Irish Soda Bread
All Irish ancestors are famine ancestors, in one way or another…. And inside this simple bread are all the whispers. So much complexity.
“The egg is this world we see. The bird in it is Love…” or, Waking Up with Simone on Easter Morning
Good morning. It is Easter and the sun just rose. Every morning recently I have been waking and sitting with my coffee, my journal, my cat, and Simone Weil. She was a radical philosopher, a mystic and marxist, a spiritual seeker and committed materialist, who relentlessly sought an experience of the reality of justice and…
I Refuse. And I Nurture, Too.
The seed of this piece of writing is fatigue.The seed of this piece of writing is anger.The seed of this piece of writing is curl-up-in-a-ball-and-remember-that-shitty-Christian-pregnancy-clinic-that-showed-you-oversized-photos-of-fetuses-and-cry-but-no!-there’s-so-much-work-to-do-plus-your-kids-need-you-and-so-do-other-people-too. Right now I have three pieces of work to do, in front of me–One is a book review about British concentration camps during famine, plague, and war in India and…
Nutcracker, I Have No Patience For You Anymore
I have a new piece up at Medium. If you adore the Nutcracker, it will … well, make you think about it. I went on a field trip with my 8-year-old and my head nearly exploded, so I had to write. It’s a quick pastiche of thinking about sugar and ballet and colonial power. View…
We Never Know When We May Need a Hand Extended Across the Sea
November 22, 2018 I am aware that I am sitting in a house on Wappo land, in the Mayacamas Mountains. I am sitting on land that is owned collectively, in a house that is owned collectively, as part of one small effort to live an alternative to the steamrolling system called private property and industrial…
On Power and Aporia in the Academy: A Response in Three Parts
I posted something on my Medium page last night. 950 people have read it in about 14 hours now. That feels like a lot. If you read it, too, thank you, truly. If you don’t, I’ll chalk it up to the crazy-making (though somewhat hilarious, once you get some distance) obfuscation of Derrida! – Amy…
Not Broken
On the morning of election day last week my eight-year-old was lying on the sofa with a blanket over his head. “What’s integrity?” we heard him say, in a muffled sort of way. I took a deep breath and said, “Wow.” Then breathed some more. “Integrity,” I said, “is when a person is making choices…
On History, Patriarchy, and Possibility, Too (With the Help of Virginia Woolf and Facebook)
I do not work in higher education. I work as a mother. I work as a poet. I work part-time as a copyeditor. I work on my children’s school board, as a political activist, and for my rural, collectively-owned community. All those things are work. But because of the society in which we live,…
After the Fire, Flood: Announcing Poetry451 and #CDCpoetryflood
It’s been a wild autumn. I was picking up speed here, posting about Barbuda and Puerto Rico, and a poem in response to Las Vegas, and then…silence. The reason for my silence was fire. I live in Santa Rosa, which was the city hardest hit by the Northern California fires in October. I was rendered…
Untitled
I want to write a poem about silence just like almost every other poet ever probably and am of course twisted up immediately in words but here is why I want to write a poem about silence silencers all sorts of silencers metal ones and flesh ones and metal ones that cut flesh with their…