After years of not getting it
I finally do–
You dip the ravaging
Insect into
The viscous sweet
“Honey,”
He says
“This is how you make the unpalatable work.”
–Luke 7:18-24
After years of not getting it
I finally do–
You dip the ravaging
Insect into
The viscous sweet
“Honey,”
He says
“This is how you make the unpalatable work.”
–Luke 7:18-24
Sometimes I do
Visit me from the past
Thinner then and younger looking
her voice so earnest
I love her
Want to tell her
That I am lighter now, buoyant,
As the truth does
Set us free
The call costs five cents a minute and you have to be ready with a form of payment. On the other end of the line there is
A princess stuck in a well
Bears curled in around a wee-sleepy home invader
A girl in a badly blended family with a knack for the most inconvenient footwear
And all the rest of us-
sleeping beauties, garden-of-Gethsemane-tired
Of hearing about
This impending crucifixion.
The day that Miracle died we walked in the mountains. Two bears walked ahead of us and their presence seemed ordained, magical.
It was magical I tell myself even though she died.
Sometimes I feel like I am out of mantras, out of coins for the machine, no longer capable of telling myself to believe it will all be ok.
Then Casey Hathaway tells us all about the bear who kept him company in the woods we have all got lost in and
I go there to find Him too, lean into his ursine chest, sob a little.
Believe He is real, despite the feat in our eyes.
It is a note on my phone, metonymy for bottomless loss, I call her name every day, aware that lost causes are lost causes are lost causes
How will we ever heal?
How will we be whole again?
I would ask the boy on the other side of the over-priced desk
If I had the heart to keep
Picking my battles
The LA Times writes a puff piece on abortion doctors who travel to states like mine to kill the unborn.
Our Eichmanns
Our Holocaust.
Matthew 2:18 NIV
[18] “A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.”


She sat in a chain restaurant twenty years ago, this time of year, not knowing that she would forget her purse there so close the federal courthouse. Retrieve a purse; retrieve a child. Strange calculus of loss.
The Parable of the lost mother–
Waiting for the baby who does not remember who they once were together
So long ago.
The home movies do not have too much plot, they are more about time
Time spent with beautiful children
Mostly grown up now
We all know how close we were
To the flood
He asks is something bothering you?
She says I am worrying about three things
Oh, he brightens, only three?
His shoulders rise and fall in what might pass for a shrug but translates as:
I have tons more than that! Never occurs to him
Three things
Could be anything.