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In grad school one night, at the end of the workshop, one of my classmates jokingly referred to me as the workshop’s den mother. Why? Because I sometimes baked muffins and brought them to class? Because I had a toddler and I was pregnant? I can still hear his voice. I’m not your den mother, I said. You kind of are though, someone else said, and I went silent.

Did they not think of me as a writer, a peer, their full and complete equal? Did they not see the fire that burned inside me, the fire that had always burned inside me? I was burning then, I’m burning now.

Moon in the Window, by Dorianne Laux

I wish I could say I was the kind of child
who watched the moon from her window,
would turn toward it and wonder.
I never wondered. I read. Dark signs
that crawled toward the edge of the page.
It took me years to grow a heart
from paper and glue. All I had
was a flashlight, bright as the moon,
a white hole blazing beneath the sheets.

Click here for more information about wondrous poet Dorianne Laux.
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