Our real world has evolved. It's become something much different, and inadvertently about healthcare, and about what it means to have good health, and to be able to have good health.

I feel possessive about stories I write in Spanish and so I usually end up translating those into English myself.

Both childbirth and abortion are medical procedures but neither is an illness, and sometimes they're both treated as such.

I've gotten to try on voices very different than my own, and I've become much more aware of structure than ever before. Also, you really weigh every word. There's no closer reading then when you read to translate.

Interestingly, in Cuba abortion is treated as lightly as getting a mole removed.

This is going to sound nuts but it took me forever to figure out why I'd stopped writing poetry - I mean, I went about a decade where I wrote very little poetry and I thought it was because I was doing a weekly blog. And then when we moved, I reconfigured my writing desk. The previous one had had very little space to write by hand. And suddenly, the poetry was gushing!

Offspring were a joy or a shame, but still the crown of their elders, nature's unpredictable creatures.