I’m flashing my boobs in public. Literarily speaking, that is. (No, literarily’s not a real word. But it should be.) Literary Mama has seen fit to publish my poem “Brevity”, available by clicking here. It’s a little weird for me, honestly. I adore this particular publication, and have submitted time and again there, only to have two accepted pieces. (Both of those are here, for anyone who’s interested.) And I’ve always sworn by writing what you feel, not what’s comfortable, so there was no oddity at all in my submitting a piece that deals with secret breastfeeding habits that I picked up casually, remember fondly, and don’t tell anyone about because it’s probably kind of gross. Submitting things like that has never been an issue for me at all. Reading poems aloud about private sexual experiences or my personal failures and embarrassments has happened more than once, in groups from five to twenty. I’ve gotten shocked looks, offended a few folks, and been congratulated for my honesty–sometimes even all at the same event. I’m not shy with my words. So why does seeing this particular poem, which isn’t racy, controversial, or even remotely written in blue language, suddenly making me feel so squirmy? Is...

Humpty Dumpty? Apparently, according to the BBC, he can’t break now. He ends up happy and superglued. The old lady in the shoe? She now gives kisses instead of whippings.

Many thanks to the editors of The Legendary, who saw fit to publish two of my poems, “Loving Darkness” and “Finger Trails” in Issue #9. These are among the older poems that I haven’t trotted out in a while, and it’s nice to see them find a home. If you’d like, you can read them here. ....

One controversial blog I read occasionally is called FreeRangeKids. The basic idea here, posed by mother-turned-activist Lenore Skenazy, is that our kids already know what they’re doing. And if they don’t, it’s up to them to figure things out. Want your child to learn how to cook for himself? Then ya gotta let him burn his hands on the frying pan a time or two. Want your kid to be creative enough to play on her own and make up games with sticks? Then you have to cancel some of the fifty-seven extracurricular lessons you’ve scheduled for her and give her time to just wander in the yard without a plan. I agree with this, in theory. Sometimes only in theory. About half of the time, I think the advice is dead on the nose. The rest of the time, the site just pisses me off. That’s probably why I go; adrenaline is a great thing to get you going in the morning when you don’t really want to do the laundry yet. Regardless of why I do this to myself, most of the posts I’ve read from her have sent me into a tizzy in one direction or the other, either wanting to...

I was transfixed by the tiny grubworm of a human before me, the one who needed everything, at all times, in all measure.

Prompted by the previous post about “miracle kids” and where they are now, I was randomly Googling the whereabouts of Baby Jessica and came across this in the Wikipedia entry of the “baby in the well” event: “McClure’s rescue was credited mostly to paramedic Robert O’Donnell and police officer William Andrew Glasscock Jr., both of whom received tremendous media attention. In 1995, O’Donnell shot himself to death while suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder. In 2004, Glasscock was sentenced to 15 years in prison on charges of sexual exploitation of a child, sexual assault, and improper storage of explosives.” The entry notes that citations are needed, but this article verifies the story: http://www.nytimes.com/1995/07/23/magazine/death-on-the-cnn-curve.html It’s truly something to read. The article is long, but every page is well worth the time. According to the report, the pressure of having been the baby-saving celebrity eventually became too much. When the Oklahoma bombing happened and appeared on the nightly news a few years later, O’Donnell was upset that he didn’t have enough money to make the trip to go help. The article says that his mother reported him thinking about how much psychological help the rescuers themselves would need after everything was said and done. There’s another whole...

Is it a bonus to not remember the horrific day, to not really understand what’s going on and why everyone else is so sad?