Category: family
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“Every lament is a love-song.”*
Many summer Sundays growing up, my family would get up at dawn, skip church, and instead head out to the beach at the Myles Standish State Forest in Carver, MA. Not just my immediate family, but a huge swath of aunts, uncles, and cousins — Mum was a Georgia girl, but Dad was born &…
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The Emperor of All Maladies hastens The Long Goodbye
But first: The Massachusetts Poetry Festival begins tomorrow! The poetry world will descend on Salem and it will be awesome. (Aside: I was researching parking etc on Google, and, as I began to note the many paranormal/witchy shops, wondered, What’s up with that? Yeah, that’s me, just a little slow on the uptake.) Saturday is…
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Despite it all…
…I know I’m lucky. I’m lucky that I was born to a great mother, that I loved her and told her so all the time. That I was able to be there for her and that she let me care for her was a real blessing. A critical illness has a way of burning away…
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Too True
The 4 truths and one lie about myself, with the lie revealed: My tenth grade teacher called me the Emily Dickinson of our class. When I showed him my next poem, he took a friend aside to inquire about my mental health. I laughed. “Poetic license, dude!” **TRUE. My first lesson that readers often confuse…
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In the spirit with which it was given
Many thanks to Karen for the Memetastic Award (which I keep reading as the Metatastic Award, but nevermind) and the sweet and generous things she said about me and my blog. This is just the sort of thing I’m terrible at — I never met a chain letter I didn’t break, never confronted a set…
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Let it snow! (Baby, it’s cold outside…)
Finally, the day after Christmas, we’re having our first real honest-to-goodness snow storm! There’s nowhere we have to be, plenty of milk, cream, cocoa, tea, and coffee (covering the holy trinity of hot beverages) on hand, and thus we can hunker down and enjoy the view. With me and the boys down with colds, visiting…
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A Life of Plenty
Gennady Privedentsev, “Still life with horn of plenty” Spell to Be Said upon Waking Trout’s maculate body, delible house of the wasps’ nests, white face of the horse — Draw close. A shadow closes your foxgrass, lichens your boulders. Cloudy the vow of the leaf in the water. Lion, where is your hunger? Come tortoise,…
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Intimations of Mortality
Lately I’m expending a lot of effort feeling frustrated by the lagging response times of most of the journals I’ve submitted to, fighting the urge to dash off mild yet curious emails regarding my poems. I feel stymied, depressed. Lately I’m frustrated by my failure to stabilize Aidan’s ever-erratic sleep schedule, my attempts at weaning,…
Marie Gauthier 