The scent radius of a rose as a unit of measurement.
My smile weighs too much,
crumbles off my face.
I’m sick of fried hair and unstoppable worry.
My secrets hate me and my eyes betray me.
On the beaches are boxes of life
watching the great red shipping containers float on the horizon.
Simply put
I have no allies I have not bought
And I drink old snow.
Grateful skirts swirl in a breeze maybe meant for them.
Design is Holy,
is enamored of its Designer,
is a crossroads of means and ends.
A housewife manufactures sunshine in her laboratory,
the beakers from the store always having a sale,
her thesis supervised by green,
and critiqued by her children.
After 20 years who will know whether the
skirts were mended or replaced?
Just that they were infused with laughter
and smelled like mother in the living room
living with her eyes full.
Translated into Afrikaans and Xhosa, then back:
Skirts twirl in the grateful air
they were meant for.
Design and the Holy Spirit,
are enamored
of each other.
Is the intersection of the cross where it all begins?
The woman who produced the sun in her lab,
is studying all the ways you make happiness from the mundane.
Her thesis is green from watching her children.
After 20 years will you know that
the aprons can be repaired or replaced?
You will appreciate the humor.
She won’t.
skirts and gratitude for the atmosphere,
either of them.
Design and Holy Spirit,
make enamored designs,
are the ends on the cross.
The woman who makes the sun in her lab,
Her laboratory in Delaware furnished by a company
in Hong Kong.
Her thesis supervision is green.
So is the clock looking at her children’s energy,
their youth,
her youth.
After 20 years you will know that
the skirts can be repaired or replaced.
As you appreciate the humor in
And sort mothers by whether they baked cookies or used the microwave.
In her eyes you live fully,
live fully alone.
Peripheral issues,
like where to raise fireflies,
consume my government.
My government,
not yours.
I don’t share,
And my whole bureaucracy is off their meds, anyways.
Stop staring at my nudity.
You aren’t supposed to be here.
Clear candles overwhelm me with a thirst for light.
I love transparency,
translucency,
transmissions from stars.
What is it about the see through
that is so luxurious and soulful?
A congress of confetti has decreed
every wind must blow up.
The ground breathes.
I look like Marilyn Monroe as a housewife,
standing in my yard with my dress billowing around me.
My husband sees me with his eyes shut.
Hands open.
The hours I have given him clump between his fingers like cat litter
I will wash them with aloe.
I will dry them in silence.
Our daughter has been sequestered with the sequins
and she has sewn a shining dress.
See her straddle the breeze.
She learns from me.
The art of Quiet is just as wonderful as fire,
the eyes of the artist open in the morning blast.
See proof of the paint box,
an uncertainty about normal color walking in a white place,
The place where luck dies.
What conflicts do publishers have with unauthorized ideas?
The artist is a charter school of chartreuse who longs to stand still.
Imagine a conference inspired by the Sistine chapel?
A child’s memory that moved Da Vinci’s David?
Passing the Bechdel Test
A voice from a blouse
A skirt of leaves
They have immolated their wicker man.
They talk of flowers and the physics of particles,
of vacuous clothing and sumptuous books.
Yet beneath brocade and bead work and sneaking mist
there is a want
they feel
but cannot remember.
The bones of bones are my bones,
White and hard
In the heat of the heat.
We who forget God can drink together,
Listening to human harassment and murder outside
In dark darkness.
I want my life to be an example of creativity and beauty to my daughter. Being a mother has completed me in some inexplicable way. It is as though I was born her mother, and Angelica’s birth was just a stage in my life cycle. When she was born it was as if I was a butterfly emerging winged from a snow white cocoon.
Because she completes me, and she widens my world, she has deepened my poetry. Motherhood has also been good for my productivity. It gives me less time to write. That may seem counterintuitive, but it is true. By allowing me less time to write, motherhood makes me focus when I do have time to write. Sometimes having all the time in the world just makes one fritter away time. When you become a mother, you appreciate time. That said, I still need my husband’s support for my writing. He lets me have a wonderful babysitter twice a week and gives me time to myself in the evening to read and write. Reading is the life blood of writing. A mother without any support and many children may find creating great literature next to impossible. Woolf was right when she said a woman needs money and a room of her own to write. But given critical aid, motherhood can enhance poetry.
Motherhood:
-Reinvigorates me and gets my creative juices flowing
-Enriches my life and gives me more to write about.
-Makes me make the most of my time. I am super productive because I know how limited my time is.
Before I met my husband I intended to go to an MFA program before starting a family. I thought two to three years with nothing to worry about but writing would be ideal. Now that life has taken me down a different path, I see that for me nothing is further from the truth. Motherhood and the awesome responsibility it entails gives me a purpose, something everyone who wants to write should have. If your whole existence is writing, you may find you have nothing to write about. See the proliferation of novels and short fiction about writers/MFA students by writers/ MFA students.
This is not to denigrate MFA programs, which can be wonderful. I am simply saying that motherhood has in many ways been a rigorous training ground for my poetry, and that the breadth of experience it provides me is nutritional for my fertile mind.
What are the smallest of the names of the words?
How can I interpret cats?
Older endless books?
Melodramatic Mondays?
What a day,
low, soft, and warm as it pleases,
boasting of kittens.
Miniature Moon 