The margins are clear.
Everyone is celebrating.
Life is good, excellent even.
Thankful, grateful, joyful.
All the good things.
It is spring and my husband is not dead.
Praise be to God.

In the margins,
I'm grieving for what we've lost,
for the terrors that were,
horrors hospital and chemical,
for the swarm of unknowns,
for a peace we may never know again.

Will you see me in the margins?
They are clear.

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I should put my phone down.
Everything I know so far is enough.

Tomorrow, we will be told what we didn't see.
Half of us will nod yes.

By Tuesday, there will be new things to not see.
Today will be forgotten.
It's not likely much will change.
so everything I know so far is enough—
I should put my phone down.

In sickness and in health, we make a good team, the two of us.

From January 2025:

Note: Small-small is a Liberian English term for a little bit of something, an amount, a size, even a time period. It can be applied to almost anything. We did not get small-small snow here in Wisconsin last night, for example.

But recent months have been remarkable in ways that I have felt the need to stake in place and remember, if only for myself. It’s sometimes difficult to believe that it has been less than a year since January. It often feels like two or three. I needed to stop and notice these three particular days near the end of August of this year, to put a hand on them, so that I do not lose track of them.

There is so much awful happening. It must not become a blur. In a blur, we lose our humanity.

I. First Full Week of School

A girl sobs in the arms of a stranger.
Her daddy is gone.

The school pickup line creeps past a rented black van.
That mom has a grocery pickup scheduled.
These dads are late to work.



II. Farmers Market

The bees are August-frantic 
at every sweet thing.
I smell roasted corn.
Nearby, buckets of fresh-cut dahlias 
await impulse buyers.

Over a weathered picnic table,
our words sound like movie lines.
Papers, passports. 
Leave, detain.
In an emergency.
We’ll help. 



III. Two Dead, 8 and 10

On Wednesday, a gunman shattered
the stained glass windows of a church

Outside, the lintel above the doors reads
“The gates of Heaven.”

I do not want your cute AI,
I do not want your Gemini.
Your memes, they make me cringe and cry;
Your promise is a bald-faced lie.

I do not want it with my food,
I'm glad to be a techno-prude.
I do not want it in my home.
I do not want it on my phone.
I do not want it in the schools.
I do not need these kinds of tools!

I occasionally hear of truly useful things AI can do, things related to searching for signs of cancers, and other sorts of large data-set tasks. Well and good! But I think we’re all tired of “more AI” as the go-to shiny-object solution for problems nobody is complaining about, though, aren’t we?

And as for “large language models,” sometimes these tools seem unable to understand, well, language. For example, just this morning I searched, “Does a Midori A5 cover fit a Hobonichi A5 planner?” (I have learned that since Google is now broken, you may have better luck phrasing things as a question instead of searching with keywords.)

The ”AI-enhanced” Google search gave me lots of results telling me that yes, a Hobonichi cover will work for a Midori journal. Grammar: how does it work?

One could say its wasteful to spend money on a new swimsuit in January 
but who could fault you for buying socks?

You can’t change what happens in Washington
not much at least—
but you can control what comes into your house. 
It might as well be socks.

You might lose your shoes in a car crash.
People often do. 
But not your socks. 

A gold Rolex is out of reach for most
but most can afford Gold Toe.
No reason to be thrifty about socks.

Maybe your practical friend says, “It’s just socks,” 
as if the last thing you can control right now
—the color of your socks

is anything to let go of.
If the world’s on fire, 
You’re going to need a pair of socks. 

I’m usually that practical friend
but not when it comes to socks. 

When everything’s coming unraveled
you’re definitely going to want fresh socks.

An outlet store 
is a good place to buy socks.

If you’ve spent an hour at a store, sniffing lotions, 
contemplating notebooks, considering a comforter, 
wisely deciding that summer is too far away to buy the swimsuit, 
you haven’t wasted your time 
if you go home with socks. 

Once you've worn new socks
you can't return them
Nobody wants used socks. 

Bad puns, wild stripes, bold patterns
My favorite, big flowers—
till holes do you part. 
The ultimate self-care—
Socks.

There are many ice shanties scattered across the frozen lake out beyond the cheery summer lawn furniture. We watched the sunset last night and then watched pickup trucks and ATVs driving back and forth between the shore and the ice shanties as the fishers came in for the night.

As the light changes, so do the apparent sizes of the ice shanties. They seem to shift around the lake, now seeming closer, now farther away; bigger, then smaller.

Wisconsin winters are getting a bit milder and years where our lakes are frozen hard enough for ice fishing consistently through the winter are becoming rare, but this lake is shallow and so is, I suspect, more reliably frozen. I would guess that it’s an ice-fishing hot spot.1

People whose first instinct towards winter is revulsion often say that winter is colorless, but I don’t find this to be true. Last evening as we watched the sunlight decline, the lake became pearlescent as the bare ice reflected the sky and changing light in different ways than the areas still dusted with snow. The landscape turned many pale and shifting shades of pale blue, purple, orange, and pink.

The grass visible in patches in the lawn outside this morning is a soft mossy olive green. Even the bare tree trunks are different shades of black, charcoal, and dark brown, if you do more than just glance at the bare branches and complain about the cold. A red chair outdoors in the snow means more than a red chair lost against the riotous bright green of July.

You have to be willing to try, though.

Back at home by the Big Lake, January is frequently overcast. The solstice is often overcast as well. Writers call a winter sun “milky” all too often but it’s a good description for the combined effect of overcast skies and the daylight’s short tenure this time of year. Some years my daughter and I head to the lakefront on the winter solstice to watch the latest sunrise of the year. Sometimes there is no sun visible at all, only a shift from dim blue light to brighter white light. But I find even this curious to observe.

In honor of ice, the North, and winter’s secretive colors, here is a poem I wrote several years ago.

Little Sister of Big Ice

This ice is lonely and small, 
she misses her big Northern sisters.
In the dim light of the solstice sunrise
when the sun tries to breathe but can’t,
this little ice shouts loudly enough
to tell me that I would love the Arctic.

There once was a woman named Kristi
who shot her own dog with a rifle.
For excitment towards birds,
poor Cricket was purged;
The veep-stakes moved on to her rival.

February 2024: The Interview

To Russia swam a white Schwan called Tucker,
To dance for the Bear for his supper.
Astonished by prices,
He avoided a crisis
by letting Vlad call him “goat-f____.”

December 2024: Throttled

Vivek, Vivek, he ate crow cake
while Laura Loomer jeered.
Elon looked on,
so white and scared—
he played his tech-bro card.

You Didn’t

There once was a reader named Sue 
who could not decide what to do. 
She clicked and she read 
while lying in bed. 
Now she’s hoping you’ll also come through 
and subscribe, even though I’ve irritated you by ruining the limerick.

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One day the school bus didn't come 
the children learned to play again.
They learned quadratic equations late or not at all 

Down the tumble of a grass hill,
battles in the back woods,
king of the castle. 
1066 never had it so good.

Maybe mud and mom's flowers
make a wedding cake for plush pandas.
It's hard being the youngest—
you're always stuck being the pastor.

What is it to 
ride your bike alone to fishing
to walk at night with your dog as lookout
to bake your own cookies for the first time
and have your dad declare them perfect?

What is it to
hear your own voice
as you meander to adulthood,
to know that you can,
to never hear that you can't?

A note—

Sitting in my office with the windows open during the pandemic, I was often struck by how many children were outdoors that first summer on bikes, scooters, and on foot. Nostalgia hit me hard, remembering my childhood in West Africa. After school, during the weekends, and all summer, we freely biked and walked back and forth to friends’ houses and to the offices where the dads (and some moms) worked. Impromptu adventures were common. Mixed age groups of eight or more kids routinely organized soccer (football!) or games like Capture the Flag. Loosely supervised or unsupervised time was routine. Often the person “in charge” was simply the oldest child present.

Eventually, the children here in my American neighborhood who were temporarily unable to attend school sports and after-school activities returned to all their organized things again —a relief to their working parents.

The street outside of my office window returned to just the sounds of an occasional passing car or truck and the birds. No more little girls screeching in delight on a nearby trampoline or middle school boys bragging to each other. No more kids on bikes with a fishing rod awkwardly clutched against the handlebars. No more teens sulkily walking the family dog. The children disappeared.

Something was briefly gained but then lost again, I think.