(After George Ella Lyon) I am from star jasmine,from slingshots and forbidden books. I am from foaming water, pulling me under.(white, churningtasting like salt.) I am from the black walnut,the wild blueberry bush,whose roots dug tenaciously into the Michigan soil,resurfacing every summer, as I did. I am from poviticas and freckles,from Ruth, Frances, and Lavina.…
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I wish for the impossible, for the faraway lifetime that ended years ago. I wish that the earth, soft with winter rain, would feel your feet — wide and solid — walk again through our garden. And that you would gather winter squash as you did before. I wish for one more brightly-lit dinner around…
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It was an early morning, and a couple of running friends and I set off for an easy run along our local trail. I started thinking about my daughter, who died suddenly last year, and about life, grief, and how things often don’t end up the way we expect them to. As my hips and…
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November is the month of marigold petals, pungent and bold, of smoke, and bone-white daughter-grief. It is the month when the leaves bleed red. Where the sun — bleeding through the thick, suffocating smoke — casts a sickly yellow hue on all our faces. Where the words that you are dead bleed through my eyes…
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I think some people are born broken. There’s something about the way the pieces of their soul clatter and shift discordantly inside them from the day they arrive on this earth. Yes, I know there are glorious stories about broken people who were able to rise above the blackness to fit the pieces together, who…
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When my children were young, they loved to play ‘the floor is lava.’ The object of the game was to avoid touching the floor, or certain doom would befall the unlucky one – sudden death by invisible hot lava that flowed across our carpeted living room. I would watch them careen and leap from sofa…
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Some words have more weight than others. This is a truth that my body did not understand until my daughter died. It doesn’t work the way you think it does. Growing up, your mother, or your father, or someone you trusted told you that words are just words. Brush them off, and move on, they…
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