Category: My family

• 2019, my Dad and coming back

  2019 was a year that was filled with loss for me and my family – a dear aunt, my step mother and then Dad. I have not been able to write much, but am now ramping up for NaPoWriMo. Plus, I am beginning a yoga teacher training and have promised to rekindle my writing practice…

  Jenifer

  March 28, 2020

  Childhood, Family, Father’s Day, Grief, My family, Nature

  NaPoWriMo, Sampler

• My father finds comfort in crows

  Inexplicable. That is what I say when you tell me and all I can do is shrug and count: How this is one more thing that separates us How you would kiss me goodnight and I would pull back How you stood wishing the boys would come to you not out of duty, however precisely…

  Jenifer

  May 3, 2017

  Aging, Childhood, Family, Grief, My family, Parenting

  poetry

• Waiting for the doctor

  hazy dry, as if in midair distant beeps, rattles, blood pressure cuff wheezing up, releasing, hour after hour, day may become day Of all possible recollections, you pick the one from December twelfth, thirteenth or fourteenth, you revolve, nineteen-fifty-three in ice cold Korea showering down in luxuriance, soap, frigid water trailing over your skin after…

  Jenifer

  November 10, 2016

  Aging, Death, Dying, Meditation, Memory, My family, Parenting, Veteran’s Day, Violence

  poetry

• In the sea

  Sometimes, my wife thinks she is still a saber tooth. I call to her to come back and we rock slow, to and fro, in the sea of here and not here. She turns to quiet me, to make me believe, and I lie that I do in our unquiet sea. Shifting away again, she…

  Jenifer

  July 2, 2016

  Ancient, Cro-Magnon, Lake/ocean, Love, Muse, My family

  poetry

• Lantern on path

  Lantern swinging down path — I wonder if it is really there, if that is you, or just some accident of moonlight and wind. How is it possible for the night to be so black that no adjective makes sense? Just black-black, with shadows hovering and the wild phlox lopped over reflecting greywhite back up.…

  Jenifer

  April 2, 2016

  Childhood, Death, Grief, Muse, My family, Pentwater

  poetry

• The Red Trail

  you would think as you walk along the forest ridge this time of year there could be nothing more wondrous than the not yet faded royal of the sky behind grey-brown branches, the last leaves gripping on but then the trail edges west and beneath the sky a darker blue surfaces and below that turquoise…

  Jenifer

  November 19, 2015

  Meditation, Memory, Muse, My family, Pentwater, Seasons

  poem