Dispatches from the final 2 to 20 days without a baby — I’ll have lived a hundred years before becoming a mother, and after becoming one, none of them will have mattered. Women keep warning me of a feeling I can’t imagine ever having: monotony, feeling trapped, craving more time with grown-ups, missing work and the validation of a career. My ignorant…

Learning to mark time in sobriety — It is not a question of missing the shenanigans, but of what’s going to come and take their place. The day starts with an observance of the bells and whistles of the straight and narrow: presence, awareness, renewed interest in ordinary and sometimes boring things, productivity, waking up without a…

One bird on the lawn and just as quickly, two. Two for joy, as someone else must be there to witness or dream up the feeling. But this is not the whole story. It’s a rhyme gone so rote in our minds that we don’t question how it sounds there…

If only the people-pleaser in me could learn to please me — Walking to the car it seemed important to decide whether we’re ascending or descending. Whether this is a striving toward lightness or a leaving behind of lightness into something sturdy and profound. On this walk of 20 yards I see judgment and insecurity (aren’t they one and the same) for…

I have a new poem up at The Awl today. It’s called “Canopy,” and it’s about love and global warming (what a pair they make). For more of my poems, you can visit my poetry-only Tumblr enterprise,No More Tangles.

There is a ritual of imagining running into you on a city street, looking up at you, though we are the same height, fingers at the ledge of the cheekbones. It’s the way my grandmother would take people in. This thought is like touching a talisman, a checking-in, almost a…

A smile rising like a moon at the horizon, behind the shadow of someone else’s head, the color of buttermilk. Me practicing unselfconsciousness behind a pillar. I won’t share what was said, and like most great stories and great jokes, I can’t remember, I blacked out, my brain seized up…

How will the warm days play out? For now there’s like a secret gathering, of a young pack with looser borders. Very loose. It just looks off limits. Everyone is invited to gather around the warm, but we don’t. There is something to lose there, it seems, rather than something…

Physical feelings are shallow shoveling. Even the feeling of running, a mostly-good feeling (it too can be abused, of course), is shallow. It’s the work around it that makes it deeper. Do people like to run longer distances because they equate the time out there with more profound reflection, deeper…