Six Poems
Birthing Age
I chip my front tooth in midwinter
chewing on chapped lips. Run my tongue
along the rough edge, feel a point,
an icicle. Cold rain’s coming down.
The day has only just begun and already
my body has managed to hurt itself,
break off a little piece and swallow. It’s not enough
that my hips spend their nights widening,
opening like a jar, a jaw, a scream,
until the morning when I creak down the stairs
for coffee, to feed the cat, who prefers my husband.
My doctor says this pain is normal for a woman
of my age. Birthing age, it’s called.
A whole epoch of my time on earth
named for a destiny I have chosen
not to fill. Even our first home was built
for a family, with children in mind.
Low countertops in the second-floor bathroom
rising no higher than my pelvis, throne
upon which my empty womb is seated.
I am no queen, no mother, just anxious,
cracking my incisors in the cold grim
of post-Roe America. All I want
is to set birds and horses free, to be
a woman watching steam billow over a pond
on a January morning, or scything summer’s
tall grasses in a meadow. Simple exercises
for love become a means of survival,
how a kudzu vine can bring a barren land to life
or choke a healthy tree to death.
The Blue Egg
I am a useless animal,
a woman who won’t bear children.
I am reminded of my wastefulness
when I bleed twice in one month:
An egg with a double yolk
cracked open for a recipe calling
only for the whites, or a buy-one-
get-one-free coupon on eggs
at the store, where shoppers think
they must be about to go bad,
otherwise why would they be so cheap
and plenty? A baker’s dozen and then some,
spit down the drain. In another decade,
a woman not wanting children was feral,
an animal going against all her instincts.
But we know a lot more about animals now—
and a little bit more about women—
and usefulness. Now, we consider
letting the horses live, even though
they can no longer contend in the races.
Now, the lucky ones can make it to a sanctuary
and green pastures before they leave this earth.
What are the constellated numbers
of working animals, thrown away
when they outlive the loads they carry,
breeding animals, put down after the milk dries?
It’s their echoes I hear, gathering acorns under the oak
for a long winter of hosting friends and family.
A mast year, an abundance of acorns
buried, or broken open by small claws,
or borne away by a childless woman
who will bake them into bread, or arrange them
in a glass bowl in the hall of her home
to welcome guests in from the cold,
and none of it is considered a waste.
The second full moon in a month is a blue moon.
A blue egg then, opulence
ripe for lucid dreaming and shadow work,
for protection spells cast over
every broken horse,
every useless animal.
The Last Days
Take me outside, under the lampshade
of wildfire ash drifting over countries, oceans.
Let me out. To walk and claw the dirt.
See the red spark of a cardinal
in longleaf pines, the towhee molting as if
tomorrow was still a promise unbroken.
And if it’s true the world is dying,
that’s one more reason, or excuse,
why I do not want to bear children.
I could hardly carry the weight,
lifting the dead bird from the driveway,
feathers and open beak, its tongue,
the songs still gathered there.
Let the doomsdayers prep for a future
I do not want to live to see:
post-wild, treeless, waterless,
our third stone, a cold concrete tomb.
I do not wish to enter the fire,
arms full of kindling, but I believed her
when my grandmother said
she was ready to die.
Let us not speak of the poison,
the useless scrubbing.
All the treatments and would-be cures,
and me by her bedside, poet-guide,
holding her healer’s hands,
telling stories with happier endings.
Listening to her call
for the crows of her childhood,
their blackwinged vows.
What wouldn’t I do for the dying?
Let the wind sigh through highwaygrass,
each stem whispering, Why?
Asking, How did I get here?
It’s ok to not have all the answers.
If the end is near, let me out into the air,
let the silt and salt inherit what’s left
of the earth. I am done
raising the dead. Let the last days
unbutton their shirts,
feel the sun on their chests.
Love Poem with Ending from Futurama
Today is his birthday and there’s a glint in his eye
when he asks me how old he is.
Today the answer is thirty-three,
and he practices saying it to himself,
Thirty-three, thirty-three, thirty-three,
like it’s the code to a combination lock.
A TV commercial says the first person
who will live to be one hundred fifty
has already been born, and I picture
a snakeskin shedding a snakeskin,
I picture golden sunsets from hospital beds.
The commercial says it like it’s a good thing,
One hundred and fifty years old!
All the buried time capsules, unearthed.
Spilled, the relics and photographs of everyday lives,
all the messages and music we sent to space, unheard.
In our room, in the green bureau’s top drawer,
there’d be more than a century of birthday cards—
he keeps them all, like lost teeth,
the foundations of a castle, waiting
to be uncovered, to be framed, displayed
with other artifacts of bygone times:
Ribcage of the last wild elephant,
vial of glacial water, monarchs pinned
and placed at the back of a museum,
if they still have museums,
collecting dust particles too young
to have seen the sun,
let alone traveled around it
one hundred and fifty times.
And if that’s where we’re headed, I think
it must not be so bad because
every year he asks how old he is,
if I want to go around again,
and every year I say yes.
When Vampire Bats Become Close Friends, They Start Talking Like Each Other
Smithsonian Magazine, January 30, 2026
—for Erin, Chelsea, and Liz
We tend to be longwinded
women with a lot to say
who let fly the serpent tongue
our mothers and their mothers
and their mothers
were taught to hold,
were taught to hold back,
were taught to hold their breath
Underwater, taught to drown.
But when we gather,
a cheese plate and bottle of wine
between us, the room swells
with our voices, low-toned
whispers crescendo into
louder calls and laughter
as the dark of night gathers
around us, cave-like,
our chitchat about science
and graveyards and poems
echoing against the cavern walls.
We are creatures with similar taste
in moss and rocks and movies,
our eyes drawn always to the trees
and meadows in search of
pine siskins and nuthatches.
We are vocal animals with a bite,
and foolish men fear us
because we live on blood alone,
our bellies sloshing
like Odysseus’s wine-dark sea.
And we are delicate things,
acutely aware of the world,
highly sensitive to its touch,
the skin of our wings stretched
so thin, light shines through
from the other side.
We are not a fugitive,
isolated coven—No.
We are colony,
convergence,
a chorus of
chirps, trills, and clicks,
speaking our hearts
with feral abandon.
We are many in number,
women who are talking
about the world and
changing it with every word.
Women having girls’ nights
in the living rooms of America,
marching hand-in-hand in the streets,
walking home finally having that heart-
to-heart with an old friend.
Let our voices collide and carry,
be swept by the wind to new
neighborhoods and vistas.
Let us nourish one another,
share a language, build a kinship,
something that will last.
Pep Talk
Remember, you are a monster, diaphanous
in the full moon’s reflected fires,
a flock of moths trailing behind you
through the forest like a veil.
History has not been kind to us, women
who’ve got a mind and mean to use it.
Look at those teeth gleaming.
Tell me they don’t dream
of tearing meat clear off the bone.
And those eyes, great and big,
perfect for silently judging
men in red baseball hats
in the grocery line or filling up
a gas-guzzling truck at the next pump.
Inside your head is a whole diary of discontents,
hot fuel for the engine, you don’t even need
that second cup of coffee. Girl,
you are so much more than what you seem,
too keen to remain innocent, no need
for that false protection men promise.
They can try to take your rights, strip you
of your power, and you will stomp your hooves
in the streets with all the other nags and mares,
you’ll hatch a revolution on their asses
like a nest of paper wasps at the ballot box.
Yes, queen. Hold your head high,
grab the nearest branch to beat the war drums.
You are a loud, beautiful banshee,
calling her senators and gathering
her sisters’ voices into a wailing,
a welling up, an awful music
that demands to be heard.
Yours is a brave and fearsome face.
Now go get ’em.
Go Deeper
〰️
Go Deeper 〰️
Read the interview here.
