Please help me be a good teacher today. Please help me bring kindness and clarity and joy. Please help me heal and never hurt. This is one version of an ongoing prayer that unreligious me invokes before I walk into the door of every classroom I teach. It is tough, tough going these days, for so many … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Sabine Miller
When it came to homework, I was kind of a hands-off mother, a mother whose life –and whose children’s lives– became instantly better when I made the decision to quit checking the portal. (The portal. The portal. The portal of hell.) My children never asked me to look at or edit their papers, so I didn’t, and … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Richard Wilbur
Once I had a friend who shared my love of strong flavors. We would buy things like kimchee and Limburger cheese and pesto that was mostly garlic and sit at the small kitchen table in the 4th-floor walkup I shared with my sister eating it. You two and your stinky food!, my sister would say, and … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Kim Addonizio
This poem keeps drawing me to it, or it to me, and I don’t know why. The last two lines come back to me when I wake up at night, or sometimes when I’ve been walking or hiking for a long time. I don’t know where I found this poem, or where it found me. … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Vera Pavlova
Friends, my new novel for children, Pablo and Birdy, will be out in August. Publishers Weekly just gave it a starred review, calling it “a tender tale of the search for home, belonging, and identity (that) smoothly incorporates elements of magical realism and powerful allusions to the refugee experience.” That reference to the refugee experience … Continue reading Please send me your immigrant or refugee stories
Once, at the end of a book club discussion held in the library of a women’s prison, the women (who are addressed as “offenders” on the prison P.A. system, as in, “Offenders, cell check in fifteen minutes”) took turns asking me personal questions from a list they had prepared. I remember only one of them: … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Philip Larkin
When we were little my sisters and I used to press leaves and flowers between the tissuey pages of our big dictionary and then forget about them. They could still be in there, for all I know, wherever that big gray dictionary is now. Once in a while, inching along the rows of a used … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Lex Runciman
Objects, Memory and Meaning
If it can't be said in a hundred words, then it can't be said in a thousand.
sewing a handmade wardrobe
"you are not alone," the poem said, in the dark tunnel. ~Louise Glück
Your Source For The Good Things Black People Do, Give and Receive All Over The World
Musings on poetry, language, perception, numbers, food, and anything else that slips through the cracks.
Thoughts on the world around me
the literary asylum
Bipolar is my superpower
