Q. Your bio mentions that you have two sons. How does motherhood influence your writing?
A. I won’t get into the complicated journey of how I became a mother, but it’s safe to say that it’s not something that I thought was possible for me well into my 30s. So, my boys – currently 14 and 7 – offer fresh windows for observing the world (as all children do), and creative (often funny) ways of using language. Many of the poems I’ve written in the last two years are inspired by things they’ve actually said or done.
One morning, in the frantic preparations to leave for school, they started an impromptu “I love you more” contest where they shouted those words louder and faster at one another to the point that people walking their dogs on the sidewalk were a little freaked out. I’m not creative enough to make this kind of thing up, but you can bet I tried (unsuccessfully) to write a poem about it! Because I had spent so many years accepting that I wouldn’t be a mother at all, my kids also offer that kind of rapturous joy that comes with the best kind of love – when you look at someone that you never thought you’d be with and just marvel at the surprise of them existing next to you. This is magnified, of course, when you can be still enough to acknowledge how fleeting it all is, how what you love is shifting and growing right in front of you.
Q. Could you talk about some of the themes that show up in the poems besides motherhood?
A. I lost both my parents to cancer (in 2014 and 2023). So for better or worse, grief, loss, or illness makes its way into nearly everything that I write. The ache of witnessing my boys’ humor, their creativity, their idiosyncratic preoccupations, their kindnesses, knowing that they will never have a relationship with my parents is very tangible to me. That is probably particularly evident in “the healer,” where my younger son comforts me on a bad day (in his own bizarre, boyish way) about the loss of people he never met (my mom) or will hardly remember when he’s older (my dad). He has no idea, in fact, why I’m sad, but just intuitively accepts it and wants to nurture me. A lot of my earlier poems which preceded these allowed me to wallow in the raw sadness, a little self-pity, and my own only-child childhood memories in a way that cleansed me – so I could begin to turn my attention to my own kids, who I was not fully present to in the fog of their grandparents’ hospice and then death.
I’m also really concerned about AI, and am still struggling with how to articulate that in my poems.
Q. Throughout the poem “the big talk,” we hear the mother’s somber voice narrating snapshots of things that never happened. Is there a sense of regret, or is something else going on? Could you talk more about the voice in this poem?
A. Absolutely. When my older son was 13, I experienced a panic that suddenly a lot of windows were closing, and I worried that I would lose him emotionally, or had already lost his child self as he evolved into a teenager. If “constant worry” is a parenting style, my tendency toward it was exacerbated, and this poem is an attempt to convey the swirling mess of regret for the past and fear for the future, where you wish you had done things differently. Because I can’t go back in time, I freaked out about the future reflecting my mistakes from the past (not being present enough, not having enough fun, not taking enough time to just sit and be still, nagging too much…).
The end of that poem is an attempt to acknowledge that memory is both fact and fabrication – a story that we tell ourselves. Stories are always malleable to the way we want to remember something, and relationships are always, always, always changing. In this case, I think the process of writing this poem actually helped me identify when my actions (i.e., nagging to stop playing Minecraft or to clean his room) were only motivated by worry about the future, and not about what was necessary in the present. He just started high school, and I have learned that giving him space to do the things he wants to do and respecting his choices means that he actually wants to spend more time with me and express his affections. Duh, right?
Q. The second poem [“the cutting edge (mammogram, July 2025)”] involves waiting for a mammogram and reviewing family medical history, only to realize that the odds don’t look good. What was your thought process to convey the speaker’s fear and resignation after providing the family’s medical history?
A. This poem is an amalgamation of two different mammograms, actually, which I recounted as a single experience. My first was the one in which I was unexpectedly peppered with questions about my family history, which really struck a raw nerve and left me crying in the parking lot afterward. The second was the one in which I had the new AI-assisted machine, where presumably my family history was a data point along with what they call “extremely dense” tissue, which I am constantly reminded makes identifying potential masses much harder. I think this kind of poem could easily veer into a dark “woe is me” place, so I attempted to inject some humor and bemusement amid the tension.
Q. I’m curious about the idea of missing something before it’s gone in “when I say I miss the ocean.” Could you talk about the association between annoying pieces of Lego, anticipatory nostalgia, and the speaker’s feelings and awareness in that moment?
A. This poem, in some ways, is a continuation of “the big talk.” Lego have been a huge part of our household for the last 10 years – my boys, who share a bedroom, exist in what I have referred to as a sea of Lego. All the shelf space is devoted to completed sets (we built two more sets of shelves just for this purpose), and the floor, multiple bins, and an entire set of dresser drawers are full of pieces. It is slightly more organized now, but for many, many years it was total chaos, and it spilled into the kitchen, the living room, etc., which was a huge source of frustration for me. Cleaning their room (which often required bribing) was a Herculean effort that required all hands on deck and a few hours. I would get annoyed by the chaos, and then ashamed of myself for being annoyed.
At the same time, building sets and creating his own builds brings him so much joy, and I admire the hyperfocus he can tap into when he’s on a project. He’s spent entire weekends on the floor of his room, still in his pajamas at dinnertime, uninterested in doing anything else. For years, the opportunity cost of this worried me deeply. One Sunday afternoon, feeling tired, I lay down in the bottom bunk of their room to take a nap while he rooted around in his bins. With my eyes closed, I could almost believe I was on the beach. The plastic scratching on itself sounds a lot like waves breaking, and I realized how comforting those sounds had become, like background music for our weekends. Personifying the Atlantic Ocean as a mother longing for a time when life isn’t so messy, then finally reaching the destination (peace? quiet? time for herself?) only to realize she hadn’t appreciated how beautiful the mess was) is not a very clean analogy, but it made sense at the time!
Q. The Lego prop up the love machine in the last poem (“the healer”). The speaker is hard on herself in several of the poems, but the last poem ends on a sweet, intuitive moment from her son. How does the last poem compare to the speaker’s feelings toward the Lego (and her child) from the previous one?
A. Lego are a literal fixture in the house, so I don’t think I was intentionally infusing them with emotion in this particular poem, which was written much earlier than the other one. My younger son, to whom this poem is referring (probably at about age 5), has a very different relationship to Lego (it’s friendly, but not obsessive), and he prefers 2D art on paper. The idea that a “love machine” would look something awfully close to a gun was a tiny bit hilarious but extremely unsettling, and the memory stuck in my head. He had started the poem for me, in a sense. His care and intuition were very comforting, but I couldn’t help asking myself if violence is always just one thought away in the mind of even the most caring males.
Q. The last poem uses language that pulls me back to “the cutting edge (mammogram, July 2025),” such as tumors, a fevered wind, a mass of color, and the speaker’s fatigue. Could you talk about how you use language in the poem?
A. I’m delighted that you noticed that. I wrote this right after my dad passed away, so cancer was certainly on my mind. I suppose I was trying to make a connection between the subliminal language of violence and cancer. In my parents’ courses of treatment, which spanned 20 years, violence against the self (chemo, radiation, surgery) was nonprofit world. Given the way we talk about cancer (and guns, sometimes) in our society, maybe it seems completely natural for a child to “shoot love” at someone. I’m also just now making a connection between this kind of language and the fact that my dad was a policeman for 27 years.
Q. Your bio mentions that you run a grain-free snack company? Does your company inspire any of your poetry, or do you keep it separate from your creative work?
A. It’s very separate! I started Good Phyte Foods about 11 years ago, and I think it started as a creative outlet when I wasn’t writing very much. At that point in life, I just couldn’t sit still. I had transitioned out of my old job in the nonprofit world, had lost my mom, and my son was a toddler. I’m not sure if the work itself inspires poetry, but I can definitely say that I always think of good lines when my hands are busy, and my mind is free to wander. Unfortunately, since I have gloves on and no pen nearby, those lines often get lost, fleeting.
Q. Who are your favorite poets right now?
A. I’ve always loved Marie Howe. I just ordered a collection by Kaveh Akbar from one of my local bookstores and picked up a copy of Above Ground by Clint Smith a couple of weeks ago. That one is very much about parenting, and so is a lot of Maggie Smith’s work. I love Bob Hicok and have found the work of Katie Farris and the late Jay Hopler to really inspire me.
