, the shapes move, the colors layer. Our crayon melts into something we, a kaleidscopic household, can't quite control. Something neither my nose nor their father's can quite smell. Sure, whether here or there, time will be measured in dollars and cents.  Perhaps, like on our broken marriage license, each name on the le...

 I Madonnari We sprinkle in our mira mama between isles of chalk artists.  On hands and knees they make  from pure black top art happen.  Some work alone, others in teams.  My children's tongues teem with questions.  "Who is that?" "Jesus's mom." "Did you see?!" "A Eurasian owl!" "They always hide the best ones!" (Crane Country Day School, my oldest gave that title to you.) We go early to the festival, because my sister says we will avoid the crowds. From the blacktop of their  childhood may they say, rather, "We'd go early to the festival to talk to all the artists."

  Melancholic Do jacaranda blooms count their Mays the way we do  our anniversaries? Not for birthdays.  Not for weddings. The other ones we all hold onto in silence. Here, the day I unraveled, uncoiled every last hinge. Here, the day I pulled up the roots of our marriage. Here, the day I lost the baby. Here, the day I got what I wanted.  The jacaranda just bloom- they count nothing. Not even the number of ways their purple blossoms punctuate the gray of our Mays. 

 Daily Poem Practice An excerpt from Wild Writing with McKenzie Zajonc — Jump off line from Hannah Rosenberg’s If May Was Your Friend ~ The tiny unfolding beginnings of right here, right now are so small I can barely make them out. Perhaps I’ve begun to indulge in what’s here. Perhaps I’ve begun to open a new something. But I am so afraid of it closing, I don’t dare say more. But it’s here, this tiny unfolding beginning. A note with it’s sweetly pressed edges. A package well wrapped in paper so pretty you don’t want to tear. Unfolding beginnings. The promise of small revelations as long as you keep your gentle courage, gingerly stay willing to open one flap, and then the next, to steady yourself to accept whatever you find inside. 

In Seattle, in May, air blends sea-salt and snow.  Pink-swirl-sky punctuates the horizon beyond us airport walkers' east facing panes.  We mortal creatures make a bee-line to shuttles,  screenings.detours                ever-changing gates.  Not every passenger               waggles their tongue with the latest update en route.  Some pass silently by.       Childish-pink-flush  mixes with fog on our faces.  Not every passenger trusts in this hive’s waggles.     I'll go ahead ,  they say to more trusting company,               Report back when I've seen what there is to be seen.  Salt and pink spread across         sweaty brows        indiscriminate of the trusting and not trusting.  Airport-walkers,          we walk on,    ...

An Ocean for Sonya Remember it: The way you stand. All eight years of your child body stacked on the rickety  gray frame leading up to your bunk.  How, outside the window, evening washes over ignorant dolphins. How, inside, we stand just above a rolling fog of inevitable distance.  Your cheeks are all salty when you say to me, again,  but Mom! All mothers love their children , s o if  I was never  born, you would love another kid just as much .  This charged, dangly bell shaped hypothesis floats to me and zaps.   The question on this mouth-arm: Are we not just two  separate and strange vessels? Your eyes look so much  like your father’s when they are weighed down with life’s limits.  Remember it: What it is in my voice as I say yes   that makes you look up and   hold my gaze it could never  be this. My mouth is the holdfast, my words, the medulla. By some miracle, the seahorses born within you pick up spe...

Could it be that I have learned even beyond the limits of my vast and varied borders there is no monster, no hostile entity, only miles of wild divinity  infinite and far as the  eye can see? 

  Transformation (alt title: gobly-guk) Time, they tell me, moves slower the closer you are to the ground. Turns out that is also true for the  heaviest inhabitants of my inscape. One minute expands to ten as I take in their solid, massive sides, push and heave at their stone sides, struggle nearly in vain to unstick what’s been stuck for a long time. Without this slowdown, I’d have no business setting those four dragons free, the black, the yellow, the blue, the red twisting  through the rolling and coiled green  pastures of my heart. I’d have no business watching, by miracle, like those heads on Easter island, The heaviness lift, be encircled in that white light, And lead a floating procession of its agents summoned from every limb and as they pass the horny gate of my crown, how they unfold into  beautiful lotus like princesses and head toward Their happier horizon, leaving me to dance with my exiles, take them in in their two time splendor,  while the d...

  Travel Log And then there’s this— my bed, made, green velvet edges smoothed and tucked in the corners. Cat food on the counter. An empty fridge.  Lights all off. I am away. Now it’s our small airport (Why so many people?) garnished with Portuguese tiles yellow and rust and teal. And now, the Cabin murmurs.  A baby kicking at my seat. A pop and fizz from A19’s drin. The loud feeling of twin jets carrying me away. A mile below, my first born plays with her friend. A mile below, my second born watches them, then climbs something. A mile below, my third born stands tall and strong in a pink sparkle backpack I hate to say she’s grown into. I never get used to this “away.”  Even when they are asleep in their beds, when I can hear them singing, when I hold my foot up to touch theirs, sole to sole, and measure whose is bigger today—  Even then, being “away”, even by just a millimeter...  and to think we’ve got so much farther to go....

  Monday Morning And now comes the quiet hymn of morning birds, boiling water, the plaintive  cat who wants in from her hunt. Here, in the mess of the weekend. Here, on the precipice of the week. A mesquito-eater lights on the ceiling. A jumping spider rests on the wall. In the garden, the king snake stretches out from her coil. All of us put on as our uniform the same question— what, out of everything, will happen next?

 Mother’s Day Mother’s Day Remember it: The way you stand. All eight years of you stacked on the rickety gray staircase  leading up to your bunk. How evening washes over ignorant deer outside the window while we, atop the mountain, are just above the rolling fog of distance. Your cheeks are salty when you say to me again “but Mom!”  Your chest is clear, “All mothers love their children” how easily slides “so if  I was never born, you would have just as much love,” Your brown eyes look  “for someone else.” So much like your father’s  eyes, weighed down with fatigued conviction.   Remember it: my voice as I say “yes,” that makes you look up “and,”  hold my gaze while I add, “it could never be this.” Our embrace. My tears, a truth we both can see.  Remember it—and like me— be completely undone

On Wednesdays the kids come home, and my heart is outsized. My heart directs Memory to play  again and again , over laundry and car clean-outs,  how the younger two  run  toward me,  arms spread eagle,  smiles sparkling .  Memory sings as I sweep the floors about how their welcome contrasts with my oldest's steady stroll, her  half smile's flash,  as the heat of my my arm  meets her rounded shoulders,  or her  quiet "hello, Mom," reaches my ear. Memory paints that first baby- circle  as my zoom background.  Uses broad strokes of my  i mpatience,    (The other babies began  to smile  at their moms much sooner, remember?)  Memory responds with little dabs  of my petulance.   Five long months I wait to see  that baby's first grin,  and when it comes,  it is never predictable. Five long nights I wait,  but every Wednesday has been  different.   I w...