like our parents always told us not to like firefighters warn against we're playing games and making the rules up as we go we're matching warmth to warmth starting fires burning wishes into our skin we're hidden holding forbidden lights we're children whose fathers have never taught never touch but we're finding these new flames we smother at the sound of footsteps.

My mother used to tell me when I went somewhere, "Please leave your foolishness at home." But how could I do that? It was stuck on me.

I grew up in St. Louis in a tiny house full of large music - Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson singing majestically on the stereo, my German-American mother fingering 'The Lost Chord' on the piano as golden light sank through trees, my Palestinian father trilling in Arabic in the shower each dawn.

Poetry calls us to pause. There is so much we overlook, while the abundance around us continues to shimmer, on its own.

I want to be someone making music/with my coming.

During the Gulf War, I remember two little third grade girls saying to me - after I read them some poems by writers in Iraq - 'You know, we never thought about there being children in Iraq before.' And I thought, 'Well those poems did their job, because now they'll think about everything a little bit differently.'

I think the job of writing and literature is to encourage each one of us to believe that we're living in a story.