Pandemic Poetry

Rosh Hashanah 5781

Smooth, spindly talles fringes

Slip through your fingers

As you twist and braid them.

You breathe out and your breath 

Is warm inside your mask

Like a child's evening bath

It puffs up and fogs your glasses

The flowers on the pulpit are covered in clouds

That roll in and recede with the rhythms of your body

As rabbis and cantor flutter masked about the sanctuary

Muttering about outages, and waiting, and waiting

As each in their homes your friends wait too for the new year.

Your breath wafts over your cheeks.

The sun through the stained glass shines a brilliant sunset pink on the ceiling.

The new year is here for us

Though we are still waiting to connect.

It is here. We are here.

The Lord is My Rock

The rush of pouring water muffled the audiobook that played as I washed the breakfast dishes.  In the book, a man pushed aside stones in the ghetto wall and lifted a young boy through the hole so he could escape to smuggle in bread. The sound of the water made it impossible to hear the boy’s fear, the man’s hunger.

Last night I had a dream that my daughter plunged into a ravine.  I saw her gazing up at me from the rock with fear in her eyes.  I scrambled through the rocks and leapt, not knowing if I would reach her and save her or if my body would slam against the stone.  I saw her face submerge as I fell toward her.

When I woke it was the new year.  My dream remained with me as I washed the breakfast dishes.  In the ghetto, under cover of blackouts, the nights were utter darkness.

In the synagogue the cantor removed the Torah from the ark and cradled it like a child.  Her gray hair was like stone against the pure white Torah mantle.

Abraham carried the firestone and the slaughtering knife toward the mountain.  His arm was falling, falling toward his son to slay him but a messenger held it back.

I am still falling, falling toward my daughter, never reaching her and never crashing.  The rushing water never covers me, nor drowns her.  Something holds me back, keeps me suspended.  I tossed and turned all night, returning to the falling.

In the ghetto the night was pitch black.

My son woke me up in the morning.  He came into my bed bright eyed, asking to play. My daughter followed, grinning as she slipped under my comforter.

The cantor returned the Torah to the ark, crying Rock of Israel, arise, help, redeem us.

Abraham slaughtered a ram on the rock where he was to have sacrificed his son.  The man filled the wall with the stone, the boy ran out of the ghetto in search of bread. I fed the children, washed the breakfast dishes, held my daughter and rocked her.  When in return for crying out to God, Hannah gave birth to a son, she sang in praise the Lord is my Rock.

Isaac is spared, in each year’s retelling. Abraham’s arm never reaches him. 

In my dream I am suspended in desperate hope, plunging and never crashing.

I washed the dishes. The morning sun was bright as my son’s eyes.

May God’s countenance shine upon you, the cantor chanted.  The Lord is my Rock, she cried.  I threw myself toward the ravine.  When I woke it was the new year.

Abundant Peace

Outside the curtained windows across the darkened street

orange lights flicker between gauzy decorative spider webs

In the living room my husband sits in front of his computer

singing, “Who is like you, Lord, among the gods?”

I tune out the slightly off-key praise 

as I place bowls of vanilla ice cream on the dining room table

I call the kids up from where they shout and run in the basement

so they can slurp whipped cream by the fading Shabbat candles

The floor is sticky from spilled grape juice. Dirty plates line the kitchen counters.

The kids are pretending to be kittens, sticking their noses in the bowls.

In the living room my husband pauses for silent prayer.

The kids meow and purr.  The curtains billow from a passing breeze.

My son pauses the game to say, “One time the wind was blowing so hard

you could even see it.  It was gray, and it pushed against you when you walked.”

“Is this for pretend?” asks my daughter. “No,” says my son.  “It was real, and you were there.”

My daughter closes her eyes.  “Yes, and there was no thunder,” she recalls.

My son nods.  “No thunder, but you could really see the wind.  That’s how I know the wind is real.”

My daughter meows.  “Spread a shelter of peace over us” my husband sings in the living room.

All this simultaneity, there’s not room for it all, in one house.

It’s a surplus of meaning, an abundance of feeling, when my sleeping daughter shares a wall with my husband comforting mourners from the glow if his screen.

Or when my son learns about whales in online school while in the next room I lead students in conversations about Gilgamesh’s diving to the bottom of the sea in search of eternal life

I’m not a poet, but lately, now that there’s no time to write them down, words spill out of my fingers

at the oddest moments because there’s no time to hold them in and nowhere else to put them.

I’m writing this poem on a scrap of paper I found in the bottom of my purse

I started it during a boring online faculty meeting and stuffed it in my pocket while I made dinner

It’s a supplicatory note crammed between the bricks of my suburban house

It’s a prayer that the power that holds us together won’t hold us so tight

“Grant us peace,” my husband sings, “abundant peace.”

We are oozing into one another like the spilled juice I keep forgetting to mop up

If I had time I would put fewer words into this poem because I think poems should be concise

But I have an excess of feeling, an excess of words, and not enough room or time to tame them.

III.

Yesterday I drove my kids to the library to return books

In the car I hummed a high holiday song, “We return, we return again to You…”

Where does prayer end and the mundane begin?

Where the separation between holy and profane?

I think of Alan Ginsberg intoning “holy holy holy”

The kids in the car are holy!  The gray of the wind is holy!  The glare from my husband’s computer is holy!

I find the exercise wholly exhausting.

In the meantime, I don’t always know where I begin or end

Which one of us is in the first grade?  Which one of us leads a congregation?

But I am returning something, sending it away from our house

like a dove searching for dry land

a few words escaping our home, easing our excess

Forces

What is it about spinning?

My daughter loves anything she can leverage her weight against

Dipping her feet on the ground and then lifting and leaning back

Reeling with centrifugal force

Maybe it's the way the metal bears her weight and constant motion

Responding to her body’s shifts and sways

Maybe it’s the thrill of whirling out of control

Paired with the power to make herself stop

What will her body be asked to bear

In a world reeling beyond control?

What will be forced upon her?

I watch her playing in the playground

filled with awe and fear

and an urgent desire to kiss the fists that clutch

the metal spinner, the fists that will have to wrest

power from those who’ll never stop

We’re falling back with dizzying speed

Political shifts unresponsive to our bodies 

My daughter spins, unknowing.

Kol Nidre 5781

Once I made a vow

To kiss the cheeks of strangers

In the pews.  Release me.

On watching remote Yom Kippur services with an audio delay

There’s something comic about it

A delay that mocks sincerity

Yet desperate, full of need

Her face, her voice, us, each apart

Avinu malkeinu, shma koleinu

Round and full she opens her mouth

Inscrutably slow, her shoulders

Sway, with grace, as though she’s floating

Sound comes later, seconds behind 

Avinu malkeinu, shma koleinu

Wait for the prayer that follows her

Lost in the fibers between us

Wait for the tremulous high notes

That drip along the Ethernet

Avinu malkeinu, shma koleinu

13 feet apart and a plexiglass barrier 

A found poem: Vice presidential debate October 7, 2020

I want to talk 

Contrary to what you may believe 

I will not be lectured 

I want to  

I would like an opportunity to respond 

I’m speaking

Here's what I would like to say to everybody 

It is within our power

Blank

You gave me a notebook

Clean white pages

Glued into blue binding

I need it

I write with broken pencils

On the backs of crumpled receipts

I left it in my office

Sitting smugly on my desk

Unopened

While pajamaed in bed

My finger kneads poems

Into my pillow

This is the hour of change

My son, asleep under a red fleece blanket

Night light still glowing, audiobook still storytelling

Into an orange room papered with crayon art

All day we’ve been forking words and numbers over to him

This evening he read a book to us, handing back words

As though we’d overpaid

He begged us to let him set an alarm

To ensure an early start to a long empty day

We shook our heads wisely urging sleep

Day of rest – a flurry of dishes

Rushing bedtime, skipping bath

Services on zoom into the night

Not enough time for sleeping in

For mornings of red fleece

Gazing at the wall, face still pressed on pillow

The fundamental stuff of creation is newness itself

My husband preaches to his congregation over zoom

This is the hour of change, he insists

We harness the day of rest

To shake us into recreating the world

For the rest of our lives, maybe

I’m not asking for the new, not

Praying for change, though we need it

Just wishing for less, and least at now, for once

Just for tonight couldn’t we

Bundle down and unplug the clock

I stretch out my hands to the universe

Brother, can you spare some time?
 

The Myth of Ithaca

The other day my son called out from the next room, “Mom, tell me some facts about the Loch Ness monster and Yetti!”  “They aren’t real,” I hollered, half-listening as I read discussion posts about Cyclops.  “I’m reading a non-fiction book,” he retorted.  “You must be wrong.”

Right now my kids are watching Sunday School on zoom, while their dad, just one room over, tells the congregation a story about Noah’s ark.  The kids like to giggle at the echo, moments of delay between his voice and its tinny reproduction through my laptop.

In the kitchen I stand by the stove, my head in my hands, torn between a desire to feed the kids oranges and praise their listening skills and my need to run out the back door, into the morning drizzle to escape my husband’s voice echoing in every room.  The children gather two by two around the kitchen table.  I’m trying to survive the flood.

Last night my daughter couldn’t sleep.  Her face wet, her eyes red, she stood trembling in her bedroom saying, “There’s something wrong in my head.  It keeps flipping from place to place and I can’t make it stop.  I know monsters and goblins aren’t real but I still feel like they are real tonight.”

Now my daughter is running between my laptop and my husband’s office, returning to ask my son, “Did you see me pop up on Daddy’s screen?  I was there!”

I don’t know where I am, searching for a home between the echoes, layers of conversations in zoom rooms, tossed across the deluge, from island to island.

My students in their white washed dorm rooms, a few books neatly stacked upon the shelves, or sitting in front of family photographs on far-off hearths.

My parents powerpointing into my son’s first grade class.

Like Odysseus on Calypso’s island, a tableau of timeless tears amidst abundance, I yearn for earlier times. 

Meanwhile, songleaders storm my fortress, lay waste to its silence (though I know, remembering babies crying, grading papers into sleepless nights, it was never really there).

At my desk in the guest bedroom

The crayon box in front of my students

Is bright mustard yellow.

The stubby crayons’ points are rounded.

An hour passes, my students,

Each in their own box, alone,

Throw comments into the empty air.

I slide the crayon box away 

From the black plastic keyboard

To make room for typing

The crayons are out of order.  Pink

Next to brown, blue beside

Forest green.  One rolls off my desk.

My students are arranged in rows,

Their eyes in boxes two by two

Like sequins pasted on a poster.

One crayon in my son’s hand

Is warm.  He writes his name

In cherry red on lined paper.

The students behind the crayon box

Glitch and freeze, the laptop fan whirs,

The space heater hums.

So does my son.

Exit Polls

My daughter emerges confident through the glass doors of her preschool, clomping in oversized snow boots as she races to the schoolyard gate. “How was it?” I ask, my voice strained with the effort of enthusiasm. “I’m not going to talk about it,” she answers in a singsong voice with a knowing smirk.

A day of endless waiting for answers, punctuated by delight: Chocolate chip pancakes piled high on giggling children’s plates. A day of sudden rage: Scolding them for choosing sandals over shoes for the chilly autumn playground. Blinking back tears while grinning pushing children on the swings.

The day descends to darkness and we sit on my daughter’s floor doodling with our eyes shut then opening them and laughing uncontrollably at the undecipherable result: a twirl of curly hair stretched out across a smiling face contorted, one eye floating in midair.

After all the asking, all the guessing, all the “What will it be now?”, while the children dream I nervously check the news, the possibility of certainty grinning tauntingly on the distant horizon of some morning, maybe days ahead.

On Counting

One.

I am teaching my students the Yiddish numbers. One to ten: Here are ten bananas. Here are three guitars. An abundance of small things, colorfully illustrated. 

The higher numbers are harder.  Students stammer, whet their lips as they try to form the words for major dates: 1881, 1913, 1924.  They get caught between the hundreds and the ones, the gap between eighteen-eighty-one and akhtsn hundert eyn un akhtsik, between Garfield and Alexander.

I teach them a flirting game, “Oh how I love youuuuu! One-and-twenty, two-and-twenty, three-and-twenty,” let me count the ways, numbers moving backwards from the ones to the tens, prioritizing movement over stasis.  It easier to count in a context of joy.

Two.

They’re tallying the votes this week and all eyes are on the metrics.  Who will be granted asylum?  Whose access to healthcare denied?  Who, in gnawing hunger, given aid?  With every desperate breath of panic, the numbers grow more unpronounceable.

Three.

Last week Bea Lumpkin cast her vote.  Her age: 102.  How many steps did she walk, her hands in latex gloves, her view misted by her breath across her plastic face shield?  Each step a slow shuffle, determined.  How many ballots lay at the bottom of the blue mail box, alongside bills, letters to aunts and uncles, proofs of purchase for rebates?  And how many blows landed on her father in prison during the 1905 Russian Revolution, and how many scars remained on his flesh? And how many months pregnant was her mother when she was not at work the day of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire? And what would you get if added the wages of the laundry workers she organized to the metal workers she organized and divided that number among the students she taught?

Four.

My son is teaching my daughter some math. She adds on her fingers, three cookies plus two cookies.  My son has a tricky one – and what if you minus the cookies, he asks?  And what if you take them away?  She cries.

Five.

I check the news constantly, knowing there will be days before results are in.  How much energy is wasted in the panic of waiting?  How do you measure the disappointment of the result, no matter what it is?

Six.

I am teaching myself to count.  I’m not sure what that means yet.  The numbers aren’t what I thought they would be, and they don’t come easily to my tongue. Forgive me, I’m a slow learner, and math was never my strong suit. Yet I watch the numbers and know there is work to be done. Can I count myself in?

Another Dawn

Overnight little red dots floating across my screen - 

Like bubbles in the front lawn last summer when we were afraid to leave our house and a journey out the door and into the grass was the beginning of freedom and also its end and we blew bubbles with the kids because they couldn’t play with friends but still demanded delight every single day, no matter how frayed we were, no matter how mournful 

Turned blue – 

Sapphires, like the skies for clearness, paving a way forward, like gems encrusting a peacock’s elevated tail on the ornamental throne of a ruler who, though mighty, bends to feed the hungry during famine

And a relief so immense – 

As though I heard the clang of the final hammer blow, driving steal to blast the rock ahead of the machine 

Mingled with the mourning

For all that remains with us, like slick oil on the windshield as we drive this foggy morning toward the long day ahead.

Havdalah, November 7, 2020

My daughter perches on a stool

To switch off the lamp

And we light the candle to greet

The eve of a new day.

I hold my hand before my eyes

My fingers are bars of a cage

Restraining whirling reds and yellows.

Behind my fingers, I am calm

This long dark day is over.

Another one begins.

Maybe longer, more deadly - 

Forest fires lapping up the West.

Maybe crueler - depression on the heels

Of months spent cowering at home

Or gasping for breath, dying.

But maybe also better -  a day 

Filled with hope and possibility.

Eschewing dread, we wish for good

And quench the candle in sweet juice.

My daughter reaches for the light

Switch.  The glare of the bulb interrupts

The somber hiss of juice on flame.

We scramble to the living room

To watch the president elect speak.

Love song to the house of mourning

Love song to the woman who sits

Alone in her house mourning her mother

Whose voice echoes off hardwood floors

She pours a cup of tea

And lifts it, steaming, to her lips

Love song to the steam that tingles

Against her weathered cheeks

Alone in her house mourning her mother

She yearns to chide old dear friends

For bending over to sweep up crumbs

Love song to the old dear friends

Who filled her home when her ex-husband died

The buzz of their voices mingled with her laughter and sobs

Alone in her house mourning her mother

She aches for the smell of their coffee

Love song to the coffee percolating in the dining room

To the cakes and bagels piled on trays

To the leftovers she apportioned into Tupperware

To the pile of coats on the bed, which now is bare and she

Alone in the house mourning her mother

Alone in the house mourning her mother

She cooks her own dinner and eats it

Washes the dishes, and puts them away

She cradles the cup of tea in her hands

Love song to the hands longing to be held.

As if returning home

A failed quester empty handed, having lost the plant of life

I came a far road, am weary, 

Yet, how steady are the walls of my home!

Were its bricks not fired in an oven?

My dwelling place, where grilled cheese toasts in the broiler

And a child in the basement studies Spanish over zoom.

And in the evening, the children asleep,

Though a sea-weary warrior washed to shore,

Appearing ragged, tempest-tossed,

I turn on my laptop, string my bow, I do the work, I can.

This room is rooted as a tree to this spot

And now, so am I.

A fallen monarch, twelve years in forest exile, one in hiding

I emerge at last.  What battles await me in the morning? 

All this has already happened, I am powerless to stop it

Yet I must choose to go on.

And so, I, a monster-slayer bearing bloody head as trophy

Approach the darkened kitchen

To pour myself a cup of tea before bed

Resting the corpse of the day in the kitchen sink.

My hearth companions sleep nearby.

1500 square feet is this house, 1500 square feet this 

Workspace, living space, two flights of stairs

From the basement to my bedroom is my kingdom’s expanse.

They say I am a worthy king,

Gracious, kind, persistent, just.

Let that be my legacy.

At thirty leagues, I stop for the night

Tomorrow, I set sail again.
 

Miracle at the Dining Room Table

Once, three years ago, I sat at this dining room table poised at a laptop with dwindling batteries, uploading an article for publication and watching a baby monitor. To my left, the open door to the garage where my son slept, slack-mouthed, buckled into his car seat, windows down.  To my right, the stairs leading to my daughter who, thumb in mouth, lay in her crib, face planted in a plush tiger. I, in the middle, alone at a table in an empty room clicked the save button anxiously as I waited for the inevitable cries to pierce the silence.

Today, at the table, I write. To the left, the sound of children playing with marbles down the basement stairs. To the right, in the living room my husband leads Shabbat services over zoom. I'm writing in a notebook and I assume I won't have time to finish jotting down my thoughts. It's Hanukkah and the miracle is I've managed to transcribe this many of them. 

My daughter emerges, plastic sword tucked into the top of her rainbow dress, asking if anyone needs saving. My husband is singing of mighty deeds in days of old. She returns to the basement. 

This time alone, it seems, is continuing. I struggle with it. I want to fill it. Read a book, close my eyes, wrap the presents that arrived by mail.  But when will the children ask to play?

My husband is praying for peace, followed by private, silent prayer. The cat hops on his lap, demanding to be pet. I have waited so long to sip my coffee that it's grown cold. 

I am still alone at this table. Morning melts into lunchtime and no one has mentioned their hunger.  

"Mom?" My daughter calls, "I was just about to have a little tea party with you." I'll finish these thoughts some other time. I can hardly believe I’ve eked out this much.

Family Game Day

They’re telling me 

Rules for cardboard pieces sliding

Over a board.

You take a coin.

You place a tile down,

Draw a card.

“Better things tomorrow”

Sings Dar Williams, I hear

Her, not them.

I have grown

Resentful of rules, I betray

Family game day

By locking out

The details, listening to music,

Turning inward, living

Through this moment

With some separate pleasure, mine.

Chords hold me

In a separate 

Chamber where I lounge alone.

While they play

I miss them.

Should I mine today for

What is best?

Pan for treasure

In these moments, his smile,

Her chubby hand,

Triumphant winner’s cheers - 

Place them in a vault

Stow them so

One day I’ll

Give myself these better things

Live within memory

So vivid I

Can almost touch that hand

Ruffle that hair?

What better days

Await than those of loving

And longing for

The gems of 

Days I’m living now, though

Escaping into myself?

Narrowing Horizons

They marched together with the certainty

Of hope, backs and necks still aching with

Long hours of toil, they saw

Ahead, a world renewed,

Made free.

They lived their lives with convictions

That mutual care could generate with

Political imagination the conditions 

Of future generations

Living free.

I long for their belief,

Wistful, jealous, angry that they struggled with

The fortitude of faith that what they saw

Was a forward facing path toward futures

Of justice.

Nowadays we sing fervent

Songs of solemn hope we cynically doubt with

Eyes cast down, not looking

Toward a grim horizon

Of decay.

What is this brazen half-blind drive?

We bear and raise our children with

Habits of hope in habitats unsustainable

Cultivating for unknowable

Doubtable harvests.

Some remnant will remain. We try to believe

That our words will not be extinct with

No one left to read them and we dream

Of breathing humans years hence

Salvage, not salvation.

Winter's eve

Out my window streetlights gleam 

through thick icles

in evening blue

Icicles like clipped

umbilical cords, pulsing still

in an exhausted newborn night

Windows frosted over,

a suckling's startled eyes

seeking a breastlike moon

In bed I lay, aching 

from the beginning of things

and the loneliness of carrying only myself.

A love like this

Does the student

Speaking over his allotted time

Words tumbling out faster

Than his lips can catch them

Know that as I stare into the screen

Our eyes never meeting

I am silently singing

“I love you?”

Would it even

Be appropriate? 

Is it better that he 

Doesn't know?

That he trips over apologies

For taking class time

For effusions, diversions

Passionate thinking

Epiphanies?

I close the window

Five minutes past class

Tenderly, if such a thing can be done

Wistfully, like a schoolgirl

Throwing away the wrapper from 

Her crush’s candy bar, knowing

His fingers touched it moments before.

Perfect

By the time they had left

Had I already forgotten

Their names, their faces, 

Even before they had closed

Their windows, put their computers

To sleep, even before they had

Had the chance to

Walk outside into the dim flickers

Of emerging spring sunlight

Through winter’s darkened skies?

They had wondered 

Whether I would think of them

In coming winters when 

Conjugating verbs with

Other students, each molding tongues

Around syllables, moving them across

Other lips, other throats.

They had thought of themselves

Fading away in my mind

Losing ground to those students

Of the perfect present of whom I

Have grown ever fonder.

Though I had told them

That what we had had

Together, our stuttering phrases

Sentence building, grasping toward meaning

Had opened in me, as it always has done

That vulnerable place where

I have reached to match ideas with

Sounds, with people, themselves

Resonating with words and the 

Feelings they have borne.

And so they are unforgettable, 

As am I.  We have had, and having had,

Are still having.

Here, there, longing.

black coffee by the window in

a white smooth-waisted mug

brown drips along the rim

trickle to the sill.

sunlight over roof casts

triangle shadows on the lawn - 

plastic magnet building blocks

flattened on a wooden floor.

my home is now a poem

of musty scented armchairs

long afternoons spent clacking 

on a heavy box computer

a story several sentences in length

about a magic carpet chasing rainbows

printed line by granular grey line

on continuous reams with perforated edges.

paper long since crumpled,

armchair long since empty,

fingers larger, rays escaping 

veiny hands on a window pane.

cat snoring by the coffee.

children charge through the living room

riding mighty steeds,

slaying goblins.

my butterfly girl

hops into my lap.

her bow scratches my chin.

she snuggles and leaves.

these will be their pasts.

misty memories, plush,

overstuffed with powdered sugar - 

here their longing will recline

someday as magic carpets flutter

above dollhouse rooftops where

goblins sip coffee in windowsills

frosted over with accreted years.

Upon noticing that I now have Nanny’s figure

My head upon a the soft, worn fabric

Newly laundered floral sweatsuit

Breathing up and breathing down

Underneath a double chin

My body pressed against her lap

A generosity of lush pillowy flesh

I counted two bellies, one above

And one below the elastic waistband

And thanked her for each

So why when looking in the mirror

Do I press and prod my ample flesh

Longing upon longing to embody

Health or beauty when she had both

Eighty years old and still laughing

As I fell asleep upon her loving lap

I write it down

The day after the first piano lesson

He explores the keys:

Perfect purple middle C's

Pounded out by two opposing thumbs.

I write it down.

What are you writing? He asks.

I tell him and he offers to edit.

He crosses out the middle C's

And pencils in a chord

Of sunburnt orange blending into gold

He adds a dissonant olive green note

His sister tapped and passing for a joke.

His sister scowls.

She didn't want to be in the poem,

Or if she's here she'd rather

Be twirling in front of the mirror,

Her hair like a tinsel.

My son approves the poem

Because I wrote it in fuchsia marker

Which is a very good color

Like the skin of a fantastical talking octopus

Devonian Forest

Spring, 2021 upon visiting the Field Museum, our first indoor family outing after pandemic isolation

Where lanky trees arrest with spindly tresses

Like serpents hissing toward the grassy ground

Water rippling, sap running,

Greening over soil, over rock

Majestic painting wallpapering above

Screens with buttons my daughter's chubby fingers press

Describing ancient shallow seas, amid

Tall ceilings, muffled voices, light up sneakers

Fossil invertebrates in glass cases that glare

When tourists stand under muted murals

Painted by a taciturn devotee of realistic pasts

And photograph them with the latest iphone

Here on Euramerican rock beds

By a lake formed by Mid-Continent Rift

On the traditional Territories of the Three Fire Peoples

I, in the Griffin Halls of Evolving Planet, now am.

In this beginning 

Rosh Hashanah 5782

I awaken 

like a woman who - 

after working late - 

waited out a tornado warning 

in her office 

overnight. 

Though my dreams 

were of holding 

my children as babies, 

I wake with stiff back 

and stale fears 

half forgotten 

in the night's gusts. 

Still,

I spread out my arms 

and establish – 

my mattress, 

my worn bedspread, 

the sunspot 

where my cat sleeps. 

Day, I'll call this. 

Though this world hangs 

above a wide abyss, 

it is good.

Winter Break, 2021

To share in refusal, I

shut all the windows,

rest my eyes on blank paper.

Lines of text stripe through

like slats of a crib.

A pencil yawns over them

sighing grey on cream,

and were words to cleave to page

I would not claim them.

Let them sleep in the margins.

We deserve some time.