Fall comes in like a shadow
that is only joking
about death

Fall expects you to believe this
one more time, just like
last year

Fall says that everything
can still be mellow
and it can

for a while

In night terrors, there are monarchs I could still save
(if only I get up out of bed) from my own forgetting.
A butterfly being eaten by a praying mantis on my nightstand,
the other night, or fat caterpillars drowning in a jar of water.
Last night, it was my own hands, falling off at last because of
milkweed poisoning, not just asleep because I sleep on them.
My mother used to have, many times, dreams about
an impossibly tiny baby, palm-sized, say — the baby belonged to her,
but she had forgotten, hadn’t fed it or bathed it in weeks.
My mother’s mother probably didn’t have night terrors or
repeating nightmares of caretaking; she was stoic and only wanted
that the world not destroy itself in war. Toward herself, she was
calm. A generation back was more fretful; my mother’s mother’s mother
taking to her couch with mysterious ailments. Fears. Later, in Florida,
she made people out of seashells, little ones, or seashell flowers and shoes.
I don’t know where they are now, and it bothers me. Did she dream about
her shell people, her shell jewels, lost and turning into sand?
These tiny things we invite in, we invite all the way in, some of us.

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Formatting note: WordPress is not kind to long-line poets. Where you see weird breaks at the end, it’s because I’m over the maximum width.

Ha ha no
I’m living in a changed body
having marshmallowed out
two marshmallows
I’m tired
haven’t I done enough,
putting new leaves into the world?
Isn’t that enough for a life,
having one child
two children
let’s take this all the way up to seven
and then also to zero
Some people never do have
kittens

I once kicked a man in the
arugula
for less than what you’re doing now.
I wouldn’t mess with me, if I were you,
after a long summer of wounding
and being wounded.
The moon unwinds sometimes
and reveals the sun,
which it has hidden in its
least pocket.
I have a least moon pocket
designated for you.

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Hello, again … I raised and released 380 monarch butterflies (so far) this summer and did all this other stuff, while trying to work with two kids at home. I hope to get back to writing, even though no one cares if I do or I don’t, I’m totally stalled out while *everyone else* is getting their first or second book published, blah blah blah … (I’m joking, but seriously, I don’t know anymore what to do.)