Shiny White Suburban

A white woman in a white Suburban with chrome rims is bumping “Still DRE.” The Suburban has just been through the car wash. She chose the most expensive option, then rubbed away drips with a microfiber cloth. The rims are blinging, bass bumping, and she’s cruising a smooth five over the speed limit. 

The white woman is on her way to get her daughter from the private school where she recently enrolled, transferred quickly and quietly once she found herself within the crosshairs of a seasoned bully. Though only a grade above her daughter, the bully was almost three years older, held back twice for chronic absenteeism, according to local gossip. The youngest of a large and notoriously violent family, she’d seen things no kid should ever see - the kind of gal you’d feel sorry for until she knocks out your front teeth.

Hurt people hurt people. The white woman repeats this like a mantra when she finds herself fantasizing about grabbing this little bitch by the hair and digging her acrylics into the back of her neck. When friends inquire how she’s coping, she just laughs and says she’s in mama bear mode. The laugh is to assure her friends that she’s upset, but not venomously so. Though this girl has a significant history of violent aggression, the white woman explains, she is still just a teen deserving of help. The phrase “restorative justice” gets tossed around, and everyone feels better for saying it, even if it doesn’t happen.

In every conversation about her daughter’s bully, the white lady is careful to mention her family’s class and racial privilege, because without doing so, her story would fail harder than half of the kids at the public school, where trauma trudges through the hallways with clenched fists looking for an excuse to use them.

Violent fights are the norm, as well as poor communication, teacher burnout, and failed policy, longstanding problems that have transformed the school into a gladiator pit, first round of elimination over Snapchat. Kids encourage kids they don’t like to commit suicide, circulate vicious rumors about classmates that harden like cement in fledgling hearts. Then, an ass-beating between classes, or better yet, just beyond the edge of school property, so the aggressor can avoid suspension and keep coming to school to eat. Well-meaning adults wring their hands with worry about the school-to-prison-pipeline while tweens get sent to the hospital, concussed, and teachers flee to other districts.

“I know, I know, the system, not the individual,” she assures an administrator, who narrows her eyes when the white woman slips and says it’s unfair this student is making school an unsafe place for her kid. The administrator uses the word “trauma” a dozen times when explaining the challenges faced by the district, and when the white woman asks whether being threatened at school is a form of trauma, the administrator differentiates between big T and little t trauma. What her daughter has experienced is little t. Bullies have been around forever, no? Her daughter is not coming to school hungry and unwashed, is she? Basic needs met?

The white woman blinks hard at this comparison. Swallows a hot lump. She’s ticked, but minding her manners. The administrator notes this rare showing of parental restraint and offers an olive branch. “Listen,” she says, and leans forward, lowering her voice. “Our hands are tied.”

The administrator opens her mouth to say more, but the conversation ends abruptly when the walkie talkie attached to her belt squawks with an emergency. There’s a rapidly-escalating situation near the south stairwell, and she rushes out the door without a goodbye.

“You probably have a black pussy,” the bully said to the woman’s daughter, who just turned twelve. So many levels of complexity here, and the white lady does not know how to explain this one to her kid. She tries, but the conversation sputters before it’s shut down by her daughter, who already knows more than she does. “Mom,” she says, “please stop.” When she suggests that its no longer safe to stay at this school, her daughter pleads with her. She loves her friends and does not want to leave them. “I’ll get jumped one time,” she says, “and then she’ll move on to someone else.”

Welcome to the experience of being a poor woman of color, a friend says when she shares her concerns, and it confuses her, this response, but she does not ask for clarification. She thinks she might know what this friend is getting at, and a tiny part of her always wants to slap this friend, who is always saying things that sound like koans concocted by the radical chic. Instead, she compliments her new hair color. “Gorgeous,” she says, applying lip gloss. “It looks almost natural.”

Besides, for the past five years at work, the white woman has shared a lunch table with a small group of women, none of whom are white. Two of the women make at least double what she does, the other three, she suspects, much less. They’re a good cross section of their city, they joke, capable of solving any problem since they’re all moms. When she spills her worries about her daughter over lunch, the oldest of the group sets her fork down and shakes a finger in her face. 

“Get your baby out of there.” 

“Thank you,” the white lady sighs, relieved she’d been given official permission to make the obvious choice. 

“Ain’t nothing stopping you from teaching your baby girl how to throw a punch,” the woman adds, dabbing the corner of her mouth with a napkin. “When I was a kid, my daddy gave me a switchblade, which was funny cause I wasn’t allowed to wear slacks, so I kept it in my bra.” 

The white lady goes home that night and shows her daughter how to throw a right hook, which she learned from two years of Billy Blank’s Tae Bo. She holds up a cushion from the couch, and her daughter balks - she doesn’t want to hurt anyone, ever. ‘C’mon!” the white woman hollers from behind the cushion. “Smash it!”

Her daughter says no. She won’t.

“I’m so lucky to have the resources to consider an alternative,” the white lady whispers to a girlfriend while unrolling her yoga mat, since the alternative is accompanied by tuition. Though the strain of this has triggered migraines and the type of insomnia no visit to Sephora can hide from her collapsed face, her friend agrees with her. So lucky. 

In addition to dealing with all this stress, the white woman is sad! Years ago, when her daughter was young, she had sworn to support public schools after listening to a podcast series sent to her from another white woman, whose political mission was to inform others about the drawbacks of charter schools. The conclusion was simple. Show up for public schools by sending your kids to them. Resist white flight. Keep the tax base healthy. Supporting public schools was her duty, according to her left-leaning friends, a few whose children went to private schools, a fact underwhelmingly discussed. 

But then, her daughter came home from school one day and crumpled into her arms, recounting how the bully chased her down the hallway, barking like a dog. Her daughter had run into the girl’s bathroom and locked herself in a stall, tucking her feet on the toilet seat to hide. The worst part of it, she sobbed, was that she knew she couldn’t bear to stomp the bully’s head had she tried to crawl under the door, and the thought of being trapped in a small space with her caused a panic attack. She’d rather have her ass whooped in front of the entire school.

The white woman moved quickly and quietly. She got her baby out of there. 

The memory of that horrible day makes her heart skip, so the white woman does three dragon breaths and tunes into Dr. Dre. Damn, those lyrics are sweet, the white lady thinks, and cranks the volume.  

Still fuck with the beats, 

still not loving police, 

still rock my khakis 

with a cuff and a crease. 

To be clear. The white lady was never a fan of defunding the police! She imagines a world without police as a sickening orgy of rape and gunshot wounds and car crashes. Occasionally, a demented man, grinning and holding a knife over her neck while she sleeps. (This is because the white lady is histrionic, at times. And because she is white, lacks a certain type of imagination, or so she’s been told.)

Snoop sticky-ickies, and man, oh man, does the white lady miss snapping her fingers to 90s hip hop and shaking her ass. And though she is vibeing hard right now in her shiny white Suburban, she is also devastated by how ugly the world can be, so she is feeling her feels. 

Feeling feels is something that’s totally okay to do, proved by the Millennials. Everyone should hold space at all times - for themselves, their friends, even perfect strangers - to feel everything. Right now, for the white woman, it’s certainty and sorrow, and they seem to be combining as pressure in her stomach, below her tits. The white woman suspects a fart would release the feeling, but withholds out of politeness even though she’s alone in her car. 

The repressed fart sends a cramp into her thigh before transforming into a surge of rage, and she grips the wheel and steps on the gas, hard. She is so fucking sick of things! The white woman recalls the most recent public school board meeting, which she watched on her phone rather than attended in person. (The truth is, meetings involving the public often smell like cigarette smoke, and her nose is sensitive.) 

The first public comment was deeply unsettling. A twitchy, gray-faced man gripped by paranoia accused school board members of stalking him, haphazardly pulling papers out of a bag and shouting wildly. The energy in the room deflated within seconds. There were so many vital things to discuss, but instead, those in attendance were forced to ride the rollercoaster of a mental health crisis. If hope was scant to begin with, now it was gone.

“That poor, poor man,” she reported back to her friends. “Absolutely heartbreaking.”

(The better word was galling, but she’s no idiot.)

The thought of the twitchy man threatens to overpower her Dre vibes, and the white woman “yes, ands” with such commitment she almost swerves off the road. She rights the vehicle and adjusts her oversized sunglasses, cracking the window to temper a hot flash. Calm down, you dumb bitch, the white lady says to herself, since shame is practical.

She does another set of dragon breaths but can’t seem to stop perseverating on the school board meeting. The next public comment was even worse, and almost caused her to smash a dinner plate against the countertop. A person with a patchy beard and black lipstick spoke into the mic as if they were making a TikTok, with so much vocal fry you could toss a piece of breaded haddock their way and crisp it up. 

“Y’all look like nice enough people,” they addressed the board, before scolding them for not resembling the students in their district. (The school board is mostly white.) “Representation,” they breathed into the mic, almost pornographically, “matters.”

The white woman almost lost her shit. Are you fucking serious, she spat in the direction of her husband, her eye twitching. Is this person implying that it’s the job of these exhausted, underpaid board members to find their replacements?! For positions they were elected for?!

Unable to waste another second of her time, the white woman shut off the video, took a shower, and exfoliated her feet with some strange but effective tool that had been marketed to her on Facebook.

No stress, no seeds, no stems, no sticks!

Some of that real sticky-icky-icky

Ooh wee! Put it in the air!

Well, you's a fool, D-R, ha-ha

The song is on repeat. She lets it play. 

Sadly, the white woman can’t smoke weed these days since it causes panic attacks. But she used to! The thought of smoking indo causes the red planet between her legs to spin - slow revolutions that radiate big heat. A memory from long ago swirls to the surface. The first time she kissed a woman, mouths whiskey-warm, hair skunked by the blunt they’d just shared. Dre was playing in the background, she remembers. The other woman had been watching her crip walk before she pulled her close, by the belt.

The white woman slows down to turn into the school, shifts into park, and texts her daughter that she’s arrived. She sits in a line of trucks and SUVs, half of them displaying red stickers on rear windows and bumpers. The white woman groans, but decides on optimism. Just a few weeks ago, when picking up her daughter after her first day, she could see the relief on her face as she climbed into the passenger seat. “It’s weird,” her daughter said, looking out the window at the stream of students pouring through the front doors. “I’m not even scared.”

It came out as an offhanded comment, but the white woman felt it like a stab to the heart. The sweet faces of her daughter’s friends, stuck at the public school, spin like a roulette wheel in her mind, and she prays to God that none of them get hurt.

Because what else but pray can the white woman do? 

She switches to the next song on the playlist, Tha Shiznit, and lowers the volume since hard-hitting bass seems inappropriate for the parking lot of a Catholic school. Then she reconsiders, turns it back up. Not all the way, just a little. 

She stares at the front doors, waiting for them to burst forth with tittering students, and thinks again of the twitchy man. The asshole with the patchy beard. Her daughter’s bully. She realizes what it is she feels in her heart, and gives it ample space. There are other things too. Self-righteousness. Defensiveness. 

All normal, she assures herself, everything’s okay, and takes a big breath, proud of how well she’s dealing. 

A thought worms its way to the surface, and she sighs with annoyance. Man, does the white woman hate it when other white people say ‘de nada’ in response to someone thanking them, as if they’re très cool.

She turns up Tha Shiznit, just enough to rattle the sunroof. Her daughter will be out any second.

mama, snowblowing

Nose dripping, mouth resolute, mama’s preferred weapon in the war with the city plow is her snowblower, which she shoves through massive drifts, launching comets of snow to the tops of trees.

Blowing snow is a spiritual commitment for mama, the end of her driveway the battlefront of an ongoing war. Tiny bones in her ears are primed to register vibrations of the plow before mama can spot the beast make the corner, dropping its jaw and depositing snow that was never mama’s at mama’s feet.

When the bones in her ears signal danger, mama prays for strength. She shakes snow from her hood, stomps her boot like a bull, and eyes the red shovel, her other weapon. Armed with a snowblower and a shovel, mama will never surrender.

Today’s driver has an unkempt beard in need of a trim, probably a fascist, probably a man who holds pints of beer instead of his children, mama thinks, snippity snip. The Van Halen blasting through his cabin is familiar enough to cause mama - for a second - to forget that he is Enemy. But mama shakes it off.

Dangerous, music.

The snow is bright and whipping all around mama, burning her cheeks and validating her fury. Her nostrils are rimed, hands clawed to the blower. The plow is gone. Things are quiet.

The most vulnerable are sometimes the most violent, mama says aloud, choking the snowblower and grabbing the plastic shovel by the neck, positioning into ox guard before she attacks the fresh pile with rapture.

When under attack, mama knows sometimes the best fuck you is to thrive.

Those People

Wind-driven rain followed by a steep drop in temps caused the food in the feeder to freeze, so through a crack in the window she aimed her hair dryer and shouted, “For the titmice and juncos!” before releasing an arrow of high heat into the heart of frozen seed, this courageous Karen with contoured cheeks doing God’s work, suddenly ecstatic with a download of truth, a revelation so instant and powerful it threatened to explode her moisturized decolletage, and upright she shot with understanding that the worst addiction suffered was not to oxy or benzos, not to sugar or Big Macs, or to sloth, but to blame.

Trinity

Omnipresent, I explained to my daughter, who asked about the word, is most often used when talking about the Christian concept of God. It describes a presence that is everywhere, always. Like violence, I think bitterly, keeping that thorn of thought to myself.

Omniscient? That’s the belief that a god knows everything, I say, waggling my fingers around my head and then up and down, to which she snottily responds, So, like how you check my phone?

Yes, and no, I laugh, reaching to pull her close, but she shrinks away.

While we’re on the subject, I say, there’s a third word, omnipotent, meaning all-powerful.

I steel myself for her response, but she surprises me: So, like how the bullies run the school?

Scrid

If magic doesn’t anymore basements flood.

Avoid attaching,

warns my therapist,

when I predict flooding.

Instead,

observe your thoughts

which are like clouds, no?

In an exaggerated Maine accent,

she leans forward and says,

“If ya don’t like the weather, wait ten minutes!”

feeling clever.

*

My thoughts have a voice that is not mine,

I notice,

a gravelly baritone, a man married to his pipe

who works a boat through winter.

Sometimes on the water, says the voice of my thoughts

that is not my voice but are my thoughts,

you’re pulling pots in a spot of sun

when all around you, rain.

*

My thoughts can turn on a dime,

unlike opinions,

I tell my therapist,

who has a sweet face

and swears her grown kids love her.

*

One out of five children is hungry,

my thoughts say at 6:06pm,

clearly not fucking around

since I’m sawing into a bloody ribeye.

And many homeless adults

are kids who aged out of foster care.

Don’t let that steak go cold.

*

Guns are the leading cause of death in children,

mention my thoughts in response

to getting stuck behind a school bus.

*

Some thoughts do not have Lobsterman’s voice.

Some are like a sudden smear of color,

a male cardinal at the feeder,

gone as quickly as he arrived,

everyone who glimpsed him now acting

like they can communicate with the dead.

*

I wake every night at 2am,

clenching a bullet between my teeth.

Don’t clench! says the dentist,

as the needle sinks into my cheek,

Or consider this $400 mouthguard

that your insurance will never cover

and you will never wear.

*

The dentist drills while Dylan plays from a tinny speaker.

My thoughts suggest Dylan was a bit of an asshole,

too busy eclipsing the sun

to wash his pants.

*

Everything’s frozen solid today

but will climb into the 60’s and hover,

unnatural for February,

snowmelt sans sump pump

flooding basements,

but just think how good

the sun for sallow skin,

Seize the spoils of war!

*

We’re just prefab houses, I tell my therapist,

dropped on crumbling soil,

manufactured following the accepted custom

of planned obsolescence.

*

I picture the windburnt man

who vocalizes my thoughts

removing his vinyl gloves,

tamping tobacco into his pipe,

hunched against the wind.

I see a wave coming, he says, adjusting his oilers.

It’s ‘uge.

*

Watch. Stay curious.

Inhale, to the count of five,

exhale, to the count of five.

Hold the pause in between,

the tiny point of stillness

where breathing stops,

and nothing suffers.

*

Sometimes you pull pots

under a single, livid cloud

when everywhere else, sun.

Grace

Because grace shows her face at random,

with no foreshadowing, or prayer on my part,

I’m terrified of her, I tell my husband on a walk,

where we do most of our complaining.

It’s uncomfortable, to want something so unpredictable,

like she comes only when she's bored.

But, he says, we’ve sworn to stop protesting the infillion

variables beyond our control, since we quickly tire

of our own voices, so let this lamentation be lightened

by a joke: “What is the Left’s favorite snack?”

But I’m in no mood since I’ve lost a thumb

to the punchline, and my digitally-privileged husband

should not punch down with his five-fingered fist,

and now I’m complaining again, angry at an Ugly Sky

of Leering Gods, who make warts on noses,

rain for outdoor weddings and anaphylaxis to nuts

and such, compels married men to whistle while

tuna casserole bubbles in the microwave at work.

But this poem is not what you think it is,

and it is not about who you think it is about,

it is about how grace must fail more than she succeeds

or you would not sigh when things were suddenly better,

or imagine a benevolent god, instead this poem

is about how you must clasp your ironies

like you clasp your own hand, squeeze

your contradictions and anger and sureties

into a tight little fist that must

occasionally unfurl to receive, better

yet to give — and though we’ve been told

the binary is nonexistent, I inform

my husband, who I’ve silenced,

the heart beats in black and white.

The Benefits of Being an Asshole

Is it just me, or does it seem that if there’s a character in a movie who’s consistently nice, you might start to suspect their motives, or begin to wonder if they’re a kiss-ass at heart, but when the archetypal mean ol’ bastard shows an iota of tenderness, it can move you to tears? For instance, the Grinch is a cold-blooded fucker, cruel behavior spewing from a heart two times too small, but how we love him instantly and unconditionally when he is suddenly good!

And what about the belief that if you ask for forgiveness before reaching the pearly gates, the angel in charge of vetting sinners from saints will not list the number of times you failed to check your sources before posting the type of garbage that cleaves relationships, destroys Thanksgivings, and acts like kerosene to a country’s blazing addiction to moral panic, and so the angel in charge of Afterlife Placement will not send you to purgatory, or to the place where you’re forced to do handstands in a steaming lake of hot, liquid shit while a devil with defined pecs flicks his leather whip, but to the 75 degree weather of heaven, where you will float around on a cloud and reunite with people who never liked you but have to deal with you since you asked for forgiveness, alongside Jeffrey Dahmer, who also asked for forgiveness, and where things are so copacetic that no one ever brings up the irony of the growing pile of unbaptized, heathen babies?

And how about the fact that in this country, you can be the president and such a pulsing sphincter that people are moved to jab into their dead lawns campaign signs that say Fuck Your Feelings and fly flags that reimagine a jowly old man with skin like a circus peanut as Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo, gripping a bazooka with shredded arms, inspiring nervous laughter in anyone who understands this doesn’t come from a place of inanity, but deadly seriousness?

I can remember the moment when I realized photos of skeletal dogs could move people with little money to donate what little money they had, or compel them to do sacrificial things, like sell plasma or stay up late knitting scarves in order to help send north a bunch of watery-eyed puppies on The Kill List, to the safety of a rescue based out of some generous person’s home, like my friend’s father who was a dedicated lover of all furry things, who would never shut up about how mistreated animals are beyond fault for their behavior, that science shows their aggression or withdrawal is strictly circumstantial, how a warm home and gentle guidance can shape them into loving pets - and oh, how they deserve this! - but then, in the same breath, eviscerate a bleary-eyed panhandler to a minivan’s backseat tittering with children, lecturing their young hearts about lack of character, the sin of sloth, the blight of handouts, modeling equal doses of self-righteousness and disgust, glossing over the fact that a sharp-boned stranger is the human equivalent to the dog chained to the fence, underfed and unloved, and what a miracle it is that their mother, who is sitting in the passenger seat and scowling at a man succumbing to lack of food and frigid weather, recently donated $100 of hard-earned money so that two puppies with parvo could be given IVs, making her a goddamn saint.

I was still a kid when I realized most good songs are about conniving cheats, absent fathers, dead horses, elusive pussy, bathtub gin, dank weed, and fist fights, taking careful note that there were no songs about sharing a pencil or picking up dog shit, no songs about resisting road rage or refusing vicious gossip, so what I am saying is that there is no solid argument for being a good person, so go ahead and say the spiteful thing, embrace that inner bitch gaggin’ to create drama, but don’t forget to ask the sky for forgiveness for behaviors you have no intent to change, and if you’d like to move an audience to tears, include in your lifelong commitment to dickishness a fleeting moment of humanity, then kick back and watch your callousness be replaced with the legacy of how you stopped being a motherfucker for 10 seconds in order to bless us with basic decency.

Black Locust

Your fever came quickly, 102 within the hour. Vigilant blanket adjustments and a thermometer in your pit help quell my mom-anxiety, but in the evening, your fever reaches 104, and I don’t sleep. At 2am, you bolt upright from bed, eyes rolled to sclera. I repeat your name until your vision focuses, the sight of me draining color from your face. You swat at me, then leap from the bed and rush for the door. In undies, I catch you, hold you to my chest until out spills the fever dream - you’ve murdered me and can not bear the sight of my ghost. After an explosion of tears, we shuffle back to the bed, your breath infernal. Holding a Saltine to your lips, I assure you a ghost would care nothing for electrolytes, only spooking.

Mid-afternoon, on the third day, your fever lifts and mine begins, and when I collapse on the stairs halved by a cough you look up from the couch where you sit with a snacks and fresh blankets, call me disgusting. Your screens disappear for the day and you howl, slamming doors, my head squeezed by the vice of your theatrics. Shivering under cotton sheets, I wonder where I went wrong, swallow Tylenol, and succumb to a bitter sleep.

Three hours later, shuffling to the bathroom, I catch you glaring. Feeling I might dissolve into a puddle of snot and misery, I grab a scarf and head outside for a slow plod along a local trail, my foul mood interrupted by an encounter with a black locust. Long thorns protruding from her trunk are easy to make out in contrast with the steel sky of early spring, her feral beauty like a medicinal slap. A coughing fit loosens phlegm in my chest as well as something else, darker, deeper, hawked to the side of the trail.

Back home, you’re punching keys at the typewriter I bought you for your birthday. I know you’re venting about how unfair it is that I am your mother, how awful it is that I do not let you act with impudence, and after making a mental note to read it with discretion once you’re asleep, I collapse on the couch to learn about the black locust, how its thorns are most imposing in youth, how as it matures, you may not, without careful attention, even notice them.

Extra Dirty Dancing

“(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” is on WBQQ

and I’m imagining myself as Frances Houseman, 

soaring through the air, body outstretched 

and supported by Johnny Castle’s rippled arms.

Like most Gen X’ers, I spent my youth 

titillated by this iconic scene, the soundtrack 

instantly unlocking my pelvis, making me sweat

and leaving me nostalgic for the original nose. 

It’s interesting, I think, how not a single song

makes me think of that scrappy bombshell, 

Penny, Johnny’s original dancing partner, 

her pretty face streaked with tears

when she discovers she’s pregnant,

and I never recall Robbie, the Yale student 

who denies knocking her up, since he has a future,

she’s working class, and it’s summer after all.

Like most people, I block Penny out, 

refuse to think about the quack, the dirty knife, 

the folding table and agonized cries,

her ensuing sepsis and near death,

and instead, soar through the air like Baby,

once sweet and naive, now hot as hell,

since the only way to perfect The Lift 

depends on reimagining the plotline.

Porn Cones & Cat Ladies

Kevin Roberts is the President of the Heritage Foundation and chief architect of Project 2025, a blueprint for overhauling the federal government through the implementation of conservative, right-wing policies. Proponents argue that these policies would dismantle an unaccountable, liberal bureaucracy and restore the country’s morale through an infusion of conservative Christian values. I say it reads as a manifesto on how to homogenize into a theocracy, promising the parachute of Christianity will save us from plummeting into a godless wasteland run by libtards. 

“The Constitution grants each of us the liberty to do not what we want,” says the writers of Project 2025, “but what we ought.” 

The Onion, broadly recognized for scrupulous journalism, reports Project 2025 advocates change by privatizing immigration through Ticketmaster, organizing a well-armed dog militia, and replacing 30,000 federal employees with Eric Trump. 

Aside from 900+ pages of material for fabulous satire, Project 2025 was a flop. Whether it failed because it proposes (for real now) dissolving the Department of Education, criminalizing porn, repealing some child-labor protections, slashing Medicare, or restricting birth control is up for debate. Some say it’s because it implies overturning Roe v. Wade was just the beginning, when for most voters, losing Roe was too fucking much. Whatever the reason, critics of all political stripes cite wee concerns - it would undermine rule of law, separation of powers, separation of church and state, and basic civil liberties. You know, small stuff. 

Its terrible reception meant Trump was forced to distance himself from it, pretending that two-thirds of the authors and editors involved in Project 2025 hadn’t served in his administration. 

*

Though Project 2025 became an instant liability for Republicans, Kevin Roberts was undeterred by lack of support. He adjusted his halo, unzipped his skin, and out stepped Commander Waterford, who sat down and got to work authoring Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, a book about how to save a country under assault by “the Uniparty and its many Skittle-haired minions.” 

Though it’s not yet published (more on that later), excerpts from advance reader copies of Dawn’s Early Light can be found online. Highlights include arguments that children should not be considered an optional individual choice but a social expectation or transcendent gift, framing reproductive choice as a snake strangling the American family, claims that IVF incentivizes women to delay starting a family and leading to problems when “the time comes,” and accusations that not having children leads to a culture of despair.

According to Kevin Roberts, evils of modern technology - including birth control, video games, and high definition televisions -  lead us astray from our true purpose, which is a world in which young Christian men marry young Christian women, and the women stay home to cluck after a brood of Christian kids. (And those children get to work as soon as they can, since low-skilled, poorly-compensated manufacturing will have returned to the heartland!)

Having children is “not an economical calculation,” Commander Waterford writes from his big brown desk, “but an act of faith and love.” 

So, breeders! Enough with your silly budgets and your family planning. Flush that birth control down the toilet, spritz some rose water where it counts, and open those thighs.  It’s insemination time for Jesus!

Thankfully, since most women find this suggestion as appetizing as an unwashed nut sack, and since hostility toward reproductive choice is widely spurned, and because J.D. Vance wrote the intro, the release of Dawn’s Early Light has been delayed until after the election.

*

After reading excerpts from Roberts’ unpublished book, I google his image since my imagination tells me he’s an orange salamander, and lo and behold, he’s smooth and long, his bald pate gleaming and edged with a power donut. I picture him slinking through wet moss, tongue flicking outward, pulling into his thin smile squirming, many-legged prey.

But his eyes trip me up, make me wonder if this narrative is unnecessarily amphibian. Perhaps there’s something warm and likable about him? His eyes are a sweet shade of blue, and it’s a color that instantly reminds me of the veins that surfaced across the stretched skin of my expanding breasts twelve years ago, right before the arrival of my mewling, waterlogged daughter. A few weeks prior to her arrival, I discovered these delicate blue tributaries flowing toward my areolas, easy to spot in my sun-shy breasts. Pregnancy increases blood volume - that I knew - but I’d not expected to see veining in my tats, which my husband and I lovingly referred to as my “porn cones” once they filled enormously with milk.

To this day, if I hear the squall of a newborn, I can recall the ache that filled my nursing bra, the surge of prickling warmth through my nipples - as if they’d suddenly tripled in size - followed by a desperate need to consume carbs and a quart of water. And the sweet relief of my daughter across my chest, her suckling mouth pacified, both of us riding a cloud into a soft, sweet nap.

Kevin Roberts does not give off the tender blues of a brimming breast, I realize. He’s more like skim milk, with its weird, unappetizing blue tint if you hold it up to the light. It’s always bewildered me, skim milk, stripped of its goodness due to the wrongheaded assumption that it’s better for us, subjected to a process that steals important vitamins, as well as the milkfat that would keep us sated.

*

My pregnancy came at an ideal time. 

I was with a man I loved deeply, who instantly committed to fatherhood once I’d decided against an abortion. I could imagine a future with him, his thick hair sprouting from a head that contained a sparking brain and his heart thumping clever chord changes through a resonant guitar. Though children had never been part of my plan, the double lines of the pregnancy test and his warm hand, flat against my belly, felt like an unexpected bend in a road I was willing to explore. I loved him because he was a good man, and for a few other reasons I won’t mention, like his perfect clock.

This was my first time being pregnant, which made me lucky, considering the desultory decisions of my youth. My childhood and early teenage years were defined by insatiable curiosity, so when the world of sexual exploration appeared like a forest full of trees to climb and fruit to taste, I committed heartily to the adventure. At 16, I asked for birth control and was given eternal hellfire rather than an awkward ride to Planned Parenthood. Though I was confident enough to reject the accusations of my pleasure as unholy, I was inexperienced in navigating the world of healthcare and the internet was not yet an easy friend to these needs. In other words, I’d be remiss to pretend that this churchy reaction didn’t contribute to a loss of basic agency. In response, I adopted a sexually insouciant attitude that stuck around into my late 20s, when I finally stopped riding naked through the forest, bareback.

Sorry, Mom.

I suppose some of this behavior could be chalked up to the invincibility that both plagues and enlivens young people, making them wonderful yet so rash. In some ways, I was just acting my age -  curious, explorative, and delusional. But there was also a part of me that knew I was making unexamined choices, and continued to make them anyway, repeating the fiction that a slip-up would be anyone else’s fault but mine. 

Most of the men with whom I’d shared a bed in my early twenties were the opposite of daddy material. Though I never boffed a guy who didn’t have a shelf of good books (or at least a magazine here or there), they kept their fridges bare and their showers unscrubbed, and I’m sure many of them still do. Childless cat laddies, one could call them. Most of them now hard-working, lager-drinking Trump fans, if Facebook tells the truth. 

Miraculously, I did not get pregnant (until I did with my daughter), I never contracted an STI, and I never got entangled with a prick I couldn’t untangle myself from. I count my lucky stars and share this part of my story in case you’re reading this, depending on similar lucky stars. If so, a minor can get condoms at any drug store but accessing birth control is dependent, sadly, on geography.

*

As Melinda Gates said, “Contraceptives unlock one of the most dormant, but potentially powerful assets in development: women as decision-makers.”

Ridiculous, that she even had to say that.

*

Reading the excerpts from Dawn’s Early Light makes me reflect on my growing group of child-free friends who are professional women, many whom have traveled the globe, dress for the opera, and post food porn that makes me jealous. I consider their tastefully decorated condos and well-tended porch gardens, their groomed dogs and efficient cars, the silk scarves of play money and climate-adjustments. Many of these women seem calmer than the harried parents who feel more like my peers. Less strung out. I’ve never once heard any of them complain about lacking familial fulfillment, as most of them clearly relish their roles as auntie (or uncle) in blood or chosen families. 

I also have friends whose eyes fill with tears when they speak longingly about the children they’d hoped to have and couldn’t. It’s a sadness that feels untouchable, and I wonder how they feel about the hateful rants on the “sinfulness” of the frozen embryos of IVF, about being disparaged for not having children, about being accused of contributing to a country’s despair for not having what they wanted most.

I think of my friends who are single moms - members of a group whose commonality includes an astonishing work ethic - and set aside my domestic complaints to bow down. Don’t bow down, a friend who is a single parent scolded me, rolling her eyes. I have to work this hard, and I’d do anything for the kind of support you get, so how about you shut it and just buy me a drink? 

I also have friends who are Christians, and who move through their day with faith, praying through hardship and loss, never expecting others to share their convictions. They are the friends who pray for me when I’m troubled, and because their care is easy and their hearts humble, their prayers easily translate into love.

*

Cat lady. 

It’s a term that’s been reclaimed, at least in the circles I run in, generally accepted as a nod to good taste in literature, knowledge of the best places to grab lunch, and a tendency to keep the company of regal friends that purr. Recently, I watched a pink-faced pundit get apoplectic about cat ladies, spittle flying from his mean mouth, but had to laugh when I found myself in agreement with him. Cat ladies are definitely guilty of moving certain books to the front of the library, where they’re better displayed, in order to reach the tender hearts of children who are not their own.

And this is just one more reason to love them.

*

For me, having a child transformed my relationship with the man who became my husband in ways that have driven us apart as much as yoked us together. Though our daughter enhanced our life in ways too plentiful and too annoying to share (see FB, lol), as working parents flinging ourselves from one obligation to the next, we’ve become enmeshed in a way that can feel impossible to separate. 

In our worst moments, I wonder if we’re anything but a blob of caretaking and bickering, losing entire afternoons to sorting out childcare, navigating dubious insurance coverage, or magicking protein into a meal that our daughter will eat. We quarrel over divvying up negligible free time - stupid - but we’ve not stopped. I resent my dependence on his salary, which is twice mine, since three years of my resume growth was stunted during my daughter’s newborn and toddler years, and like many women in hetero marriages, I still lag behind. 

I’d once read that “marriage is one long conversation.” That makes sense to me, though I’d add in lots of muttering, 30 minute stints of hiding in the bathroom with a laptop, and hyper-focusing on the sound of each other’s breathing.

*

Sometimes, I think domesticity would feel less overwhelming if the realities of parenting were more freely discussed, but burying the truth under the floorboards like a tell-tale heart and smiling insanely seems to be protocol. It’s a sore spot for me, since I’m an external processor who loves to vent about the endless demands of the home front, so when selflessness is championed as the highest good (especially in regards to motherhood), I withdraw in disgust. 

If you don’t get what I’m saying here, read what the heteros post on social media every Mother’s Day, and count how many times you see a husband write something like, “Thank you for being a contortionist, for bending into any shape without complaining, for always putting your family’s needs ahead of yours, Becca, we couldn’t survive a day without you.”

Heh. I bet.

To borrow from Matthew Remski, co-host of The Conspirituality Podcast: “The sleeplessness, the attempts to console the inconsolable, the endless housework, the impossible ethical decisions, the scarcity of privacy, the work of being the support for a young tortured mind that triggers the tortured heart in yourself” - can be draining, even excruciating. Life as a parent - I’ve heard only the wealthy say otherwise - is not your own. 

But yes, of course, OF COURSE it’s beloved work. And we’d never choose otherwise! We shout this from the mountaintop, defending ourselves against an accusation no one has made, assuring everyone knows HOW MUCH WE LOVE OUR CHILDREN. And it’s true! We look at them and love so hard we lift momentarily in the air. We exchange knowing winks and nods with other parents to let them know that deeply, in the center, in the bloodiest, goodest place in our heart, we carry the secrets of the trade and they are ours to savor. The bigger the bags under the eyes, the deeper the commitment. Our child rushes into our arms, their sweet heads tucked into our neck, and we are not our own. We are theirs. 

Complaining about the realities of domestic life can come off as indulgent, or negative, I’ve been scolded, especially for other parents who would rather not think about how tired they are, or talk about how much they sometimes resent their partner, and sadly, we have to cancel plans again, we’re desperate for adult time but we’re so exhausted, the baby didn’t sleep well, and tomorrow is another relentless day.

*

Tangential, but worth saying: The hard work of raising a child has given me insight to how and why women in shitty relationships - including abusive ones - can feel stuck. How many times have we heard the onslaught of criticism aimed at a woman with children, with a pittance of income or none at all, who stays with her asshole of a man? How many times have we been forced to endure the unimaginative scrutiny of those who have yet to reflect on their own hardships and entanglements, but who can’t help but lecture about “what they would do” in that situation?” 

Bah. Too many fucking times. 

*

I recently listened to Matthew Remski argue that JD Vance’s accusations of “childless cat ladies” caused an uproar because it tapped into deeper, more hidden troubles with the American family, including jealousy of those who are child-free in a country that does little to support families. It made me recall how common it was in my acupuncture clinic to hear new parents bemoan the sudden lack of idle time, how they realize its importance to their sanity once it’s gone. But it’s not polite to stare with envy at the young man under a tree with a book, the couple having Bloody Mary’s at brunch, the older woman nibbling a pastry and sipping a latte, taking her sweet ‘ol time, so we don’t. We look away, and swallow it.

Remski also talks about how a certain part of our country has become addicted to making up stories about “childless” people, framing them as a growing army of drag queens kicking off their heels and climbing atop desks to twerk for kindergarteners,  lobbying administration for litter boxes in school bathrooms and more representative porn in school libraries, which is so stupid I will not give it another second.

*

Many parents believe their children are gifts from God, and so it follows that they should give thanks for their blessings and work harder if they find themselves struggling to keep up. Sometimes, they’re asked to pretend that raising a family with little support can’t turn them into a human husk, no matter how hard they loved, no matter how hard they pushed their nose to the grindstone.

From Matthew Remski:

“I first heard the phrase [family values] in the late 1980s - and then the Bush’s really took it up - and of course I knew it stood for socially and fiscally conservative positions, but it confused me with its vagueness. I mean, what families were they talking about? It made me think of the opening line of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, “All happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” And the joke there of course is that he’s going to go on for 800 pages describing an unhappy family, but in such relatable terms that it becomes impossible for any reader to imagine all those happy families somewhere, all alike, as being more than fantasy.

But it doesn’t take much for that fantasy of “happy families” to reveal its shallow nature. One learns about gendered labor, about how deeply siblings can hate each other, about intergenerational abuse. One learns that “stranger danger” is a massive coverup for the fact that child abuse, and child sexual abuse, happens within the family for the most part. It becomes clear that the “satanic panic” was a massive backlash against women with children moving into the workforce, and through Marxist literature, one can learn that the nuclear family is the social reproductive unit of the bourgeoisie. And if one is paying any attention at all, one learns that those who crow loudest about family values usually have a lot of family problems.

At this point it seems to me that the appeal to family values does the same labor that all conservative rhetoric does - it tries to conceal a very unpleasant truth. It’s a deflection from the fact that families are often all we have and all we know. They are crucial to our survival and identities, and are also often brutal, non-consensual power constellations from which we can never fully escape. How much must the freedom-loving American hate that? And so, what do you do to the walls of a prison you can’t quite name for the shame of it? You wallpaper them with stories and myths.”

*

“The other night I ate at a real nice family restaurant. Every table had an argument going.” 

That’s a George Carlin joke.

Families are complicated, amoebic. For some, they are hard landings, for others, soft. Some are halved by politics, forced to reckon with the fact that the personal is political. And most could use more help, especially those supporting aging parents, the sick, or loved ones with disabilities. It’s the type of care that can easily become full-time work, in addition to one’s full-time work, in addition to the full-time work of raising a family.

*

In one dreamscape, policy that prioritizes the American family is not represented by a glass of skim milk, anemically-blue, undrunk and sweating on the kitchen counter. Instead, it's an enormous porn cone with rivulets of blue, ready to spill forth its full-fat manna. Of course, if someone wants skim milk, eww, but fine. Let’s just agree that making skim milk the only choice is obnoxious, yes? And if you’re lactose intolerant, Cat Lady has various nut milks in her mini fridge, which she’ll happily share if you ask nicely.

*

The Porn Cone Playbook translates into a country in which women have autonomy over their bodies, regardless of geography. The constitutional right to abortion is returned and codified. Contraception - of any kind - is simple to get and free. Motherhood is not championed as a journey of endless self-sacrifice. Paid family leave and sick leave are unquestioned benefits. Wages are fair, groceries are affordable. Healthcare looks like healthcare rather than a rigged game of subterfuge and exploitation. Good medical attention does not require a part-time job of self-advocacy. Grandparents do not have to work past retirement and can help with the grandkids after pickleball. There’s clean water and air, enough food, solid public schools, green public spaces, comprehensive healthcare, and safe housing. Children do not die from lack of dental care and individuals do not go bankrupt from a cancer diagnosis. People with disabilities are not required to fight tooth and nail to get through an average day. Mental health support is quickly arranged and destigmatized. Children are not slaughtered in their classrooms. Addiction medicine does not lag behind the research by 50 years. People do not stick Fuck Your Feelings campaign signs into dead lawns, and instead let wildflowers grow tall for pollinators. The big global family stewards a planet we’re lucky to inhabit, since she is the most important Mother of all.  

*

Sometimes, my husband and I get so enmeshed, something strange happens, and we transform from a gelatinous blob into cold, distant planets. 

Go for a walk? I ask him, to which he always agrees.

On those walks, sometimes we find the same sun, strong enough to reorient us in the direction of warmth, and only then can we talk about our individual needs and consider creative solutions, which means we must first forgive each other for wanting more. 

*

On one of those walks, after the kind of discussion that will cumulatively become “the long conversation of marriage,” my husband and I were booted out of a somber mood when we discovered we were dealing with the same ridiculous truth.

After a chaotic summer schedule, our daughter was back to school for her first day, and she’d been there approximately 75 minutes. Rather than relishing this moment of rare, child-free time, we were both preoccupied by how much we missed her.

Groundhog

The groundhog did hundreds of dollars in damage before I got fed up and bought a trap to rehome it, but after taking to social media to ask whether melon outperformed apple as bait, a few concerned citizens drowned out my question with a remonstrative chorus of how rehoming the rodent was an act of colonialism.

Displacing the groundhog would guarantee its demise, I was told. Released within two acres of an already-established groundhog, it would be forced to fight for territory or starve. Was the yard not the animal’s rightful home, as much as it was mine? Did I want the blood of an innocent animal on my hands?

I supposed I did not. So, I did nothing.

The groundhog dug labyrinthine tunnels under my shed, displacing a foundation of crushed stone and growing fat on my gardens. I put chicken wire up; the groundhog dug under it. I bought a jug of coyote piss and sprinkled it around the garden beds, rolled a smoke bomb into its burrow. But nothing worked.

Frustrated by the amount of destruction the groundhog had caused in a few short months, I messaged a guy I knew from social media who was always posting about returning to his ancestral roots - a journey, he said, inseparable from establishing food sovereignty. I’d seen pictures of him enjoying groundhog tacos, and wrote to see if he’d like some more.

He was in.

An hour later, he pulled into my driveway and slid a metal spear from the backseat of his car. The groundhog had already been trapped, so things would be easy, he assured me. Up close, I noticed his spear was actually a rusted picket salvaged from a wrought iron gate.

Is that gonna work? I asked, brows raised.

The tip is kinda dull, he admitted, but it’s what I use since I can’t discharge a firearm within city limits.

Thirty agonizing minutes later, when the groundhog finally stopped moving, I walked him back to his car. He was digging around in the trunk for a plastic bag when the groundhog lifted its head from the pavement, making a gruesome attempt to drag itself away.

Dude! I yelled, jumping backwards. The fuck?!

I can’t believe this thing isn’t dead yet, he muttered, grabbing a mallet from the back seat of his car.

*

Weeks later, when bloody incisors still gnawed at the edges of my sleep, I wrote to He Who Carries A Dull Spear.

I’m freaking out about how much the groundhog suffered, I wrote. I should have said something and I didn’t, so I’m writing now to ask if you think there is a better way to harvest future groundhogs?

His answer was curt. He recommended that I consider what the groundhog’s death might have looked like had white men not extirpated native rattlesnakes and wolves. I should consider what it would have looked like if the groundhog was slowly poisoned, or ripped to shreds by a pack of dogs. The animal had not been caged and pumped full of chemicals to make it fit for consumption in an enslaved environment. Instead, it had lived a natural life and died a natural death at the hand of a natural predator. 

Attached to his message were photos of dark purple meat, vacuum-sealed, stacked neatly in a mini freezer.

Sharpen your spear? I suggested, then snoozed him for 30 days.

*

I smudged every corner of my house, then I smudged my yard. Though I’d been told countless times that sage was not for white ladies, it was the only thing that helped. 

*

On a Facebook gardening group, one guy suggests a .22 for dealing with groundhogs, and a few members call for him to be removed. 

This is a GARDENING group! they admonish. 

I am a gardener, he responds. 

He is removed.

*

Groundhogs are clearly a nuisance for lots of people.

On a different Facebook gardening group, a woman suggests using a live trap to move the critter, and encourages mindfulness around relocation in order to avoid making the groundhog another gardener’s problem. 

Someone in the group calls her a Zionist, and three people like it.

*

Everyone is talking about Palestine.

Everyone is talking about Israel. 

Everyone is talking about Palestine and Israel.

One dismembered baby is not the same as eight babies dead to starvation!

While there is no evidence of dismembered babies, there is no question that women, including pregnant women, were raped and beheaded.

It was not a terrorist attack and it was not an antisemitic attack. It was an attack against Israelis.

It’s war.

It’s genocide.

While everyone is distracted by Gaza, drag queens are waltzing into our public schools and brainwashing boys into thinking they’re girls. 

You’re grimacing, my husband observes. 

I shut my computer and crack a beer.

*

I come across this paragraph in a book by Patricia Lockwood, published in 2021: There was a new toy. Everyone was making fun of it, but then it was said to be designed for autistic people, and then no one made fun of it anymore, but made fun of the people who were making fun of it previously. Then someone else discovered a stone version from a million years ago in some museum, and this seemed to prove something. Then the origin of the toy was revealed to have something to do with Israel and Palestine, and so everyone made a pact never to speak of it again. And all of this happened in the space of like four days. 

*

On Facebook, a friend posts: Aaron Bushnell is a hero.

Aaron Bushnell was the 25-year-old serviceman of the US Air Force who doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy, shouting “Free Palestine!” while burning alive.

I ask, Did you watch the video?

No, he writes back, too traumatizing.

*

I’m stuffing a tangle of bittersweet into a blazing fire when I see him, shuffling out from under my neighbor’s shed, dazed and mangy. After an extended pause, he stands on his hind legs and sniffs the air. 

Fuck.

The sound of my voice sends him scrambling back to safety.  

*

When your friends do not worship your personal gods - Bjork, orbweavers, cowboy boots - calling them an infidel is funny, or not right now? 

Save it for the Republicans, my husband says.

*

Occasionally, the marm who lives in the unheated schoolhouse of my solar plexus scolds me, her voice thick with cobwebs: Think it’s time for jokes, while the planet floods and burns? While cities are razed and children plowed into graves? While homeless men take heroin and horse tranquilizer only a mile from your daughter’s school? 

I’m telling a friend about my inner marm, how she can pop up and instantly ruin the fun. 

You’re supposed to say unhoused, not homeless, she says, exhaling her vape in my face. 

*

I read in an editorial: Using words other than “suicide” to describe Aaron Bushnell’s death strikes me as reminiscent of how we restrict the meaning of the word “murder” to killing that we believe is unjustified so that we avoid it in the context of war.

*

I listen to a recording of a Hamas fighter telling his parents that he killed ten Jews in a kibbutz near the Gaza border, all by himself.

Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews! Mom, your son is a hero! he boasts.

He tells them he’s calling from the phone of a Jewish woman he’s just killed, encouraging them to check WhatsApp for proof.

I wish I was with you, his mother says.

*

Kunti is a character in the Hindu epic Mahabharata. She is the queen of Kuru, the first wife of King Pandu, and the mother of five sons known as the Pandavas. Kunti is known for saying, When one prefers one’s own children to the children of others, war is near.

*

I’ve set a live trap for the groundhog. 

A woman I met - a farmer - scoffed when I shared my concerns.

How much food will you lose before you grow a pair and get rid of him, she asks, shaking her head in disbelief. Cantaloupe, she says, a cigarette pressed between her lips, and a friend with a truck because that bastard will piss and shit everywhere. 

Her personal method is to angle a wooden plank against a five gallon bucket filled with water, a trail of apple slices leading up to the homemade swimming pool.

*

Whatever you do, don’t lose your sense of humor, said Jerry Seinfeld in the commencement speech he delivered to Duke graduates. 

Protesting his presence, a small group of students walk out.

It’s because he’s Jewish! 

No, it’s because he’s a Zionist!

One student is quoted saying they walked out because none of them particularly wanted to listen to Seinfeld.

*

Look at these Ivy elites, embracing oppressed identities, wearing keffiyehs and pitching Patagonia tents on manicured lawns to protest a war they are incapable of understanding after a life in the suburbs, a mustachioed Vietnam vet posts.

The word tentifada - owned by both sides - makes me laugh. So clever!

*

The groundhog is gone, relocated to a 20-acre field of clover.

Settler-colonialist, I call my husband, who puts on a pair of thick leather gloves before opening the trap to release it. The groundhog’s ass, grown huge on my veggies, wobbles as it disappears into lush grass.

That’s not a term people use, my husband says, peeling off his gloves and tossing them in the backseat of the truck.

Infidel, I say, laying on the gas, speeding away before someone catches us.

*

I read: Generally, just war theorists believe that war cannot be ethically waged without having reasonable prospects for success. The logic is intuitive: War inevitably involves a lot of killing, and killing can only be justified if it accomplishes a greater good. If the objective behind the killing is impossible (or extremely implausible), then there is no greater good to be won from the bloodshed.

*

Scorched earth, I read. Humanitarian nightmare. Children burned alive.

*

Students on a college campus tear down posters of Jewish children held hostage by Hamas.

Go back to Poland! a young man shrieks, his face hidden behind a mask, when students protest the removal of the posters.

Some students shrink away in horror. Others call it decolonization.

*

A Columbia student writes to his professor: I think [the protests] do speak to a certain failing on Columbia’s part, but it’s a failing that’s much more widespread and further upstream. That is, I think universities have essentially stopped minding the store, stopped engaging in any kind of debate or even conversation with the ideologies which have slowly crept into every bit of university life, without enough people of good conscience brave enough to question all the orthodoxies. So if you come to Columbia believing in “decolonization” or what have you, it’s genuinely not clear to me that you will ever have to reflect on this belief. And after all this, one day the university wakes up to these protests, panics under scrutiny, and calls the cops on students who are practicing exactly what they’ve been taught to do from the second they walked through those gates as freshmen.

*

A Tweet with seven million views: A good law of history is that if you ever find yourself opposing a student movement while siding with the ruling class, you are wrong. Every single time. In every era. No matter the issue.

I wonder if this is true. Do student activists historically have some sort of unique claim to moral authority?

I spend the next day digging.

No, it is not true. What it is, is complicated.

*

I read an article about Mao Zedong’s Red Guards, the National Socialist German Student League, and the students who helped Khomeini come to power.

*

Many parents see the footage of the Palestinian father frantically searching the rubble for his children. They feel the grip of his horror and hold their babies, sickened with understanding. Then the grind calls - the bus pulls up, the timer dings, the toddler shrieks - and everyone moves on.

*

In an article, Palestinian human rights activist Mahmoud Mushtaha reflects on how the recent surge of conflict has made his work impossible: I’m constantly engaged in conversations about coexistence and reconciliation. But Israel’s actions against Palestinians consistently undermine what I am advocating. How can I convince a child who has lost every member of their family to accept the killer as a neighbor?

In a live interview, I hear an Israeli peace activist say the same thing, but about Israeli trauma at the hands of Hamas.

*

A man in a naturalist group on Facebook posts a drone-recorded video of an eaglet pecking at the head of another eaglet until it dies.

VIOLENT, one woman writes, THAT’S ENOUGH!

Apologies, writes the videographer, I was under the impression this group was okay with the nature of Nature.

*

A poem, by Wislawa Szymborska, titled The End and the Beginning.

After every war

someone has to clean up.

Things won’t

straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble

to the side of the road,

so the corpse-filled wagons

can pass.

Someone has to get mired

in scum and ashes,

sofa springs,

splintered glass,

and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder

to prop up a wall.

Someone has to glaze a window,

rehang a door.

Photogenic it’s not,

and takes years.

All the cameras have left

for another war.

We’ll need the bridges back,

and new railway stations.

Sleeves will go ragged

from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,

still recalls the way it was.

Someone else listens

and nods with unsevered head.

But already there are those nearby

starting to mill about

who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes

sometimes someone still unearths

rusted-out arguments

and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew

what was going on here

must make way for

those who know little.

And less than little.

And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown

causes and effects,

someone must be stretched out

blade of grass in his mouth

gazing at the clouds.

*

‘From the river to the sea’ must be judged only by what the speaker says is in their heart.

I hear a man on public radio say this and wonder if the preposterous logic of this statement might be used on my husband. 

I meant what was in my heart, I’ll tell him, but you heard what flew from my mouth.

*

One argument is that it is impossible for the oppressed to be themselves racist, just as it is impossible for an oppressor to be the subject of racism.

One argument is that you should never assume the weak are “just” simply because they are weak, or the strong “wrong” because they are strong.

*

On a Facebook gardening group, people fight about the importance of differentiating the word invasive from the word aggressive.

Invasive is correct if the plant is out of control and killing everything, but it's not native. Aggressive is the preferred word if it’s out of control and killing everything, but it's native. 

*

I wake suddenly from sleep, heart racing. Where did all the Ukrainian flags go?

*

Not enough of life makes sense for you to be able to survive without humor, said Jerry Seinfeld to the Duke graduates. Humor is the most survival-essential quality you will ever need to navigate the human experience.

In front of him, silently, unfolds the Palestinian flag.

*

A poem titled “Making a Fist” by Naomi Shihab Nye.

We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.

                                                              —Jorge Luis Borges

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,

I felt the life sliding out of me,

a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.

I was seven, I lay in the car

watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.

My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

“How do you know if you are going to die?”

I begged my mother.

We had been traveling for days.

With strange confidence she answered,

“When you can no longer make a fist.”

Years later I smile to think of that journey,

the borders we must cross separately,

stamped with our unanswerable woes.

I who did not die, who am still living,

still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,

clenching and opening one small hand.

* 

I cannot publish this, I tell my husband, listing friends who will cancel me.

Why would they cancel you, he asks.

Because you’re not supposed to feel conflicted, I snap, heading outside to burn.

*

I read this, in the book by Patricia Lockwood: Go not far enough, and find yourself guilty of complacency, complicity, a political slumping into the cushions of your time. Go too far, and find yourself saying that you didn't care that a white child had been eaten by an alligator.

*

In the fall of 2023, my hometown was brought to its knees by a mass shooting that killed eighteen people in under 15 minutes. It was the tenth-deadliest shooting in U.S. history.

While law enforcement searched for the shooter, the city remained suspended in terror. Blinds were drawn and doors were locked. Victim counts changed by the hour. Over social media, rumor outpaced fact. Parents tried their best to keep children distracted, telling jokes and performing melodramatic readings of silly books.

More! the kids begged, delighted by this unexpected attention. More!

*

The manhunt lasted two days until the shooter was found dead by suicide in a tractor-trailer.

We began to breathe, just enough to feel our bodies again, which no longer felt like our own.

*

Two months after the mass shooting, a local woman hoping to boost morale decided to move forward with the holiday event she hosted every December. Local businesses in the downtown would open their doors for an afternoon of holiday shopping, as they had in previous years. There’d be hot chocolate and handmade crafts, Christmas carols and cheese boards. After two months of unspeakable heartache it seemed a little warmth could go a long way. Struggling business owners desperate for connection and customers began advertising for the event. Excitement built hesitantly, then steadily.

On the day of the event, a group of 50 pro-Palestinian protesters gathered downtown to voice their disgust with a local congressman. The congressman had voted in a way that made him complicit in the murder of thousands of Palestinians, yelled a woman into a bullhorn. Women and children! Blood in the streets! Protestors responded to her calls in unison, shrieking, “MURDER!” Child-sized caskets covered in white sheets stained with fake blood were set out on the sidewalk. One man held a sign suggesting the congressman should be jailed for his vote.

Local residents who came out in support of the holiday event froze at the sight of the bloody caskets. Some heard the word “MURDER” reverberating off of buildings upon stepping out of their cars, turned right around, and drove home. At some point, a local florist asked the protestors to move up the street a little, so customers could better access her front entrance. They refused. The woman running the holiday event asked, too, assuring them that this was not a request to disband, just to better share the street. They refused.

After two hours, the protestors moved on, and the holiday event sputtered to an early close.

It’s not like they shut down a weapons manufacturer, I overheard the woman who organized the holiday event say, tears streaming down her face. A lifelong supporter of organized protests, she did not feel this one would translate into support. In fact, just the opposite. At some point, she sat down on a stool and sobbed into her hands.

Later that evening, curious to know more about the protest, I found the public invite on Instagram, aptly named “Shut It Down for Palestine.” In addition to the time and place, the invite included a reminder to be respectful of the unhoused people they’d inevitably see on the street.

They achieved exactly what they were there to do, a woman commented on Facebook, in response to whether the visceral intensity of this protest was tone deaf to the reality of a city struggling to grieve eighteen stolen lives, including a 14 year old boy and his father. Make them uncomfortable, she wrote, and hit those complacent business owner’s right in the wallet.

*

My questions trip over themselves, wriggling stupidly on the floor. 

*

I had a friend who died by self-immolation. 

A month prior to his death, and after a gradual erosion of mental health, he called me in the middle of the night and left a belligerent voicemail. I listened to the end, took a big breath, and deleted it from my phone.

My friend was Black, gay, and cuttingly clever. His aesthetic was deliciously queer - the last time I’d seen him, he stepped off the bus in a pink denim skirt, his bare shoulders shining with sweat. He embraced me, leaving a slick of fruity lip gloss on my cheek. 

My friend also happened to be a Christian missionary who’d been tortured in a prison camp for 10 months after crossing into North Korea to protest the inhumane treatment of children. 

Our friendship - both before and after he was rescued from North Korea -  included full days of adventuring, open-mouthed laughter, and removing our shirts on the dance floor. Sometimes, in the purple hours of the evening, he’d close his eyes and deliver messages from my ancestors.

But I’d grown fearful of his increasing aggression and isolation, and I was pissed that he’d refused all attempts at help. I was a new mom and trying to figure out how to stay sane with what seemed an unending scroll of responsibility paired with scant sleep. Not responding to his voicemail was an act of self-preservation, I decided.

Radical self-care.

Soon after leaving me the voicemail, he walked into an open field in San Diego and struck a match. 

*

There are no words for the smell, a witness cried, in an interview after Bushnell’s suicide, his face the color of cold ash. 

*

When my 6th grade daughter came home from school and sat down to a snack I’d made - a bowl of yogurt and three huge strawberries - she reported that one of her teachers hates strawberries. 

She hates everything about them, she said, teeth pink with their juice, even the smell!

Perhaps she’s allergic, I offered. 

Nope, she said, stuffing another one into her mouth. She’d asked.  She even asked if her teacher had past trauma with a strawberry.

*

Animal Speak is a book about identifying and understanding animal totems, gifted to me by a Mi’kmaq man who laughed when I asked if I had any business exploring such a thing. White people talking about their animal totems pisses people off, I explained.

He threw his head back and laughed so loud people stared.

Humans have found meaning in animals forever, he said, shaking his head, and to think otherwise is ridiculous. But if you’re gonna be precious, call it your ASS.

Animal of Special Significance.

*

20 years ago, my friend, Terrence, told me his spirit animal was a hamburger.

One thing I’ve stolen is that joke.

*

The author of Animal Speak is Ted Andrews, a white man born in Dayton, Ohio, who devoted his life to the natural world and spiritual arts. Though Animal Speak received criticism for being “typical white shamanism,” 500,000 copies were sold in five years.

In an Adirondack chair by a raging fire, I flip to the section on groundhogs.

Groundhogs go into hibernation and spend about four to six months in that condition. They prepare for this by fattening themselves. They gorge through summer and late fall. Their temperature will drop from its normal 96 degrees to about 40 degrees, barely above freezing. They achieve a state of unconsciousness and will usually awaken in early spring. When groundhog shows up as a totem, lessons associated with death and dying and revelations about its process will begin to surface. Its medicine is that of going into the great unconscious to touch the mystery of death without dying.

*

My ASS is a groundhog, teehee.

*

A maple in my backyard is felled to Asiatic bittersweet, which vined up the length of the trunk and choked it out. American bittersweet is native, while Asiatic is not, though both like to strangle trees.

*

I’ve entered the secondary burn, I tell my husband, pouring myself a glass of water before heading back outside.

What’s that, he asks, peering over the top of his laptop.

When a fire gets so hot, it consumes the smoke as fuel.

*

Social media baits outrage on every side, a fire burning hot on a diet of its own smoke.

*

I’ve lost the secondary burn. Smoke billows across the yard in choking gray sheets. 

Reaching into brush pile to grab an armful of kindling, there’s movement in my periphery, then a high-pitched whistle. The groundhog bolts from the pile, heading straight for my feet, her black eyes shining. 

Sidestepping her trajectory, my sneaker catches the edge of a canvas tub and I fall on my ass.

From this perspective, I can see two small heads peering from the hole she’s running for, and before I can stand up, she and her pups disappear into the burrow. 

*

TIME TO BURN IT TO THE MOTHERFUCKING GROUND.

A sensation of heat pricks at my neck, limbs numb. My breath sounds funny.

Tears well up and I rub them away. But they come back. 

*

Once the panic attack dumps me back on the ground and my breathing slows, my vision clears and rewidens. There’s an emerald canopy of oak above my head, sunlight glittering through the spaces between leaves. Little spots of sun are cast across my body, their location shifting with the light breeze. My jaw lets go, hangs open. I must look like a doofus, staring into the tree tops with my mouth slung loose.

I do not care.

*

I don’t know is an enormously disorienting thing to say.

*

It’s quiet in my yard but for an occasional sough of wind through the white oaks. 

Cautiously, they step from the burrow, heading for the flower beds.

Meme Poem

sorry how i acted when there were multiple noises happening at the same time

was the meme shared by my most prodigious meme-harvesting friend

which I saved to my phone before returning to scroll and accidentally

landing on an enthusiastic ad for full-body deodorant with volume

maxed which sent my heart galloping and blood rushing

causing me to close my eyes in order to engage the breathing I do

to calm the fuck down vagally-speaking when the shower started

and the pipes shuddered and my daughter broke into song

‘World Burn’ from the musical ‘Mean Girls’ which is a song

with incredibly high notes she can’t quite hit but she reaches

with such conviction the walls buzz making my husband convulse

with worry that she’ll damage her vocal chords to which I snap

jesuschillshewillbefine recalling how I’d become apoplectic as a kid

when my brother switched the tv station from DuckTales to WWF

and body slammed all attempts at liberating the remote and look at me baby

I’m fine I’m fucking great I tell my husband who eyes me suspiciously

since my voice cracks the moment I attempt to lift it in song but he shuffles

away to another room to chill out by picking an old folk tune on the mandolin

which is an impossible instrument impossible to play impossible to ignore

and the impossible instrument he practices multiple times a day a particular tune

by Chris Thile who is eye-gougingly irritating and now I’m reminded of when

Thile took over for Keillor on Prairie Home I almost drove my car off the road

sailed it over the edge oh my god anyone but him and his pompous hairline

and in the center of this sonic chaos my body begins to quiver at a frequency faster

than any vibrator I’ve ever owned which is a thought that elicits the sound

brrzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzrr and suddenly I picture myself as a giant dildo

crashing around the kitchen like the dildo is human-sized with two feet

in roller skates and vibe maxed and this tube of veined flesh is flying into things

and breaking dishes which makes me think of a friend of mine who got so mad

at her girlfriend she gathered all of her vibrators and turned them on high

and tossed them in the claw foot tub which made such a racket that her girlfriend

cried out and in response she climbed into her truck and sped away cackling

like a patchouli witch with all the chargers stuffed in her canvas duffel

which makes me realize I should avoid washing knives for now

and instead flip on the garbage disposal to deal with the fruit flies

and after that I will organize the cabinet with the pots and pans

and stake my flag in this hellscape of noise which I’ll miss

with unequivocable desperation I’m told by two different women

whose irises went from blue to grey when things got quiet

Baby Hairs

You hate the downy hairs

lining your forehead with fuzz,

so you stick them back with wax.

Dressing for a birthday party,

trailing perfume, round belly

receding under a yellow crop-top,

I want to kiss the top of your head,

instead tuck my arms to sides,

and dim doubt from my eyes

when you spin to wave goodbye,

and I’m chill, bruh, totally at ease,

your overnight bag dropped

and you’re back for a squeeze,

my heart the pendulum of parenting,

gather, release, gather, release.

Hagfish

Though hagfish have been around for over 300 million years, they’ve barely evolved. Researchers think this is because hagfish are equipped with a defense mechanism so effective they have few natural predators.

When under attack, glands lining their snake-like body release proteins that transform into a cloud of slime upon hitting the water. In under a second, the proteins expand to 10,000 times their original size. So, imagine a 5 gallon bucket of snot. The gills of the predator are clogged, and the scare of suffocation sends them looking for Mucinex. 

If you google “hagfish,” you’ll see pictures of a common species, its anemic-pink skin loosely attached to its body like a fleshy sock. With a mouth full of comblike-teeth that move horizontally and a rasping tongue, hagfish are well-equipped to rip flesh from carcasses found on the ocean floor. Boring a hole into carrion face-first, they prefer to eat their meal from the inside out. 

*

A YouTube video shows a group of hagfish tearing flesh from the bloated carcass of a whale. 

One article describes their anatomy: five hearts, boneless, blind. 

In another video, a cloud blooms from inside the jaw of a shark, the hagfish slipping away.

*

What does it feel like, the jaws of a shark cracking down upon you?

I shut my computer and stare into the dark, an undertow tugging at my feet.

Will my daughter know it too?

*

I want a defense mechanism so effective evolution is unnecessary for millions of years.

*

Where might I manifest slime glands, if I magically could?

Since glands in my nose would be nasty, I picture them budding from the smooth surface of my cervix, enhancing its natural gift.

*

For 10 years, my husband and I had a recurring fight about cookies. He consistently ate 80 percent of the cookies - chocolate chip and always baked by me. 100 percent of the time, he finished the last one. 

Once, I’d rushed home from work anticipating the pleasure of a cookie microwaved for 10 seconds and consumed in three bites, only to discover he’d eaten the last one.

Again.

What the fuck?! How can you do this to me? I hissed, my face a pickled beet.

I’m not doing anything TO you, he hissed back, I wasn’t even thinking of you. 

*

One reason I love my husband is that when he’s an asshole, he’s an honest asshole. He ate the last cookie a dozen more times before the issue surfaced in couple’s counseling, his behavior admitted to without shame.

My love language is you not eating the last of the fucking cookies I bake, I said, kicking my commitment to nonviolent communication to the curb.

Ouch, he says.

100 percent of the time, I say, looking away.

*

After almost 10 years of eating the last cookie, my husband apologized. 

I was an only child, he said, and I’m not used to making accommodations for others. But I understand eating the last cookie, every time, is inconsiderate. I’m sorry.

Within minutes of his apology, everything is slippery.

*

Hagfish are also called snot snakes, I say aloud, searching under the comforter for my underwear. 

Huh? my husband asks, wobbling, his foot searching for the leg-hole of his boxers.

Suddenly halved by pain, I sit on the edge of the bed until it passes through my pelvis.

*

Growing up, I had a neighbor who permed his hair and loved to make his pecs dance for the ladies.

On hot summer days, he’d strut down to a shared beach in a Speedo to tan on a square of reflective foil, occasionally standing up to flex his lats while commenting on the physical fitness of anyone wearing a bathing suit.

I’d submerge myself underwater to avoid his gaze, but lift my nose and eyes above the surface, like a crocodile, and imagine sprinkling sea salt all over his oiled body, extra pepper. I’d cinch the four corners of the foil, sliding him smoothly into the oven.

*

Would you get a look at those gams, the neighbor in the Speedo said to me. Keep at it, he said, tracing the line of my body with a finger through the air, because if you don’t, you’ll end up looking like them. He laughed, and pointed to a group of women I loved.

*

He used to sell knives, my mother told me. Just imagine.

*

What did he say, anyway, in his polyester suit, holding a case of knives? 

Ma’am, go ahead and clear your kitchen table and fix up a pot of coffee while I demonstrate how these knives will improve your life, oh, you already own a nice set, let’s take a look, aren’t you sweet, honey, these are cheap, so cheap they’re dangerous, so I’m going to offer you a 15 percent discount, frugality is good until you lose a finger, no need to wait until your husband comes home, I don’t like it when my time is wasted and I’m sure he doesn’t either, how about another coffee while you grab your checkbook, that’s right, you need the best tools to work in the most sacred part of the home, which everyone knows is a woman’s kitchen, congrats, sweetie, we just made your life better, and before I leave, I’m sure you have some friends who need this upgrade to their life too?

Slime would work well against high pressure sales, I suspect.

*

An 81-year-old friend of mine recently shared a secret she’d only ever spoken within the wooden box of a Catholic confessional. She’d birthed eight children, all of them still living. But the birth of her seventh child was so difficult it almost killed her as well as her newborn. At 31, her vagina was prolapsed, her blood pressure out of control. Her husband worked incessantly to put food on the table, yet there was never enough to eat. Her church did not allow the use of birth control, since artificial contraception was considered evil.

When she discovered she was pregnant for the eighth time, she did not tell her husband. Instead, she got the name of an out-of-state doctor who performed abortions, but she could not afford the travel, the cost of the procedure, or the time away from her kids. The birth of her 8th was excruciating - a three day back labor followed by near-fatal hemorrhaging upon his arrival. Within a month, her son was diagnosed with cerebral palsy and a seizure disorder. He was 50 now, and lived with her. He’s the most charming of all my children, she whispered, and a wizard in the kitchen.

Her secret was not that she loved him best - which was true - but that she’d believed for most of her life that her son was born with disabilities because God had punished her for seeking an abortion. 

When she confessed her fear, the priest behind the anonymity screen assured her that God does not give us more than we can handle. 

*

The skin of the hagfish is loosely attached to the body along the ridge of its back and filled with almost a third of its blood, giving it the impression of a blood-filled leg warmer.

*

In the late 80s, the toy I loved most was called the Water Snake, a pliable plastic tube filled with liquid designed to allow movement within the contained unit of the tube, which meant that it was impossible to hold. The moment you applied the grip needed to hold it, the pressure would displace liquid and send it slipping from your hand.

Unless you practiced, of course.

Catch! I’d holler, and fling the Water Snake through the air to a friend, who would snatch it from its projectile but find it impossible to hold long enough to fling back.

*

When I met my 81-year-old friend’s son, I was attracted to his dry sense of humor and his green eyes.

We connected over social media, then connected more due to a shared love for French cooking and Ricky Gervais. 

There’s nothing more arrogant than praying to a god who didn't stop the Holocaust, thinking he’ll help you find your car keys, he posted.

I hearted it, then hearted a photo of his beef bourguignon, considered by many chefs to be the mother of all stews.

*

It was an especially boring CCD class that I skipped in order to take my mother’s car without permission to my boyfriend’s house, where I smoked my first menthol cigarette and dry-humped him on the hood. On the way back to class, I prayed that God could help me wipe the shit-eating grin off my face.

*

When I was 13, I spent the summer kicking everyone’s ass at Spit, a lively card game dependent on quick hand-eye coordination. 

On the last day of our summer, before we packed up to head home, my sister beat me. She punched the air with joy, and I lunged across the table and slapped her face. 

Her expression proved I was a godless sinner.

For the next two days I spiraled with self-hatred until I tired of it and apologized.

*

Occasionally victim to their own friendly-fire, hagfish can sneeze to clear mucus from their single nostril.

*

I had a boyfriend in my 20s who was so committed to spoken word, he once rhymed “bitch” with “Filet-O-Fish” and the poem was about my pussy. After telling him the poem angered me, he read it again in public, only a week later.

After refusing to talk to him for two weeks, I finally agreed to a walk through a public park to hear what he had to say for himself. After a stretch of silence under towering oaks, he wheeled around to face me, his face pink with rage.

If I wanted to be his girlfriend, I could not police his writing.

*

Five years later, I attended a reading he gave at a coffee shop. Time tends to bleed men of immaturity, I thought, failing to get comfortable in a shitty plastic chair.

This is for Lauren, he announced to the crowd. It’s called Filet-O-Fish.

Before leaving, I let him know that his beard looked like a pile of pubes swept up from a public bathroom and glued to his face.

*

He sent me snail mail. 

In one poem, handwritten on the back of a napkin stained with coffee, he rhymed rabies with labia.

*

Some hagfish species are endangered due to destructive fishing practices. This is especially problematic in areas where cod, haddock, and flounder are commercially fished and large amounts of bycatch discarded. The water suffers, since all the dead shit rots at the bottom when there are not enough hagfish to clear it away.

*

A flat mate from northern England once told me he’d put pubic hairs in my milk should I refuse to be his bird. 

It was my first week in a new country, so I chalked it up to cultural differences, perhaps some Monty Python-like, absurdist humor I wasn’t yet versed in.

Later in the week, suitcases unpacked and excited for classes to start, I went out for a pint and a game of snooker with a group of new friends. At the end of the night, he tried to kiss me, and I politely refused.

As the days went on, I became skilled at avoiding him. During long stretches at the library, I satisfied my longing for sweetness by stuffing my face with English chocolate and tea biscuits, gaining twenty pounds in under six months. 

*

Some research shows hagfish can absorb nutrients directly through their skin.

*

When I returned to the states after my year abroad, I sat across a sticky kitchen table from my ex-boyfriend, whom I still fucking, when he told me that he and his friends had rated the girls on campus.

I was a 5/10.

When I asked him why a 5, he told me I was 30 percent too large.

If I were a smaller version of myself, I’d be a 7/10.

*

At work, an old man with lips the color of raw liver told me he’d looked at my website and saw a picture of me with short hair, which he did not prefer. I moved his walker out of the way and supported his elbow to help ease him into the reclining chair, where he’d receive a medical treatment from me.

Cripes, did he ever hate it when women styled their hair like men! 

*

Home after work that evening, I touched the cotton gusset of my underwear.

I’d ovulated a week early.

*

A middle-aged man inquired if I would give him a better treatment if he paid more. When I told him that I treat all patients the same - meaning, to the best of my ability - he laughed and assured me that money was not an issue.

So what will I get if I pay more, he asked.

*

When hagfish slime is stretched and dried, it makes a soft thread that can be woven into durable fabric. One website claims garments prepared from hagfish fiber have bulletproof properties, similar to Kevlar.

*

When I finally saw a D.O. to address neck pain I’d been ignoring, the doctor, a man in his 60s, was assessing my cervical spine with his finger tips when he began venting about the state of our country.

The downfall of the United States could be traced to women entering the workforce, he said, his voice thinning, thumbs straining against my neck. I know you own your own clinic, he acknowledged, clearing his throat, but -

Before he could say another word, I slipped from the exam table, pulled my paper gown aside, spread my legs and covered his face in a 5 gallon bucket of snot. 

*

On the drive home, the puddle in my pants expanded. When I got out of the car and saw how big it had grown, how it had soaked my seat, I giggled like a girl.

*

After devouring two tins of sardines, their silver flesh smothered in mustard and spread on water crackers, I shed my clothes and stepped outside to absorb some hot sun.

Jesus, no one needs to see that, you old hag! yelled a teenage boy from his bike, scowling and pumping his legs to race away.

Since there was no need to disrobe, I aim and fire, instantly knocking him from his bike.

On the ground, blinded by slime, he’s stunned.

I release another stream of goo, just to scare him, and he flips to his knees, scrambling for his phone and crying.

Attempting to stand, he slips and lands on his back, moaning.

*

Discharging slime leaves me ravenous!

Fist plunged inside the cookie jar, fingers scrape the ceramic bottom.

There’s the familiar ache. My husband will be home within the hour, and I can’t wait to see him.

Instar

~for Esmé

I can hear you digging in the snack cabinet again, and it’s got me thinking about a piece in Nat Geo about caterpillars in which the writer refers to them as “cylindrical eating machines.” That makes me think of you, since your appetite refreshes on the hour to sustain your lengthening.

Caterpillars grow extraordinarily fast due to constant feeding, I learn, molting several times before the pupal stage. At some point, a specific hormone surges and the caterpillar spins a pad of silk in which it embeds its cremaster (fancy name for “hook”), then hangs itself like a Christmas ornament to start the mystical process of metamorphosis.

Once in chrysalis, the caterpillar liquefies into what one scientist refers to as “a chunky stew” while specialized cells called imaginal discs dictate the remodel. There are imaginal discs for wings, legs, and antennae. Eventually, the cylindrical eating machine emerges as a winged butterfly equipped to sip sugar from flowers with a proboscis that looks like a straw.

You’ve molted at least three times this year, upping an entire shoe size in less than three months, and I suspect you’re approaching the pupal stage. Your body grows beyond itself, seemingly overnight. Once hormones dictate it’s time to dissolve into a pupal goo, I think you’ll find imaginal discs for eyebrows that connect in the center, as well as an aversion to working in groups. Let’s hope you get your sense of style from me, direction from your dad.

Never again will you undergo such rapid growth in such a short period of time. I feel for you, burgeoning child, your brain flooded with hormones that whisper wicked things in your ear, swearing to you that everything I do is intolerable. The furious amygdala of puberty leaves you vexed when I laugh off your annoyance, a tactic that allows me to dodge the laser beams you direct at my forehead. I refuse to stop having fun because you suddenly loathe me!

So, sweet girl, go ahead and attach your silk to the red maple of my heart and melt into goo while I keep the mildest of weather, and one of these days you’ll forgive me for staying merry. Just this morning, I reigned in a chuckle when you became angry in response to whether you’d like pancakes, and when you returned to the kitchen table after sulking in your bedroom, the pat of butter atop the stack had just begun to melt.

The Muse Is Not Visiting

The Muse is not visiting because she is dealing with a fibroid the size of a melon and a $5,000 deductible, so she is at home Netflixing and hemorrhaging.

The Muse is not visiting because she totally spaced it, though she did remember to get weed and sesame bagels, lol.

The Muse is not visiting because she is convinced she is dying and there’s a six month waitlist for a PCP who will eventually diagnose her with generalized anxiety and tell her she needs to lose weight even though that is not the cause of her anxiety.

The Muse is not visiting because at this point she’s only staying alive for her cat.

The Muse is not visiting because she is caretaking for her sick father-in-law and two school-age children, and on the weekends her husband needs to unwind since he works so hard.

The Muse is not visiting because she is a single mom and they canceled school again.

The Muse is not visiting because your balls are uncommonly hairy and she heard you say “mama” in your sleep.

The Muse is not visiting because she’s hiding in the bathroom, sexting your wife.

The Muse is not visiting because ever since the corners of her mouth began to wrinkle, she was told she could no longer be a Muse.

The Muse is not visiting because she cannot stop reading about climate change and is pinned to dread like a bug to a Styrofoam board.

The Muse is not visiting because they’re recovering from top surgery and just doing bone broth and Jello right now.

The Muse is not visiting because the stairs will creak and wake the baby, who never sleeps, so she’s in bed reading about sourdough again.

The Muse is not visiting because her boyfriend said no.

The Muse is not visiting because she realized that rage-cleaning can put her into an ecstatic state.

The Muse is not visiting because she is making her way through a stack of books about how coverture remains undead.

The Muse is not visiting because she’s working on outsourcing lightning strikes of grand inspiration to a team of gifted drag queens.

The Muse is not visiting because she’s busy being an inspiration to herself, gathering her lime green hair into many tight buns and securing mini-Koosh balls to the laces of her platform sneakers in preparation for a Bjork concert.

The Muse is not visiting because every single man in this establishment interrupts.

The Muse is not visiting because she has retired and is now part of a growing group of retired Muses who donate their time to help young Muses leave the performative business of being young, naked, and demure in an attempt to spark an idea in some old dude whose artistic ennui is inversely proportional to his ability to get it up for women his age.

The Muse is not visiting because she and the other eight Muses, lead by Calliope, have decided that they will no longer engage in the unpaid labor of inspiration. It’s been 2500 years and they done.

How to Heal

Sit naked in the sun.

Photosynthesize.

Branch hips.

Unfurl fists.

Picture every 

yolk soft-boiled. 

Wear shame 

like fishnets,

pair with 

pleather boots.

Deliberately

undress.

Recall the

perineum sits

between providence 

and pareidolia,

the third eye -

a jeweler’s loupe.

Find the 

hooked thorn.

Remove carefully,

place in tissue

soaked 

with grief. 

Burn that 

motherfucker.

(Smoke is the only

honest prayer.)

Don’t stop 

treading water -

there is no 

bottom anymore.

Be sure to wave 

to lovers

waving from

receding shores.

Cotyledon

To love is to not be too busy always.           

Love is never busy.

*

To love is to rearrange.

To give the heart ears.

The eyes taste.

To reason with the nose.

               *

To love is to open the fist.

To keep it open.

To bite down hard.

               *

To love is to reach 

unafraid of edges,

unafraid of no edges.

                *

To love is to halve, stem to stern.

To pluck the stone from the fruit.

To sink the stone into the dirt of another.

To germinate in the dark.

If the stone doesn’t sprout, 

to love is to exhume.

                 *

To love is to write a poem 

without worry of wasted time.

                 *

To love is to trick time.

 *
To love is to expect a blaze,

to discover glitter in your panties.

                  *

To love is to know the poem writes itself. 

To love is to know the poet writes the poem.

Both are true. Both find glitter in their panties.

In His Image

“If God made you a male, that wasn’t a mistake, and if God made you a female, that wasn’t a mistake, and people who argue against this are insulting the perfect Creator,” said the frosted blonde who uses Invisalign to straighten her teeth, stilettos to lengthen her calves, Ambien to help her sleep, contacts to assist her vision, filler to plump her lips, and IVF to conceive her now 19 year old son who once wore a patch to align the strabismic eye he does not regularly gouge after lusting after hot bitches in the dining hall.

Kiss My Ass, I’m Going Dancing

my husband says arguing with me is like watching storm waves 

crash into a granite crag in that the waves never stop coming 

and the rocks never move it’s all fascinatingly furious and natural 

and I responded shit man, great compliment, the problem with female

rage is fuck off, unbuttoned my pants, mooned his round face,

and latched his bedroom door shut just as his blue eyes flared

anyway it was him that chased this big salt and he can’t pretend 

he didn’t know how ready to pounce my nipples, he can’t pretend

he ain’t a groundhog who’d destroy the foundation in a single season,

and just the other day a patient told me that there’d been another shooting 

up the street disturbingly close to my workplace, and she warned me

to stop walking to work because it is no longer safe to walk to work

and I won’t stop but it seemed wrong to dismiss the wound she was baring

so instead I took a moment to explain how I’m writing a new poem 

addressed to death titled, Kiss My Ass I’m Going Dancing,

but she did not hear me and I think she was offended by the word ass 

being tossed in a medical setting and she began blinking rapidly 

and it became clear that she wanted me to hold the burden of her fear,

she wanted me to feel scared like she was scared, so anyways, she said,

watch for reflections in the side mirrors of parked cars and shop windows

to assure you’re not being followed, I know this since I am from the big city.

The first lines of the poem are:

 how the tongue of a dog

            springs out    enormously         

 the heart is    incorrigible

and she grabbed my rough hand in her soft hand and said, cross the street 

and cross it again and do not ever look down at your phone, stay alert,

and now my annoyance has roused my fear of sudden male fury 

which lives in my throat and under my collar bone and against my cervix 

thickens in my endometrium and spikes the pressure of my blood,

a promise waiting to unspool - how violence prophecies violence -

and now thanks to this lady I’m picturing Tom Cruise 

from the movie Legend where he’s trapped underwater 

by sudden winter and a growing disc of ice 

bubbles tumbling from his mouth and he is pounding the ice 

kicking and panicking and it’s all caged fear and fury and nothing budges 

and the princess is shrieking and the goblin hacks the horn from the unicorn

and now storm waves break across the granite crag of my ribs

arguments that are ongoing and incessant and frigid and don’t change 

beating their foaming heads against an immovable stand of rock 

Exposure to cold is important for many plants,

I tell my warm-to-the-touch daughter, explaining  

that the numb seeds of primrose must wait for spring

Do you think you’re invulnerable, asked my sister 

and though her care was easy what I heard was 

Are you delusional and the answer is, Yes, 

I am a superhero,

and tonight’s conquest is an inky bar with heavy chairs 

walnut floors and amber lights populated by people who are not drunk 

but drunk enough to stop policing themselves and others 

and there is righteous ridiculousness in the air

- Did you know Janet Mills is known for dealing coke? -

and I can kick back with a cold one and listen to libertarians

talk about their mothers and get confused by their own phones,

set my beer atop a pulpy coaster, lean a hip against the juke box

and press buttons that lead to furious bursts of joy

so is the dark wood the unlit trail the hidden path

the things and places you should not touch or go

the waves the crag the granite the ice the gun

so, aggrieved husband

so, big city lady

so, Tom Cruise in the movie Legend

Look up

look up before the scleras freeze, 

look past the crystals forming 

the heart a Torch

a holy blur dancing across 

the cold disc of Death