My child I see such potential in you. Your laugh, genuine as prayer, it makes me smile with my whole body my whole being. The mother in me waited for you and she was born in you she came into me for you and now I cannot remember who I was before. At two you toddled into the road. My heart froze, but my body reacted. Oh, my God, I ran I snatched you back and spanked you soundly. Your tears your cry-- I've never known my heart to break and leak such joy til that moment. Even now, in remembrance...

I am reaching out-- a great sinewy stretch. Muscle, tendon, bone work in concert. Love has great efficiency at times and yet, when you least expect it eternities pass as days and stretch, you will-- til muscles fail and tendons falter and bones become brittle with passing time. A lack of nourishment will effect love surely as bones will crumble. You must feed it tend it nurture it and efficiency will return. Healing will occur and we will forget the famine.

Childbirth sucks. Oh, I don’t mean the actual birth, itself. The first moment you hear your child’s cry, the second in which you first gaze upon him—a tiny life you brought into the world after nineteen hours of excruciating labor because you had to prove to the world you could handle it and wanted to win a stupid ten-year-old bet because your idiot brother got mad when you told everyone that he cried like a baby when his girlfriend dumped him, so he bet you that despite your cold heart, you...

I sympathize with circus clowns. In fact, when I was only nine, I was a circus clown (for a short while… sorta). I know that it’s bad form to constantly blame one’s parents for all of life’s miseries, and I do not intend, either, to offend the local 242: United Brotherhood of Circus Clowns -- God only knows the types of revenge they’d reek! I have enough stains on my carpets—have you ever tried to get pie filling out of berber? However, my father is at the root of a debilitating clown phobia...

My forehead aches! O’ Jupiter you have learned the pain of birth. Minerva has sprung fully into these lines— pen to paper waging war on words with shield and sword— An epic battle! The fight of the poet bravely forging forward in a world unaccepting of her noble incautious path.

I grew up poor. I’m not saying I lived in the Ghetto or anything nearly so glamourous as that. At least in the Ghetto you get shootings and guys with gold teeth and loud music blaring at all hours of the night. I could easily romaniticze that into something quite wonderful. But what I was given to work with was not so terrible. We were a white-trash, countrified version of the ghetto complete with a single-wide trailer, unmovable, stuck in the front yard for years after it had served its pur...

Friendship. One of life’s greatest treasures. I have had a number of friends through the years, and I must admit that not all of my friendship choices have been great (no matter how cool you perceive her, a friend who encourages you to run naked across your college campus “because it will mark our names forever in the annals of crazy antics history” is really not a good choice—especially if you would just take the time before taking the bet to do a little background investigating and discove...

Mace is dangerous. In fact, I heard recently that it’s off the market, and it’s a good thing, too. I know the reason why the stuff was ever marketed in the first place—people need personal protection devices, and mace is an effective one. However, before anyone jumps on the personal protection bandwagon, she should first know why mace isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. I was in my early twenties. It was the early 1990’s. Early this, early that, but late me—late nights, that is. I’d like t...

Sometimes there are acronyms that just pass you by, and there are others that live with you. For instance, who knew that B.U.R.P means Biometric Underwater Robot Program? And yet, when the initials M.A.D.D. are evoked, we know those mothers are mad! Some have been around forever; say N.Y.C., and everyone knows you’re talking about the Big Apple. So when a new acronym evolves, it takes a little while to catch on. Take that mid-90’s slogan that was emblazoned upon just about every third t-shir...

My pre-teen years were as topsy-turvy as anyone’s. I struggled with the big issues such as my awakening sexuality, the new responsibilities of my increased age and maturity, and the age-old question, "Who shot J.R.?" It was the early 1980’s, and I was in middle school at Harry Flood Byrd Middle School in Richmond’s West End—a Henrico County suburb that exemplified the middle class run from the city to the suburbs, and most of my classmates were from relatively well-to-do families. I don’t me...