Outside, the trees are plain and silent as bottle brushes. They could scrub something clean, get at the tight corners where grime likes to hide, if only they were tipped over, spun like street sweepers. Or turned again upright, set going on the air.

This kind of cold distances. In ’49, a Nebraska driver named Hop found his school bus buried during a historic blizzard. Those days, he says, they dug tunnels to find each other after the storm.

An old crush is on vacation in Costa Rica; in the photos he posts, the streets are full of women in handkerchief skirts and bright yellow scarves. Everywhere skin and Coke bottles, striped awnings and sandaled feet. I look at these photos while wrapped in a brown afghan, my coat thickening like the neighborhood squirrels. Cold, land-locked gringa, in my dream I try to salsa dance in those crowded streets.

Last week, one of our squirrels was struck dead in the too quiet street in front of our house. Another squirrel tugged with his cupped hands at the dead squirrel’s shoulders. Come, he said, let’s run to our nest and drink beers. Later in the day a neighbor used his snow shovel to scoop up the body, maybe so the others would give up hope.

Farmer’s Almanac calls for an early spring, the senior cashier repeats to his customers. Weeks of single-digit wind chills sting worse than ever after that. The high-heeled, lip-sticked forecast is a daily disappointment. This is why we’ll wear short sleeves too soon, why we’ll sunbathe in 50 degrees. We want to believe winter will end, want to pack away parkas and snow shovels. For now, for today, we tunnel through, look for ways to find each other in the drifts.

I told my parents being published in this magazine would definitely out me as a progressive Christian and they both laughed to say that was likely already a drawn conclusion. It’s true that I’ve changed my mind about a lot of things related to faith over the last decade or so. It feels like, as one dear friend said to me, it’s been “a series of small decisions” that possibly went unnoticed to others but added up to a big evolution for me in the end.

I read today that the antidote to bad religion is good religion, so I guess that’s what I’m actually working toward. This poem addresses that by allowing the speaker to question what she’s been told while also interrogating what she hasn’t been allowed to consider until now. It’s been through several revisions and I’m thankful to all the writers who shared their feedback in the process.

I’ll update when it’s available to everyone online!

I’m happy to send you to The Sunlight Press to read two of my poems, “Fika on Marstrand Island” and “StarDate: August 27 – Moon and Aldebaran.” 

These poems have been in process since my MFA program, and submitting poems for publication is hard.

This new online journal seems like such a nice fit for this pair. Look at the beautiful photography! And the editors have been so nice to work with.

I recently found little white flowers on the spider plant in my kitchen. I was surprised because I usually kill houseplants – even succulents, the ones everyone says are soooo forgiving. To me, these flowers meant I wasn’t doing everything wrong after all. The little cycle of watering and sun I’d settled upon had worked this time. Life!

So, yes, seeing these poems published feels a little bit like that.

… and reads it to you that evening. 

And it makes you tear up it’s so beautiful and intricate and moving.

What lesson do you take from this extraordinary moment? From knowing that a former Poet Laureate spent hours of his morning capturing the essence of a memory into lines of poetry and then spoke it into the air on a Friday night in Omaha, Nebraska, and you were one of the few in the room to hear it?

Start by being hard on yourself: Why didn’t you write this morning? If you had a regular writing habit, you might be able to write about a conch shell in a way that makes people catch their breath when you finish. You need more discipline.

Then tell yourself this is about longevity. Sure, your poems aren’t spinning out of your head and onto your computer screen like that, but maybe if you keep at it for the next 30 or so years you’ll get there. Don’t give up.

Then listen carefully when Mr. Kooser responds to the audience question, “What is poetry to you?” Listen to the charming man in the bright orange tie, perhaps an homage to the perfection of October. Listen as he pauses before he answers, gathering up the thousands of words he’s spoken on this subject and sifting through them for the ones he wants tonight. Listen to his response.

“Poetry is the record of a discovery … in life … or in memory …”

When he says it, first you’ll turn to your husband who is already offering you a pen so you can capture the line exactly. Then it will settle into your soul that this is the work you’ve been doing and the work that will continue to bring you life. This is work that does not feel like work. This is your great pleasure. This is open eyes and heart and mind.

The discoveries are the gifts; the poems, if you make them, are the record. 

For most of my usual blog readers, a literary journal is probably a bit of a foreign artifact. The first time I published in an ungrad journal I didn’t even show my mother a copy because the cover was a horrifying piece of Chucky-style doll art. And even my poem in this particular journal is very different from the kind of things I write about here – basically my kids these days. But there is a method to this seemingly bi-polar writing style and basically it has to do with being better at all of it.

What we love about good actors is that they can portray dissimilar characters with ease. My daughter Ada has been mourning the loss of Professor Snape while I grieve for Colonel Brandon. I’d like my work as a writer to have a similar scope – which means I hope to be read by more than one kind of reader. A poetry mentor of mine believed the healthiest writers could write in more than one genre.

In case you are hoping I’ll tell you what “At the Nadia Bolz-Weber Lecture” is about, prepare to be disapponted. I won’t tell you because that would be like telling you reading one person’s movie review was as good as watching the movie yourself. A poem is a very different thing from an essay or a work of fiction. It’s probably as far from a blog post as two pieces of writing could be.

A poem is a carefully crafted piece of fiction, even if it is based on a real-life experience. This is the single piece of writing pedagogy that opened me up to the possibility of becoming a poet. In the process of writing, the poem becomes a new thing. Even if it started from something that actually happened, once it is on the page the poem is then crafted into whatever it wants to be as a piece of art. Every word, syllable, and line is re-arranged, edited, re-created.

In the case of “At the Nadia Bolz-Weber Lecture,” the speaker of the poem wasn’t even me anymore. As a writer, I had been constrained by telling the truth as I knew it and that limited me from exploring the many ways a moment could be experienced by myself or by others. This poem is how I imagined a person could have experienced that lecture, those words.

When you read a poem, keep those things in mind:

Remember the poet is not necessarily the speaker.

Remember the poem is always about more than what happened. The poem is how the poet tells you it happened, every word, space, and line break. The poem is the experience of reading the poem, hearing each word break through your conscious and unconscious mind.

This is, not incidentally, what I think makes some people love poetry and others hate it. You don’t get to “torture a confession out of” a poem (as Billy Collins brilliantly remarks). You only get to read it, hear it, feel it.

Don’t misunderstand me, I love to tease meaning out of a poem! And I’d love for you do to that with mine. I love a poem that captures my imagination with language, rhythm, or sound but isn’t clear immediately to my mind. I love re-reading it, studying each line and word choice, and eventually making connections that add up to a sense of meaning. You can read my personal anthology of favorites here.

You just shouldn’t try to make a poem something that it isn’t: an essay, for example, or a blog post. Let the poem be a poem. Who knows what all goes into one person preferring Professor Snape to Colonel Brandon … but they are both brilliant, aren’t they? Suited to different tastes and purposes perhaps, but created by the same person (with obvious direction and inspiration from outside sources, which is another discussion entirely).

Happy reading – whatever you choose!

I see it on your Facebook photos, too. If our kids aren’t looking too old, they’re growing to fast. “SOMEONE STOP TIME!” you type under the adorable photos of your infant with one of those clever __ months old stickers on her chest. (I got married AND had children pre-Pinterest. What a waste.)

But you know what I’ve been thinking lately? Nope, it’s all just right. This age at this speed. It’s all just right. It’s good to appreciate the brevity of life. I think that’s a smart way to live. But I wonder sometimes if we subconsciously amp ourselves up like the mice I read about once in a book. Researchers put a group of regular, healthy mice into a cage with a group of mice who were totally hopped up on amphetamines. Within minutes the normal, healthy mice were spinning and jumping and gagging just like the methed-out mice. I start feeling a bit like that when I scroll through photo after photo in my social media feeds with these kinds of comments about everything happening too fast. I start believing it is all happening too fast.

I have to remind myself that nothing actually happens sooner than it happens. And there must be a rhythm to this system of growing and changing that makes sense for our species, for our hearts. As the beautiful song from the movie About Time says, “there’s gold in them hills.” The hills of two year-olds and tweens, infants and young adults.

In the hills of third grade and eight years old, I’m going to remind myself she doesn’t look too old, she looks just right.

Claire is in summer school this month. I know, mean ol’ me forcing Claire to miss out on the traditional joys of a care-free summer break! To be fair, this program is more of a transition jump-start than remedial academic help. The students go on “missions” in which they have to follow clues to find designated spots in different classrooms and other school spaces (call this interactive tours for 100 kids in their new middle school that will eventually be crammed with 700+). They have relay races in which teams stand in front of lockers and take turns working the combinations (and apparently Claire is far from being the only incoming 7th grader who hasn’t quite mastered this skill yet).

Biggest challenge: she’s riding the bus for the first time. I know, the bus! What am I thinking?! First I put her in public school and now I put her on the bus?! Now you know I’ve lost it.

Here’s what I was thinking. Pick-up at her elementary school was the most difficult concern for Claire on almost any day. She would make trips to the nurse at 10 a.m. because she got herself so worked up about whether or not I’d be standing at the right door after school at 4 p.m. Some mornings she was already crying before school thinking about the afternoon plan. We tried different approaches – from ignoring her to arriving 15+ minutes early to be sure she could see us from the classroom window – but none of it was fail proof emotionally.

So when the middle school open house presentation said bus service would be available for summer school, I thought we had nothing to lose. The grandmothers might have panicked a little (although they are good at playing it cool), but I thought we had to try something different from what we had done so far, especially since middle school parent pick-up is a much more congested and chaotic process than elementary school pick-up. This year Jesse weaved his own way through bus lines, rowdy students, and a busy parking lot to get to wherever I had found an open parking space. I couldn’t see that same scenario working for Claire.

I also thought Claire might see the bus as a fixture of transportation reliability. What is always there when you walk out of school? The school bus line. What isn’t always there when you walk out of school? Your parent (NOTE: We were late or not within sight a total of three times the entire year, but it left a mark).

On her first morning, she trooped up those tall bus steps and never looked back. Even when her driver needed a sub this week and the bus was late at school, Claire was fine. I asked her what they did while they waited. “We just sat together on the grass. Mr. Cody has our names on his clip board, so he called the bus.”

(It’s not hard to make people feel safe. I was surprised by how much it meant to Claire that her bus driver and the school security officer knew her by name and kept track of whether or not she was on the bus. That’s all she needed to feel covered.)

This week I watched her bus driver move a kid to a different seat so that Claire could have the one in the very front. I didn’t ask her to do that, but I was very pleased to see it happen. Can being a public school bus driver be a gift to the world? I think, yes! The bus stop is just a block from our home; from it she can see our van in its parking space. She’s currently working up the bravery to walk home on her own. She’s just waiting for me to get her a key to the front door. (WHAT?!)  And I’m so proud of her. Since she’s started summer school, it’s been like watching her grow-up through that iPhone super speed filter.

What I’m doing, in some ways, is setting her up to not need me. It would have been easier in a lot of ways to drive her to and from summer school. But learning to ride a bus is making her braver. I’ve read stories about New York kids who take the subways to and from dentist appointments in the middle of the school days.The SUBWAY!

What if learning to ride the bus gives Claire a freedom she might not otherwise have? Can I overcome my own fears so that she can enjoy that? I’m not sure either of us has the nerve for her to get her driver’s license. A school bus today could be the city bus tomorrow. She could learn to ride to high school, work maybe. I don’t know what her future looks like. I just don’t want to get in the way. If I truly want her to be brave when facing the world, I probably need to start by being brave myself, which sometimes means doing less so that she can do more.