Packing day still life. Alice and I leave for Japan tomorrow -- I'm working on poems about weapons, horror, complicity, empire. (Thanks Human Rights Initiative for the support!) Alice is working on Pokémon. :)

I am not as brave as a person needs to be to face the moment we're in. But look at this kid's moxie! I feel braver just looking at him.

A little slap dash mending the night before a trip as evidence of a life well-lived.

My editor suggested a short notes section of sources for HELD. Twelve pages later and a week past due, I think it's done. This book should probably be dedicated to interlibrary loan and JSTOR.

This book is a delight. And disturbing as hell. Like wonder and zoos and the world tend to be. PHOENIX This is the cage destined for the resurrection of the Phoenix. (It's ashes will arrive in December.) -Nicolàs Guillén, translated by Aaron Coleman from THE GREAT ZOO

"Was the command the first utterance in any language, or was it the narrative, the story? Or the declaration? Or the question? ... What was the first lie?" -Vi Khi Nao & Sun Yung Shin, SIX TONES OF WATER

287 resolved comments later and I've learned I love a comma splice, hate hyphenated/open/closed adjectives, and have no idea what transitive and intransitive verbs even are, much less how to conjugate them. Which is to say, thank god for copy editors, especially my exceptionally good one!

Poems and a glass of wine on the patio -- just out here living the dream. "How do you know? I know because I speak a language too a lung-language night can hear in its big empty bald head" -Eleni Sikelianos YOUR KINGDOM

Was woken 7 times (!!!) last night by a constipated two-year-old weeping "want poooop." I'm about to get on a plane to LA with what is surely the least amount of mom guilt I have ever felt before a trip. AWP pals, see you soon!

On walks I let the two-year-olds pick a book out of the neighborhood little free library. And the way this guy leaped for the steamy romance novel!

"When there is nothing, there is a piece of paper. It's the dawn of the world. There's nothing, it's blank. And then two hours later, it's full. You compete with God. You dare to create something. You write... You do your own thing. You. It's completely terrifying." -Marguerite Duras

When the student in the back seat of the 10 passenger van asked if we could pull off so she could hug a white pine, you better believe that van was tilting on two wheels as I took that hard right. Tree hugging emergency!

There's so much to love about teaching this science writing class at the headwaters of the Mississippi -- swans fishing, geese fighting, jack pines, fire ecology... And, when I ask if anyone wants to see the picture of zombie chipmunks I took up at the Biome Center, everybody says "Yes please!"

Hello from Itasca Biological Research Station, where I'm spending spring break with 17 students in my Watershed Workshops class, writing about the headwaters to the Mississippi, birch-fir tree mutualisms, cool fungi, eagles doing it in mid-air (!!!), and, and, and...it was a good day.

I'm not doing so well lately, because who could and how in a time like this? But also, it's spring and the world is full of puddles and acorn caps and very nice sticks. I feel like my heart breaks open a hundred times a day, often in the good way.

I love new notebook day!

It takes some coming to terms with the simultaneous truths we are small amid the mighty forces of destruction and also capable of effecting change, that things are dire but not all hope is lost... It can be dizzying to hold all these things -- and the grief itself can get in the way. -Lauren Markham

Apropos of some bullshit at my work that is probably happening at your work too... "Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given." -Timothy Snyder in ON TYRANNY www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/558051...

I love how Ayşegül Savaş captures the creative complexities of motherhood in THE WILDERNESS. "I find, in this liminal experience, a site for multiplicity, for experiencing the world beyond ourselves...redefining how we relate to the flesh of the world, and how we allow the world to touch us back."

"Why draw prison walls in the dirt in the name of freedom Could there be a sky beyond the sky" -Bei Dao

A couple little guys who LOVE mail are turning two tomorrow and I'm pretty excited for them to wake up and let me play with their presents. Maybe I'll teach them about SASEs and form vs. personalized rejection letters.

My inbox! It will only be this way for 10 minutes max, but what a feeling. Like there's tiny emeritus professor in my heart who just fell asleep by a fire with an open book in her lap.

"...my site is wherever a rose grows, wherever clouds cast their shadows on roofless houses, wherever a bomb does not fall, wherever a child does not confuse a cloud for bomb smoke." -Mosab Abu Toha, "To My Visa Interviewer"

Brian thought it would be super cute to teach this guy to sing "Mama, oooo oooo oooo" like a little Freddie Mercury every time I walk in the door. And it is super cute. And that song is a lot of feelings to have toddlers demanding on repeat at 5 o clock in the morning.

"A slug is not As you might think A snail without a shell A slug lives its whole life Without a shell Like I do"

Trying to be a relaxed, nurturing, art mom like those totally real people on Instagram, but I'm pretty sure I just hatched a new stomach ulcer I'm naming Finger Paint. And anybody who gives these twins a "sensory table" for Christmas is going on my "People Whose Deaths I Won't Grieve" list.

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I've been dilligently reading a very fine book of narrative nonfiction with engaging and anecdotes and solid reporting and it's just so... meh. Could somebody please drop me in a deep chasm between one understanding and another and leave me to clamor out, but with words?

It's soup season, bitches! I hate following directions, I hate attending to details, I'm the kind of white lady who put raisins in the chicken salad. And now I rise from the ashes of a turkey carcass and half a bag of last year's barley to shine like so much salt and pepper to taste.

HOWS YOUR BOOK GOING?! HAVE YOU EVER CONSIDERED WRITING SOMETHING PEOPLE READ? Good luck in the trenches out there today. And remember, all you have to do is self publish a bestseller that becomes a movie and write the newspaper about it

Got some time to write now, but I've been up since 5 a.m. with toddlers mushing my brain with some kind of bad Dadaist poetry reading. "Moo night pee eye eye eye eye night moon eye pee poop pee night bye night bye hi night hi eye eye eye..." The worst part is how they're convinced it's a narrative.

Spent the morning at the incredible Sophie Calle show, OVERSHARE. In spring I'm teaching a grad seminar on confessionalism, post-confessionalism and other experiments in writing about the self. And wondering how messy I want to make it. Probably very messy.

Regarding this tea towel he was folding, my husband just told the kids: "Death is the thing with feathers. That's what Maya Angelou said." I would say something, but I'm just so glad someone is doing the laundry.

The twins have been up since 4 a.m., mostly chasing each other in circles around the table yelling "die, die, die, " which aside from hoot, snot, and goddammit is the only word they know. Tbh, it's very cute.

Out of the blue, the two-year-olds started spinning in circles and singing their nonsense sounds. Wow, I'm thinking, they are really digging this Joyelle McSweeney poem I had running in the background. Maybe so, but also the first snow of the year just started falling.

I start most days at like 4 a.m. with two toddlers and a poetry podcast. Today David Naimon and Cecilia Vicuña were talking about whale songs, David played a clip of one, toddlers loved it way too much, we've been listening to whale songs for hours. Which is maybe the ideal outcome of a Vicuña poem?