Nights, I hear barn owls calling,
shrill as hunger stripped bare—
and think of the onion farmer
from east of the mountains, his broad,
exhausted body on my massage table,
the owl he told me screamed
all winter from his barn rafters.
Like a Friend
You are hung safely in the past now,
fixed in the frame of the photograph
from that day in the mountains when I was afraid
but you went right in, trusting your body
to the body of the lake, its coldness
that held you even as the bottom dropped
away. I’d like to remember you
floating in the green world
of the water, the heavens broken open
like a vault above us, and summer
pouring through.
Admissions
Making You Noise
Hush
The Sound When the Held Note Ceases
Tonight I contemplate, thirty years late,
his dark head cradled in my lap,
teen-aged boy from band snuck back with me
to our grade school playground,
middle of a bitter night,
and him telling me he’d been adopted
twice, and me considering the mother
who gave him up, one who died
when he was two, and finally one who lasted,
her voice cool when I’d called
for him that afternoon.
Standing by My Shitty Man
It’s been a difficult couple of years for women and for liberals. For those of us who are liberal women, it’s been downright excruciating. Watching the recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearings where Dr. Christine Blasey Ford offered pained, dignified testimony about the sexual assault she suffered in high school was particularly wrenching.
Maybe Time
Every couple of years, I strip down to my underthings and let my dermatologist and her two assistants check my entire body for skin cancer. I admit I feel weird and a little chilly, being the only nearly naked person in the room, but I have become basically comfortable in my body and benign toward it. I even have the illusion, before the doctor arrives to examine me, that I am still, well, kind of hot.
Thoughts About My Poems at PANK
Today, five of my poems were published by PANK. These poems are some of what I refer to as “my priest poems,” poems I am writing about the sexual abuse of children at the hands of Catholic priests. I started working on these poems back in 2011 when I read that the Philadelphia archdiocese had finally gotten around to suspending 21 priests.
The Teddy Roosevelt Writing Process Blog
Here I am, weeks late, working on my Writing Process Blog Tour post. The path this far was circuitous. It was weird and involved delays caused by vomiting, Spring Break, sinus problems, and taxation. I cooked a homemade dinner for twenty-seven people. I flew to Bozeman, Montana where I visited my son and watched overweight cowboys check their text messages and drink beer. I fed nine mice to three snakes and wrote a love poem about a spider I used to keep as a pet.
LIKE A RIVER, LIKE A FLOOD
ON JOSHUA MENSCH’S BECAUSE: A LYRIC MEMOIR
New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018.
128 pages. $22.95. ISBN 978-0-393-63522-5.
I still remember the first time I read Because, Joshua Mensch’s lyric memoir about childhood sexual abuse. It was a summer morning, children were playing quietly somewhere in my house, and I was sitting at the kitchen counter. Joshua and I knew each other a little then and have since become friends.