Medusa's Head

I realized about a week ago that neither Tony or I had ever had a blueberry pie. I just made one and it's pretty good. Blueberries, Robert Frost "You ought to have seen what I saw on my way To the village, through Mortenson's pasture to-day: Blueberries as big as the end of your thumb, Real sky-blue, and heavy, and ready to drum In the cavernous pail of the first one to come!"

A big part of what I learned in my MFA program was how to emotionally detach myself from my poems and see them as my readers would so that I could better revise them. When I was writing lyrics about museum visits and mockingbirds, this worked. By my third year in the program, I chafed in workshops, receiving critique that pointed to problems I already saw or that were informed by a different aesthetic. I had already seen the reflection of my poem that was going to be offered to me by eyes that I had internalized or rejected. And then I had a miscarriage. And then I had kids. And then my marriage matured out of its now-uncomplicated-seeming first few years. And then I started to become estranged from part of my family. The emotional detachment that I had learned to apply to my work—an art product crafted out of visual stimulus and some kind of feeling of insight from my lyric self—I could not apply to my life. My poetry began to flesh out and give voice to the parts of myself I ...

So our time here in DC is almost 2/3 done! We'll be moving summer of 2013, and it looks like Montgomery, AL is going to be home for a little while. Probably. I've checked out this neighborhood in Montgomery called Old Cloverdale that seems awesome. It's got its own gardening group, and house tours, and outdoor musical events, and restaurants, and is not too far away from a Montessori school for Jefferson, although it is on the whole other side of town from the only Catholic school with a kindergarten. So there's that. The premature house search/droolfest has begun! So far I'm in love with one Colonial Revival and a couple Arts and Crafts Revivals that are huge, cheap, and slightly delapidated. And a beautiful Victorian in downtown Montgomery, although I don't know anything about the neighborhood. And one in the Garden District , which had an interesting write-up on ThisOldHouse.com. If I can find one without lead, asbestos, or a leaky roof, we're go...

Gestures Commanded by Existence The Insane Character That Daily Agitation Divested of Illusions and Lights The Body's Judgement The End is the Absurd Universe Revolt of the Flesh Primitive Hostility Secrete the Inhuman Incalculable Tumble Before the Image The Cruel Mathmatics Appetite for the Absolute An Infinite Number of Shimmering Fragments So Many Centuries of Inquiries Sterile Exercise on Great Subjects Certain Evenings When the Heart Relaxes Poisoned Peace Produced by Thoughtlessness Which is to Burn the Heart They Simultaneously Exalt Impulses Born of the Desert* Fatal Game of Appearances That Face Both Tender and Sneering His Beloved Scandals A Priviledged and Bitter Moment Admitted the Absurd Climate Without Exception, Suggest Escape Universe Upset By Failure The Commandments of the Absurd A Conjurer's Emotional Trick* The Vocation of Rapture Feed on the Roses of Illusion Metaphysic of Consolation* An Intellectualism Sufficiently Unbridled More to come!

I'm excited to say that some of my poems are up at Lingerpost with Todd Fredson as well! Check it out!

Yesterday Mississippi rejected the idea that a fertilized egg is a person. Today there are so many blogs and news articles talking about how the amendment was a terrible idea, outlawing many kinds of birth control, invitro fertilization, life-saving medical treatment for miscarrying women or women pregnant with tubal pregnancies in addition to the hot button abortion issue. But I'd like to look at how the whole idea that egg+sperm=baby is a hurtful lie. I know this, because since I was a teenager I've been interested in the abortion debate. I read lots on how one should treat egg+sperm, but not if egg+sperm is different from egg+sperm+uterine lining, and definitely not that egg+sperm does not equal baby A LOT of the time. That's why it's the miracle of life, folks. And it took a really sucky experience to teach me that the abortion debate had given me unrealistic expectations about what egg+sperm would mean in my life. In 2007, I was trying to get pregnant. I was peeing...

How You Became a Monster It happened slowly. Anger became a physical ailment, it blistered up in scales. You ran your tongue along your teeth in exasperation. They were sharper than you remembered; you slit your tongue in half with the things you wanted to say but did not. Hypocrisy! Hypocrisy! You hissed and coiled in on yourself. If you can't say something nice. You have a hard look you inherited from your mother. You have a hard mouth from keeping it shut. They say you didn't raise the moon-white child you gave birth to. Your hair tangling up from the strands you lose in clumps as months go past as you fatten the growing demigod. The matts grow teeth. Only one who also has sacrificed the daily exercises of attraction knows exactly how hard to comb your long tresses become. The statues will never know, they were not the kind to love like this. They were the ones whose mouths are open. But silent now, and so less unkind. This is the process wherein vision became fatal. You hav...