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Family and Relationships
The Work We Do
I can’t believe it took me so long to hold myself accountable for how much my life actually costs. Forty-two feels incredibly, abnormally late to realize that, yes, time is money. And, conversely, money is time—time that someone, somewhere worked.
December 2024
The Wind Phone
The prairie grass has always drawn things into its orbit. I’ve seen rabbits hide among the bluestem, and the occasional red fox, and after every storm there are objects that blow or float past and entangle themselves in the switchgrass and fescue. . . . Tonight, a windy September evening, a shiny new object has appeared in my yard, like a loose mylar balloon blown by the wind.
December 2024
Guarding the Coop
I watch for the fox that’s slaughtered / three Rhode Island Reds, the hens / just lumps of bloodied feathers I buried / before my son and daughter woke this morning.
December 2024
Greenie
Sometimes I wonder if that moment when I came into the house after school, during a time when I was mostly friendless, dressed in matronly, dated clothes from the Cancer Society thrift shop, barred by my mother from concerts, movies, and parties, and I sat down at the table and was grabbed hard by my grandmother’s hand, which seemed to hold a charge of energy—sometimes I wonder if that moment, that physical connection, that pinch, was how I survived.
December 2024
Love and Other Pandemics
The thing about the apocalypse is that nobody said it would be so beautiful. Spring is letting down her hair. The air is warm, sweet, and clear. Moss drapes over a storm drain, parting for the rush of early-morning runoff. A heavy quiet has descended since we took to our homes, save for the shrieking hawks circling the shuttered strip-mall parking lot next door to my mother’s house outside of Philadelphia.
November 2024
The Telephone Mode
I find talking on the phone to be one of the purest forms of communication. You are receiving the person’s voice, their tone, their laughter, without the distraction of their clothing, their hairdo, their body. I don’t care what someone looks like. I want to hear them sigh with exhaustion or cackle with delight. I want to hear tiny details of the environment from which they speak: birdsong, barking dogs, the beep of a microwave.
November 2024
Driving Upstate with My Father
Driving upstate with my father / at the end of a bad year. Trees begin / to outnumber houses. Rain turns to snow / as fields hang like paintings. / Dad fills his lip with chew, talks.
November 2024
Bone Frag
There are countless theories about the origins of the pebble storms. The one that makes the most sense to me is something about melting ice caps and ocean acidification and dying coral reefs.
October 2024
The Next Peak
The mountain in winter enables the kind of sleep that restores, heals, allows brains to solve problems. The days have more than enough darkness to crawl inside.
October 2024
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