Category: Parenting
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Birds work all through the night
I don’t know what they do this time of night. I just hear them squawking. And they sound a little bent out of shape. They chatter with one another, voices strained but constant — New parents whisper loud through the nursery wall trying to get their baby down, exhausted, having lost all sense of night…
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On counting cairns
Tomorrow my son moves back in bringing inexhaustible items in large clear sacks that swallow the floor like jellyfish claiming the soft sand along surf. My younger son’s things, and his girlfriend’s, are piled up in the corner. Constant piling, constant shuffling, constant marking the month, then the term, with a new pile, papers to…
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Effigy Mound
In my belly, now flat, curled a spine with indistinct tissue wrapped around its tiny bones like those of a bird. I imagine them now bleached by the sun and gathered by the wind into some sheltered corner like pickup stix. In that corner, sand, brittle leaves, acorns layer alongside, under, above and make another…
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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…
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Even so
Even as you sit smoking weed in the room I just cleaned and leave your papers and dirty dishes on the desk, not making the bed I just resheeted, there is no amount of missing you that is enough. It goes on and on like the Mississippi flows in constant cycles from mountain top through…
Poems from in between 