tonight I willfully remember her as a baby, taking in the curve of her cheek in the dark of her bedroom, the little smile curving into it and my eyes fill it out, add the baby fat and take away the teeth so I'm seeing a gummy grin, and she's not so different now, I think, except maybe a little more perfect because she is more whole, all complicated angles and inner machinations. a little person who infuriates me and surprises me and still knocks me over with the weight of all this love I have for her. she who curls an arm around my neck and breathes, "I love you a billion trillion" and kisses my chin and squinches her eyes and in the next breath says, "I AM sleeping." and then shuffles her feet and then relaxes, asks, "Is a billion trillion a lot?"

how to make a salad

cut the green onion, slice with the wrong knife
push the same knife through the wrinkled red tomato
wade through the juice of the overripe tomato
feel the large fist squeezing like a vise around your spine
push the cat away from your feet

press your lips together, swallow
the sob making its traitorous way;
it fills the tight hollow of your cheeks.
your teeth ache.

shoo the cat again, who abandons you
to chase a hobbled cricket.

the wilted arugula goes in the bowl.
wince at small sounds, argue with the defeating drum of doubt
marching up and down your back.
your heart swells. leaks.

smaller bones are disintegrating. like mica. into dust.

add the tomatoes, the green onion,
last night's roasted chicken. shake the dregs of your
fat free balsalmic vinegar dressing on the mix.

sit with your bowl and consider:
here is what I made today. swallow it into emptiness.
fill yourself up.

I'm listening to a philosophy lecture, and the professor asks, "Is there an end to space? Does it just go on and on forever?" Even contemplating an answer to that question is hard for most people, she says - they wouldn't even know where to begin.

It's familiar for me, this question, because it makes me think of motherhood, of the enormity of these little lives before me, the little people I have to grow and develop. It's not a task. Not a bullet point, not a goal. It's an enormous endeavor, an odyssey.

And it's hard to wrap my mind around it because it's me standing at the edge of the world, staring out into an endless space, trying to make sense of it. Trying to decide what I believe in, how far I can stretch out into the deep expanse, trying to intuit where I think it goes and if it ends or goes on forever.

Before I can do that, any of it, even begin to stare down the void, I have to try and understand myself, unequivocably, and to understand myself separately from my daughters, and it's just impossible. They're standing right there with me facing down the void, and we have to step out there. I have to take them with me. It's the scariest thing I can think of, what we'll find in that void, and I hope it isn't a void at all. I hope it's a space filled with color and the softest shadows and light. I hope it's life on distant planets and joy, but from here, I just don't see it. But we're taking those first steps out anyway. Here we go, girls. I ask them to trust me and can't think of why they should. Except.

Them. For all that deep scary blackness I see in front of me, I see them putting it to shame. They are my life on distant planets, all the color and light, all the joy the universe could know. They are what the atomists believed in, atoms, atoms that can't be created or destroyed. They are infinite, they are the stuff of life, and they have created me, these girls.

I believe in them, their worth, their intrinsic, indivisble, infinite worth. And if I believe in them, I should believe in me, too.

The philosophy lecturer posits that if you believe there is an end to space, you have to think you'd reach a point where you can't reach your arm out, there'd be nowhere to put it. Is that possible? And I can link my arms with my daughters' arms, hold their small hands, fill my ears with their sounds and kiss their soft faces. Tangible evidence of infinity, belief in a thing that goes on forever.

I'm sorry, little girl, because love is not always easy. Because right now you and I are engaged in this terrible push and pull. You are inserting your tiny will all over the place, mostly with me, laying down rules that I don't agree with. Ignoring my rules because you don't agree with them. And we're both ignoring each other's wills and I'm looking for a middle ground and I don't even think it's there. I think we're stuck in this eternal pull, a knot of tension between us, and somewhere in that knot is something softer, a love that simmers and glows and I'm trying to unwrap my fists from around and somehow convince you to let go so that soft love can grow bigger, and wider, and even softer. I want us not to be sorry the next morning. I want us to be happy to love to feel good about each other. No easy conclusion, no big answers, just nothing right now. Nothing but I love you and I know you love me and I'm sorry things are hard. I love you. Nothing and everything.

I hope so.

"Mama?" She asks me early this morning, curled into the crook of my arm. "Today are we going to put shiny stars on the blueberry tree? The orange blueberry tree?"

is it grief
that folds you over at the waist
and crumples you to the ice
this impulse to bend,
to give way to something
wracking your bones with shock

an evening unraveled long and flat,
a length of barbed wire a grassy plain a broken fence
monsters rattling dirt and stones a scuffed heel
kicked heel broken nose
a fist of blood a sorry, sorry and weeping
silent

it's silent here
convinced monsters aren't real
if only if only
if only they weren't stomping the floor
or remembering the path from your throat to your feet
your throat to your feet

everything in you is pricked
and falling