A man carries a safe onto a moving van parked in front of my home. We place our important papers into the safe. What important papers do we carry inside of us? Which sentences do we cross off to make better sentences? Sentences that help us become confident enough to do what we want to […]
Category: Gratitude
Arrival
She almost puts balsamic in the cookie dough. She calls out, “Mom!” and I use my woman eyes to locate the vanilla. Her friend calls her Car-o-line. Short but long like that, the melody of her full name—my chest clenches in pleasure. I want to write a poem. This time I have left at the […]
Sing It
Sing It by Nancy Schatz Alton We are still young. Our amazement still plays like a favorite song on the radio. It’s hard to hold our awe with all the bulletins coming in: beeps, alarms, no more rotary dial sounds for us. We are still young holding our young making new laps to […]
Love Song
Love Song by Nancy Schatz Alton “An idea, too, has a surface, a skin.” – from “The Problem” by Noah Eli Gordon The idea of you changes like the way my skin ages— more beautiful than I’d imagined the age spots like diagrams to shapes I’ve not yet explored like the triangle of […]
Arrival
My past is so alive I feel like I can touch it. Sometimes I think it’s not that way for others. Or maybe it’s only that way for poets, who pull from every scene to make a new scene on the page. Time traveling is an actual pleasure of mine, too, because I think some […]
What’s Right?
What’s right? Right is Liz telling Chris she loves his nose when she says goodnight to him. Right are the pictures in my office: There’s my young self: laying on top of my dad in a lawn chair, the grass underneath us as endless as the horizon. Right: all the noses in these pictures that […]
Happy Birthday
Today’s it’s my brother’s birthday and I think of him in New York City, celebrating another day. I think of all the people we cannot see who think of us when we can’t imagine anyone thinking of us. I think of the tiny prayers we hold in our hearts. The ones that we want to […]
The Now
Ah. The 31st. I already went online and saw summations from 2018. The instinct to gather and look behind is so great. I am a lover of memoir. I understand that. I want to gather what is behind me and make a story that can help me live out tomorrow. But more than that, I […]
Washing the Dishes
When I finally insist that the vacuuming of the room needs to happen, the breaker clicks off. The roar of the machine overloaded the circuit. The room is black, only the light of the screen still lit. I push every breaker except for the right one, my rain boots on my feet grounding me to […]
Light
The day is slow enough that I notice the moment when a string of Christmas tree lights burns out. There’s no noise, just a light shift change to the right of me. I think it but don’t know it until a bit later. I want to capture the slow-down of today. The hyphen of every […]