Pause to Review

“Those silent spaces act as meditations whispered to the reader, and to the speaker as they both reciprocally ruminate on domestic life and expectations. Maternal relationships, learning to listen to oneself, and the journeys throughout motherhood are freshly analyzed and expressed here… leaving me waiting/twenty-three years to find/what grief implanted/in my body’s hushed/ brooding corridors.”

Parenting Pause

He Won't Let Me Take Pictures So I Write Poems Instead

Three of us wait along an NYC side street

Two (dad, son) scroll their phones while one (me, mom) pretends

To be chill, to fit into this city

Where trendy cool is effortless to the untrained eye.

They scroll.

I try not to worry. Impossible.

They zone.

I contemplate. Another name for worry.

They pass the time.

I want to freeze frame the days. Only the happiest ones, of course.

Everyone is in motion to or from

collision or comfort or commonplace.

Particles mix for a moment in

the passing by energies exchanged.

Are we all new compounds for 

that second, hour, day?

To embrace this new life role of mine

Is there a name for the second act of being a mom?

Can the postpartum blues return, eighteen years later?

I thought I was in remission. 

I stare down the eventual departure

Admission into his next phase

Which is somehow mine as well.

Art Pause

Hello, Frieda.

Squares of faces look down upon us eating

Lunch for two, French cafe.

Slick acrylic Tupac gazes, questions, waits

Chats between bites, mother and son.

City Loop Traction hangs out with Welcome to Maine

Brakes for Moose meet the Members of the Are You Famous Yet? Needlework Guild

Modern Art = I Could Do That + Yeah, But You Didn’t

Which pastries to go, to eat now, college essay.

She is truly wise who has traveled far and knows the ways of the world.

Check swipe done, crinkled bags, heat heavy curtain, are we there yet? How will we know?

Barbara Schulman, Stories of the Street

Pause. Scroll Back.