I think families are sometimes just tough all around.

Here's a quick poem I wrote while evading writing papers and grading papers. Hope everyone's Thanksgiving was happy and healthy.

King Lear Sees a Family Counselor

On Wikipedia, I looked up “self-esteem”
just in case. Unlike four humors or gout,
the buzzards of memory nest and circle, as
( Read more... )

From today's Writer's Almanac

Diagnosis

by Sharon Olds

By the time I was six months old, she knew something
was wrong with me. I got looks on my face
she had not seen on any child
in the family, or the extended family,
or the neighborhood. My mother took me in
to the pediatrician with the kind hands,
a doctor with a name like a ( Read more... )

* I spent the more productive part of this weekend writing a short paper on Frankenstein and postpartum depression. That's kind of a "done" trope, in that in 1976 Ellen Moers wrote a paper about Mary Shelley's miscarriage in light of her writing her novel, and that there is a running metaphor of postpartum tendencies in Victor Frankenstein. I never ( Read more... )

Today's Things ( Read more... )

Six Things From This Week or So

1. Today, a man knocked on our door inquiring after the wood we salvaged from the fence. Then he offered to pressure wash the bugs off the front of the house.

2. In class, as we discussed Frankenstein, our professor asked us what Victor Frankenstein was feeling upon giving life to an inanimate object. One ( Read more... )

Here are six things I saw yesterday: 

• Quick-crete-We moved hundreds of pounds of it from Lowe’s to the Fit. Each dusty paper bag smelled like rain to me-that earthy, petrichor of rock and dirt. I loved the white dust on my shirt and hands.
• Leaves everywhere-when I went to step after the cat who was in hot pursuit of a ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

Last night, at my parents' house, I made the mistake of bringing up Bob Dylan to my dad. Dad credits Dylan for so much in our lives: invoking a muse to get me reading poetry, rattling the system like an iron bellwether, inspiring the Humvee of my dissent from mainstream expectations….

And in some ways he's right. I loved Bob Dylan, especially in ( Read more... )

Dead Girl's Paroxysm

Suddenly I got up from the table
in the middle of your rant, spittle popping,
coffee swilling, storm clouds echolocating
their lost thunder, and I realized

I'd lost myself. I ran to the ladies' room
where, behind the closed doors, sets of shoes
toed each other nervously like spooked cows,
brown leather and wedges murmuring ( Read more... )

Westward Prayer

O sky muscle
flex your rain
so from your skull
ropes of water, your
steroid hair extensions
might tether to the desert.

O mudmaking stocktrader
trill your exchange floor gong,
divvy all chits.
Flush the  lizards
from their holes,
stretch the cactus arms
like praise songs.
Feed the hare
his weight in toads.

O seersucker lullaby
sing of the ( Read more... )