Or as every other late 80s action hero my mother successfully jumping off of a skyscraper onto another skyscraper my mother hunting the Predator with a cigar lodged in her mouth my mother saying sonofabitch in the coolest way imaginable my mother ripping a mask off to reveal she is not in fact the president of the United States but that she is in fact my mother my mother somehow knowing how to pilot a helicopter my mother pulling her abusive father out of a bath tub my mother slamming her fist down on the table during an arm wrestling tournament my mother registering her hands as lethal weapons my mother pleading with her mother to leave before things got dangerous my mother watching things get dangerous my mother holding the green wire and the blue wire and figuring out which wire to cut my mother covered in her mother's blood my mother my mother my god my mother walking away from a burning car my mother an action hero that self-destructs and yet she's still my mother sitting in front of a villain calming explaining to him that death is almost here without sharks without bombs. My mother pale as the moonlight my mother watching him die slowly, in explosive peace and immeasurable quiet.
" I am not interested in writing about myself in a direct way and purposefully try to distance my poems from the personal—the use of “us” and “we” does that and can be alternately inclusive or implicating. I also use “us” and “we” to make me and whomever I’m out walking with a single unit—for Empire it was often my husband, Matt, or an imagined walk with my brother—since many of the poems deal with my/our grief over the sudden death of our father"
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"What is a weed in one cultural context is medicine or food in another; what is invasive in one ecosystem is native to another; and plants, like matter, as William James would wisely say, have no ideals. What I brought to the Star Thistle was what Adam Phillips in his marvelous book Darwin’s Worms would call the problem of grieving in a secular age."
