I once had a real Jeffrey Dahmer of a cat.

Chipmunks, baby rabbits, mice, of course,
shrews, snakes, birds.
Once, a flying squirrel lay on the carpet
in a puzzling blob,
all the parts that were meant to open and fly
now nonsensical and loose.

Sometimes I got there in time to try to save them.
To pick them up while they were stunned and twitching,
the cat lounging on her side nearby,
amused by the way her prey interpreted the space between them
as hopefulness,
rather than a temporary reprieve,
part of the game.

Inevitably, when I set them down,
they ran frantic and crazed—
into the road and the black jaws of a tire,
into the rain barrel,
into the hawk’s shadow, gliding across the grass.
Or worse,
straight back to her.

Every time I think I’ve made progress in this life,
I realize I have done the same.

I have taken lovers from the same dark house.
Men with my father’s thirst folded into them,

carrying my mother’s small, bright knives.
I have gone from one disaster to another,
wounded, bleeding, desperate,
unable to find a safe place long enough
for the blood to dry.

The body remembers the shape of its trap.
The bird with one dragging wing
still trusts the familiar hand
that closed around it.

And I miss that cat, even now.

The sleek cruelty of her.
The green coin-eyes.

She always liked me best when I was sad,
curling against my ribs when I had tears in my eyes.
I thought she came to comfort me.
Now I wonder.

Perhaps I was simply another warm

suffering thing,

mistaking proximity for mercy.

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This week was my birthday, and this year marks twenty years since I threw my memoir Smashed into the world like a brick through a window. I found myself reflecting on how impossible it once was to imagine becoming the woman I am now—old enough to have a daughter horrified by the things I once considered ordinary.

For My Oldest Daughter, as We Listen to The Bell Jar

The last time I read this book
I was your age and I wanted to die.

Not theatrically—
no frayed rope snaking from a closet bar,
no wrist flowering red in the bath—

but the steady undoing,
The faithful rot.

I drank like a girl feeding coal
to the furnace beneath the house,
certain if I disappeared slowly enough
everyone would call it an accident.

Weakness.
Proof.

I wanted my body to confess
to crimes they planted in me
like nails tapped into a young tree.

Back then, the future was a crippled seedling
left in a cellar bucket—
white-rooted, blind,
gnawing toward a sun
it would never touch.

Even the plum tree outside
seemed impossible to me then,
its boughs obscene with blossom,
each flower a small pink mouth
saying Live.

And yet—
here you are.

Horrified by some people’s hunger for death,
as baffled by it
as I am baffled now
that I survived it.

Whatever hand dragged us
out of that starless country
and replanted us here—
where light arrives
at least in rations—

I kneel to it.

The way I once might have knelt
before the oven,
its little orange mouth
waiting patiently
to take me in.

“You put a spell on me,”
a man told me once.

I thought, poor fool,
it was love—
some bruised valentine
dragging its red foot
through February slush.

But no.
He meant hex,
Me, beneath the waxen moon,
my dark hair snagging starlight,
my thighs silvered
with cold prophecy.

He meant me naked in the garden,
rose petals pasted to my hips,
lavender crushed like small blue bones
between my fingers.

Binding his name
with red thread.
Carving his hunger
into candles.

How quick they are—
men with their matchstick egos—
to call a woman witch
when she reflects
their own fever back at them.

How many lives
must I go up smoking,
skirts licking flame,
before I learn:

a woman need not conjure
to be condemned.

It is enough
to be wanted
in the wrong way.

Enough
to possess some dark republic
of self
they cannot colonize.

They built the pyre
from their longing,
then blamed me
for the fire.

Tell me,
how many stakes
must split my spine
before I stop paying
for the tremor
in other people’s hands?

I have dark hair,
a mouth sharpened
like a crowbar,
and eyes that do not lower
like parish girls in pews.

But the only witchcraft I practice
is naming.

Is seeing.

Is standing so fully
in my own charred skin
that weaker hearts
mistake it
for sorcery.

Look in the mirror.

What scorches you
is not my magic—
but your fear
of women
who do not burn quietly.

I’m sorry I did it.
Clenched your jaw.
Clenched your fist.
Gathered the heat beneath your skin.
Made the thing inside you pace.
Turned your brain into a courtroom stenographer.
And narrowed the world to just one injustice.

My heart gives way at the slightest pressure.
My tongue swings on a broken hinge.

This is to say, you weren’t the first.
Or the last.

There was the husband who called me cunt
more than baby.
An echo of my mother, who called me bitch
more than baby.
Who, when I cried, put me in the attic
or the dog pen
instead of in her arms.

She had been thrown out of her house
at sixteen
by a mother
who had watched her own sister be thrown out too,
banished to a locked ward
for the unforgivable crime
of speaking aloud
what had been done to her.

I come from women taught
that pain is either hidden
or punished.
That grief is something feral,
best locked outside
until it learns not to make noise.

I cry for all of them.
And for myself.

And I have punished those
who tried to soothe me.
Because I learned long ago
that comfort was a trick door,
that reaching for it
often led somewhere colder.

So instead,
I made whoever was holding me sear.
Made them burn for it.
Made them prove
they could survive the fire.

As if love, to be real,
had to stay
even while burning.

In honor of Poetry Month, this poem arrives as a small case study in what poets do best: circling meaning, resisting the urge to land too neatly.

Between writing my own books and working as a kind of book doula for other people whose novels and memoirs are mid-becoming—plus the ongoing side quests of helping high schoolers outling college essays and coaxing college students’ English papers into sentences that sound like more original thought—I’ve recently added a new role to the mix: private, one-on-one poetry-writing teacher to a couple of high school students.

There’s something beautiful about it: offering prompts, reading drafts in their earliest, bravest forms, sitting with revisions as they tighten and tilt, and eventually helping send these poems out into the world, whether toward journals or into their first chapbooks.

This poem comes from that in-between space where language is still mid-formation, and meaning isn’t something you arrive at so much as something you keep learning to notice.

On Proximity to Meaning

How long does it take two poets
To get to the point?
You asked me once in between
Saying something in you
Had started leaning toward
A certain kind of light.

Light is never just light, I said.
It arrives with a kind of yearning direction,
Turning even the stillest air.

There are windows that hold the dawn
at the glass, you said,
uncertain whether to open
or let all that light remain
a possibility on the other side.

What is a window for? I asked.
If not to be opened?
What is a horizon
if it never breaks?

And still—
the line faltered at its own edge.

What is a poem, I went on,
if it will not risk its meaning?
What are these careful fragments
if they refuse the fall
into something whole?

“I want to talk to you,” one of our poet friends
asked another.
“Why?” she shot back—
as if the question itself
were already too much.

Lovers, the two of them,
standing at the lip of a sentence,
each waiting for the other to finish it—

until even their silence
began to sound like a language
that refused to be ordinary,
that was the last honest way
of saying anything.

Chapter Eight:

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There’s a particular kind of advice that follows you around as a writing student, like a well-meaning ghost: be serious, be worthy, be important. In my master’s program, I saw it in a hundred different guises, usually dressed up as craft talk.

And yet, somewhere in the back row of my brain, George Saunders was gently heckling. How many times have I heard him say that the stories people loved most weren’t the ones where he tried to sound Important—they were the strange ones, the playful ones, the slightly unhinged ones that sounded like him.

Which is to say: the assignment is not to write well. The assignment is to write specifically—to find the exact frequency you hum at and turn the volume up until it rattles the windows.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately because, about a year ago, I met a woman named Susan Fino and immediately felt the kind of recognition that almost seems like fate. We had all the important things in common: a devotional relationship to music, a reverence for art, and that special kind of upstate spirituality that makes room for tarot cards on the kitchen table and crystals charged under a full moon. Our childhoods had that slightly gothic, Jane Eyre-adjacent energy—lonely, dramatic, full of secret passageways (emotional and otherwise).

She also had, crucially, the nerve. The kind of nerve I once wrote into my Drama Teacher protagonist and worried might be too implausible—except here it was, embodied in a real woman who had, on multiple occasions, simply…talked her way into places she was not supposed to be. Forged press passes. Smuggled cameras. Lived like the world was a series of velvet ropes meant to be ducked under.

And I had this very clear, slightly mystical thought: Oh. I’m supposed to help tell this story.

Which is where the mediumship comes in. Because writing this memoir with her has not felt like writing so much as channeling. I read her notebooks, her old newspaper clippings; I study her photographs like they’re evidence in a case I’m trying to solve. We talk for hours on the phone, and somewhere between her voice and my sentences, something third begins to take shape—something truer than either of us could have made alone.

And the magic of it—the thing that feels almost electric—is how utterly hers it is. Not sanded down into a “serious” or “worthy” narrative, but alive with her particular audacity, her humor, her way of moving through a world that has so often tried to keep women at the margins. She is both empowered and wildly empowering, the kind of person who doesn’t wait for permission because she suspects, correctly, that permission is mostly a myth.

Take, for instance, the matter of the camera:

(2001):

Ordinarily, I broke my camera apart: stuffing the lens into one cowboy boot, nestling a roll of film in my bra, squirreling the body of the camera in my underpants, and praying I wouldn’t have to explain the strange bulge to anyone with a flashlight and a badge. In the summer, when my clothes were too thin for contraband, I secreted my Pentax KM inside a Kotex box in my handbag. The security guards at the venues were almost always male, and at the sight of menstrual pads, they sprang back as if the very cardboard would smear them with blood and estrogen. No one ever dared to open the box and confront the mysteries of womanhood head-on.

But it was November 2001. The air in New York still held phantom sirens and the smell of scorched paper. And I thought it would be too reckless to stumble into Madison Square Garden with a bunch of mechanical entrails. Everyone had terrorism on the brain, and I didn’t want security to think I had a bomb.

Instead, I spent the whole day hunched over my friend’s kitchen island. Incidentally, her name was Susan, too, and that bit of nomenclature was about the only thing we had in common. I was a take-no-shit Bronx girl. Sue was a cardigan-wearing WASP from New Hampshire. We did share one thing, though: music. We’d seen more Patti Smith shows together than I could count, pressed into dark rooms, shouting lyrics like they were scripture. But where Patti was sacred ground, Bob Dylan was a hard no for her. I’d spent decades following him; she insisted his music was nothing more than whining with harmonica.

Still, she relished the secondhand thrill of my bad ideas. And best of all, as president of the PTA, she had the authority to borrow the school’s laminating machine.

Sue’s kitchen usually bore the innocent detritus of family life: math homework, half-eaten string cheese, a rogue LEGO. But with my input, it now looked like the backroom of a disreputable tabloid. At the corner desk where she usually addressed birthday invitations and paid the electric bill, I fired up the hulking family computer and began my act of petty forgery. In a blank Word document, I typed “Photojournalist” in an authoritative font, then lifted the bold blue Village Voice logo from the website and pasted it just beneath. The printer wheezed to life, coughing out my creation. It was part fantasy, part felony, and moderately convincing.

I didn’t stop there. Once I realized how easy it was, I made more—cycling through mastheads like costumes: The New York Times, New York Post, Hudson Valley Magazine. Each one further legitimized me.. I’d tweak the fonts, adjust the spacing, study the real badges online like a method actor preparing for a role. Soon, the desk was littered with credentials, each one a little more polished than the last, as if repetition alone could will them into authenticity.

Next, it was time to feed my forged press passes through the lamination machine, ordinarily used for multiplication tables and inspirational posters about kindness. Sue did the honors, and I held my breath when they emerged one by one, warm and glossy, absurdly official-looking.

Even the forged press passes were risky. Not only were cameras forbidden from Madison Square Garden, but there were also no backpacks allowed inside the venue. Word on the street was that no press credentials had been allotted to anyone—not even the real photographers who usually shoved me aside with the practiced elbows of men who’d spent careers chasing the perfect shot.

Still, something in me dared to try, though my husband, Robert, was dead against it. “Who do you think you are?” he asked as I draped the whole lot around my neck, as if the question itself might pull me back to earth. I didn’t have an answer that would satisfy him. Maybe I didn’t have an answer at all. But the pull was there, undeniable, the same stubborn instinct that had carried me this far, and I wasn’t about to ignore it now.

Just beyond the main security gate at MSG, November wind hissed around our ankles. I looked convincing enough, dressed in black the way a real rock photographer might: anonymous, purposeful, a silhouette with a credo. The badges dangled around my neck with deadpan confidence. I clutched my camera and exhaled little clouds of courage into the cold. Just beyond the entrance, a uniformed guard stood passing a little electric wand over people and asking what they had in their pockets.

When it was our turn, the guard held out his hand, and I handed over my lanyards. The lamination shimmered faintly under the fluorescent lights. He turned one over. His thumb traced the plastic edge where the lamination had bubbled slightly. My armpits prickled with heat. I imagined the whole scam unraveling: security radios squawking, hands on shoulders, my camera confiscated, and possibly, gone forever.

He looked up.

One long beat passed.

Two.

Then, almost imperceptibly, he nodded and motioned me through. The badges suddenly felt weightless as I slid them back over my head, as if they had become real through sheer audacity. Robert and I walked inside with slow, measured steps, careful not to run or glance back. The moment we cleared the gate, we ducked into the nearest hallway, gripping each other’s arms.

“Holy shit,” he whispered. “I can’t believe that worked.”

My favorite day in March
is when the trees bear
the red aura of buds,
not yet individuated,
just smudged and glowing

as if someone
has taken a pinch of sindoor
and rubbed it
with a fingertip.

Nothing has opened yet.
no petals,
no declarations.

just the rumor of leaves
waiting in the wings.

If you didn’t know better,
You might miss it—
the way a person can live
for years inside a life
that isn’t quite theirs
yet

working quietly
like a stagehand
testing the ropes
before the curtain rises.

March understands this.
It does not hurry the trees.
It lets them stand there
blushing faintly
with possibilities.

I think of how many of us
exists this way:

The selves not yet introduced,
the talents still in rehearsal,
the courage
trying on its coat,

all that red
hovering just beneath the bark,

a life
still deciding
how
to arrive.

I once knew a man
who professed his love
in riddles.

At first
I found it charming.

At restaurants
he leaned across the table
and murmured things like

Some constellations
only appear
to certain travelers,

while buttering his bread
with priestly concentration.

“Are you saying
you like me?”
I’d ask.

He’d smile
the way a cat smiles
at a glass of milk.

Sometimes he texted koans:

You are the question
to which my silence
is the answer.

At the time
I mistook this for depth.

Later
I realized
it was a very efficient system.

He could say everything
and absolutely nothing.

“Will you be there tonight?”

“Presence
is a river.”

“Do you love me?”

“Define love.”

Somewhere in there
it dawned on me

a riddle
is just a locked door
masquerading
as an escape room.

This is the part
where I’m supposed to say
I learned something noble.

Mostly
I learned

I hate riddles
when the answer
is supposed to be
me.

When I met my husband
I met a man who never spoke in riddles.

When he wanted me
the entire neighborhood knew.

He said it plainly,
like a siren
or a fire alarm.

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How to Escape a Black Hole

Down there, the voice begins its litany:
You are stuck with what you have.

By which it means
what you lack—
peace, laws, choices,
the easy affection of unbent lines,
everything you carried
before you wandered too close
to the tear in the fabric of things.

You tell yourself it’s too late.
You’re dark matter now—
astrophysically doomed—
and anything that drifts near you
becomes fuel for the pull.

From here on out,
your calendar is gravity.
Every day a tightening spiral
toward a fixed point in space.

Dreams once mapped the cosmos.
But inside your well
you’re afraid to sleep.

You stay up, bargaining:
Let the system swallow something small—
central heating, maybe,
or a carton of takeout.
Anything but me.

I get it.
The longer you live with absence,
the less matter matters.

You begin to fear a life
without catastrophe.
Without the drama of collapse,
the elegant violence of orbit.

At your lowest,
even freedom—
energy flung outward in all directions—
makes you agoraphobic.

You prefer the one-way flow.
The certainty of inward.

You almost kiss the black whorl
for giving you coordinates,
even if they’re nowhere habitable—
a distant system
with a quasar for a heart.

As a child, they told you black holes were quicksand.
Struggle and you disappear faster.
Your science teacher—breath sugared with spiked coffee—
said resistance erases proof.

But physics has revised itself.
And so will you.

I asked Stephen Hawking about you once.
He said nothing is ever entirely lost—
that even swallowed light
leaves a rumor at the rim.

Some part of you—
call it story,
call it heat—
clings to the mouth of extinction.

Even loss generates information.
Even collapse creates a field.

Listen. I’ve been there.
The math is ugly.
Magnetohydrodynamics is a cruel word
for someone choking on stellar ash
inside the corpse of a star.

Time slows where you are.
A galaxy lodges in your throat.
You speak only in sparks.

I won’t force you outward.

Just know this:
You are not the hole you fell into.

I keep your scattered photons in one pocket
and the certainty of your return in the other.

Remember—
the brightest stars are born from wreckage.
The coldest dark makes fusion possible.

The universe that flung you into being
has not rescinded its invitation.

It is still here,
wide and patient,
waiting for you
to slip the horizon
and shine.

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Celebrating completing my chapbook by continuing to post some old poems…

The trouble with the dog-eat-dog kingdom
was that it made me weepy.
When I saw the moon, I wanted to sing.
There was a wild assortment in me—
lion to skunk,
shaggy as a bear, tender as a rabbit.
I grinned like a hyena, sobbed
until ants curled from gum logs.

I moved in covert, a nervous target.
My breath ran hot,
my face smeared with toil.

You’ve probably seen signs of me.
I left my name in yellow arcs across the snow.
I tried and failed to eat your cat.

Back in the den,

I was alone in my kind.

The others tore through bone and sinew,

but I mourned the twitching,

and meat caught in my throat.

We’d all been taught:
if you want something good,
you hunt it.
So each night,
beneath a blanket of dark,
I crept into the village
of soft, human families.

On their light-spilled streets,
I sang the old menace—
the death-hymns of my kind.
Curtains stirred.
But to my disappointment,

no one emerged with a shotgun.

One night, I saw him:
an ordinary man.
Parking on the wrong side
of a too-civil street.
I had never seen someone

so hungry in the man-made world.

In the moonlight,

his hair flared wolfish.
The sky above us was heavy

with dryer-steam
and electric stars.

I saw then that he wasn’t austere.
Not even that tame.
I snarled, half-false—
but he didn’t flinch.

“Come here, soft thing,” he said.
So, I licked his fur flat to skin
and uncaged
the howl locked in his throat.

Celebrating completing my chapbook by continuing to post some old poems on here….

You win.

You cared less.
You floated three inches

above the ground
while I poured concrete,

hands blistered,

trying to make something that would hold.

You mastered the ancient art
of the casual text.
The twelve-hour reply.
The lowercase “sure.”
The well-timed silence

that throbbed like a held note.

You packed your feelings

In a carry-on.

I brought the kind of

Old-fashioned steamer trunk

that requires two people to lift.

I cared in paragraphs.
You cared in ellipses.

I built a city.

You left no forwarding address.

You win.

But tonight,
when the lights are off
and there is no one to outmaneuver,
I hope you ask yourself something gentler
than whether you succeeded.

I hope you look back
to the first time someone taught you
that wanting more was a weakness.

I hope you wonder

who showed you to ration affection

like it was wartime sugar–-

who made you believe

that the safest way to stay

was to always be halfway gone.

I think loves lives in the same pasture as unicorns,
all shimmer and horn,
grazing just beyond the tree line
where the lighting is flattering.

People swear they’ve seen it.
They describe the mane. The glow.
The way it lowered its head and chose them.
They show me blurry photos—
a proposal on a cliff at sunset,
two wine glasses sweating into linen.

I nod.
I have seen horses before.

Romantic love, they say, is partnership,
a passion sustained,
the experience of being fully known.

But I have lived inside the human body.
I know its jumpiness.
Its ancient smoke alarms.
Its habit of hearing abandonment
in a well-timed pause.

I have met real love.

It arrived loud and vernix-slick,
howling like a tiny dictator,

Rooting against my collarbone

Forgiving nothing and everything.

Real love studies my face for weather.
It believes I can fix the world
with a bandage and a glass of milk.

Romantic love pleads,
“Will you stay?”
Maternal love decrees,
“There is nowhere else.”

One is negotiation

and compromise.
The other is a vow written in bone.

Perhaps somewhere, in a meadow I have not walked,
two adults meet without flinching,
and ride their mythic beings calmly into middle age.

I hope so. I do.

But when I search for proof of the divine,
I do not look for glittering hooves.
I look for the small hand
curled, ferocious and absolute,
around my finger—

the only creature
I have ever loved
without suspending disbelief.

The night, of course, didn’t end with just one implacable kiss in the dark. After who knows how many surging seconds, the projector clicked on—a thin beam of white light, just a pinhole on the wall beside my ear. The animated line drawing flickered hot and pure, casting a halo around my head while Bash’s lips traveled—my jaw, my clavicle, the dip betwee…

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The Writer’s Apology

“When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.”
— Czesław Miłosz

I’m sorry I’m so permeable
that I let the world leak through me—
every siren, every headline,
every bruise blooming on someone else’s skin.

I know my pen is the knife gleaming on the shelf—
words make everything less safe.
They testify, linger, refuse to shut up.
They loiter in doorways,
repeat what they’ve overheard,
stage their own confessions,
and drag the rest of us, blinking, into the light.

We spies know more about everything
than you do, and sooner.
We writers are like children:
when we are ready to tell, we tell all.

I am sorry that loving me
sometimes feels like sleeping
with the door unlocked.

I have come to believe, in my delirium,
that I’d be letting myself and everyone else down
if I didn’t name what happened.

And so I write.
And I apologize.
And I write again.

Should you fall victim to a late-in-life fertility surge, take heart….. I present:

The Unexpected Perks of Raising a Toddler and a Teen at the Same Time:

1. You have a visual aid for your talks about birth control. “Do you want this right now? I didn’t think so. So, let’s talk pill or patch.”

2. You can simultaneously teach one child to drive and the other to use the toilet.

3. You have a living example of genuine helplessness when your teenager tells you they “can’t find a charger.”

4. During a temper tantrum, you have someone to remind you of how articulate, independent, and emotionally complex they grow up to be.

5. During a temper tantrum, you have someone to remind you of how tiny, doting and easily redirected they used to be.

6. The postnatal/perimenopausal convergence gives you a legitimate excuse to never lose the baby weight…ever.

7. The smell of BO masks the smell of dirty diaper.

8. You get to say “We don’t put that in our mouths” to both kids, just in wildly different contexts.

9. You’ve learned that “I’m bored” and “I’m starving” are constants on both ends of the developmental spectrum.

10. Your Spotify wrapped is a confusing mix of Miss Rachel and Playboi Carti.

11. You are both relearning chemistry and celebrating the successful use of a spoon.

12. You are simultaneously baby-proofing outlets and locking down Wi-Fi.

13. You’ve said “because I said so” and “let’s talk through our feelings” within the same five-minute window.

14. You’re raising a built-in cautionary tale and a built-in proof of survival at the same time.