originally written & published June 2024; revised June 2025

i am on my hands and knees
a belly full of baby,

and so happy,

in our backyard

in June

i am pushing the wrong variety of snapdragons into the soil of the new-to-me flowerbeds — in all my young, botanical ignorance,
on this 3rd day, your ‘due’ date,

they call on a landline
to say to me, “your dead, first father’s second wife is now also dead
… and there is a little money from his railroad retirement pension to be disbursed to you, his only child, a daughter”

the timing feels supernatural.

like a gift, from him — ten years, plus one day, after his death on June 2, 1984 — on your “due” date.

a gift.

we are living friday to friday after just barely mortgaging a little worker’s cottage on Grace Street in Six Corners-Portage Park, nine months ago.

on this 3rd day, your ‘due’ date,
in Streeterville, they say to me, “you’re not even effaced,
let alone opening: go home — but come back soon.”

ultimately, we, me and you, go back in exactly 13 days.
the timing is inconveniently perfect:

The World Cup, biblical Chicago heat and humidity, and the hypnotic O.J. Simpson circus
are not my and your fault;

your father and i bring you home on a sweltering Father’s Day.

you, are now, undeniably a Chicago summer baby and i, was always meant to be your Chicago summer mother.

//

i think about that word — “dilated” retroactively:
how my womb would open and become your light-filled
tunnel, one way — or another

Continue reading “sonlight [june 1994]” →

i wake up
and first, go outside
read the land, front to back
and observe what’s happened overnight

you wake up
and first, while safe inside,
read front to back, the new york times
and conclude what’s happened overnight

so, how is it always true,

that i

am more

informed than you.

---

Hath finally come the hour
when Rengyo will hold fast their
growing, arching, golden stem
long enough to know, to taste, to touch
Lilac’s delicious violet truss?

---

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because, ’til now their Vernal bloom,
has in me, conjured only tragic myth
the one with the cruelest climate and clock,
the tale of an aching,
faith-fulled Thisbe,
and her yet-untouched, devoted,

beloved Pyramus

Continue reading “Syth & Lila: a phenology” →

anything interesting about her
was external to her
having never birthed or midwifed anything original,
she was a mosaic of willingly received or easily imposed externalities,
perfectly squared tessarae
arranged into place, adhered in an unremarkable, familiar composition, so very common of her sisterhood
her mortar was mixed not with the warmth of cord blood, not with the sweat of work, not with sacred tears, or river water
but with an expensive bottled vintage that she bought

she was a surface dweller, invisible to the ancient light or darkness,

both the heights and depths remained beyond her

she was not known as a daughter of Norea, Lilith, Demeter, or Eve

and would not eat of the apple — nor the pomegranate, in this incarnation

but reside and hide within the curated and policed gardens of her kind

she would contentedly remain external to and ignorant of her Self for all her life

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Continue reading “the mosaiced clone” →

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“Lara walked along the tracks following a path worn by pilgrims and then turned into the fields. Here she stopped and, closing her eyes, took a deep breath of the flower-scented air of the broad expanse around her. It was dearer to her than her kin, better than a lover, wiser than a book. 

For a moment she rediscovered the purpose of her life. She was here on earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name, or, if this were not within her power, to give birth out of love for life to successors who would do it in her place.”

- Boris Pasternak

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She was here on Earth,

for now

to nurture
a lone patch of milkweed
for the last monarch butterflies looking to land from the fiery skies

to make sure that some stalks of aster and goldenrod
remain, entangled and kissing
on the day this most brutal World dies

to sweep an old concrete slab every day until
blue snakes shed their final skins

to let the crows drink from her mouth
a last sip from the great lake,

known as michigan //

and to keep some seeds

sweetgrass, corn,
melon, chile, squash
pawpaw, cedar, oak,
maple, blackberry, datura, bean

in a jar, made from micaceous clay

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---

sparkling, and sealed with her blood-made mud

for when inevitably arrives that day,

then, she’ll clasp it in her wrinkled spotted hand

and bury herself along with it, deep within this land,

so the Earth, right here,

might, one day,

become home for life, once again.

Continue reading “purpose:” →

the rain starts
then pummels
birds descend from their roosts in trees
they’d already abandoned feeders, baths, meadows and prairies
now queuing one by one
down into the bramble
grounding themselves
without air traffic controller directives and guidance
from the torrent of wind and rain
and possibly, hail

// how have i never noticed this procession/
this choreographed safety dance to firmament //

those manicured landscapes, lawns, shrubs
the “smithification” & “kleinschmidtification”
the topiarification,
the modernization,
the suburbanization,
then re-gentrification
— those perfectly clean lines of uniformity
and complicity,
their kempt lawns
and unbroken windows-theory obedience
to property values
none of that offers true shelter

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nor do the hospitals, schools, mosques, designated safe zones, “humanitarian” airdrops on beaches ///

there is nothing in this natural or built World that escapes comparison to Gaza, right now,

not even native or migratory bird behavior observed during storms in Bucolia, America

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Continue reading “bramble” →