Some women make it look so easy, the way they cast ambition off like an expensive coat that no longer fits.

A few nights later, I secretly hope that I might be a genius. Why else can no amount of sleeping pills fell my brain? But in the morning my daughter asks me what a cloud is and I cannot say.

When God is a father, he is said to be elsewhere. When God is a mother, she is said to be everywhere.

But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.

Also she signed away the right to self-destruct years ago. The fine print on the birth certificate, her friends call it.

My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead.

These bits of poetry that stick to her like burrs.