by Jennifer | Jan 16, 2016 | 31 days of creativity, pain, poems
I wrote this a few days after learning that I had cancer. Now, when the gravity of life weighs too heavy on me Details seem safe. I brush my teeth with care. I even floss. I wash a dirty plate until every speck of egg is gone. My closet is almost tidy again, sweaters...
by Jennifer | Jun 1, 2015 | poems
“Chink!” She tossed the word with careless scorn, darted back into her first-grade classroom. And I, just passing in the hallway, caught it up and held it, turning it over in my hands. Like night slowly creeping in the knowledge that it was thrown with...
by Jennifer | Mar 15, 2015 | a mom's life, poems
If I had only known Three days was nothing Four weeks now notched on my belt of motherhood Four weeks with a sick child, one at a time, usually on Thursdays Falling not like dominoes but like patient drops from the tip of a stalactite J.D. Fitzgerald’s mother...
by Jennifer | Feb 11, 2015 | a mom's life, poems
For Tennyson, who says it isn’t a real poem unless it rhymes. There was one a 9-year-old kid Whose stomach decided to rid Itself of its contents Under the pretense Of denying itself, so it did. There once was a boy fair and jolly Who snuck a lick of his...
by Jennifer | Feb 7, 2015 | a mom's life, poems
Three days in to the stomach virus in our house And I am checking every twinge Was that nausea I feel? What was that gurgling in my intestines? Something sinister? Heaven help the child who complains of anything abdominal; It means quarantine for sure. And constant...
by Jennifer | Jan 15, 2015 | 31 days of creativity, poems
I used to dream that I showed up at school wearing only my underwear. That I missed the bus and couldn’t find the school. That I never began the research paper we were supposed to be writing all semester. Now I dream that I’ve forgotten my son’s camp...
