A bucket
Two feet past the busy woodpile, Igor’s fury and the stillness that reigned after the trees cracked. The baby restless. The rampage. A bucket and all it could hold. CLICK ON THE RECORDING TO LISTEN
Ready?
Small girl in a clutch of trees scraped knees peeking from a gallumph of rubbers. Her yellow boots big as the world CLICK ON THE RECORDING TO LISTEN
Trade route
You are knees and curls, a palette of surprise. Rehearsing a way home, your feet too small to carry you. CLICK ON THE RECORDING TO LISTEN
Amazing Grace
Your fine bones and the weight of you. The night unending and the swell of this tiny song, humming. CLICK ON THE RECORDING TO LISTEN
Twinkle, twinkle
The woods and your red cheeks and the baby tucked, just so. You find the words and sidle up alongside, swelling with rhyme. CLICK ON THE RECORDING
Schoolyard in Cuetzalan
Could you live here? he asked, meaning the trumpets and the bone-rattling streets, the crisp white shirts and someone forever sweeping a sidewalk to dust. Could you? he asked, meaning our son, unborn, and our daughter’s lily white hand. Darling, a part of us always will. CLICK ON RECORDING TO LISTEN
Pop Goes the Weasel
Round and round go the songs in my heart. Mechanical surprise. CLICK ON RECORDING TO LISTEN
16-week heartbeat
Tap tap tap tap. What’s your message little one? Tap tap tap tap. Are you a daughter or a son? CLICK ON THE RECORDING TO LISTEN
4-week baby nursing
It all comes down to this he said, Curious. That it all should come down. That it, in its sprawling it-ness, could, or would ever be, felled. The whole shebang. The whole enchilada. Kaput. Perhaps he meant this: the wide world shrunk to one room where everything that matters is this man, sleeping, his…
Two rubber ducks
A drama unfolds in this metropolis of bubbles — two lost on the high seas, their magic carpet no match for the vortex raging past the plug and down the pipes and under the asphalt, out into the harbour and through the narrows toward Ireland and beyond. Saved by a girl with a watchful…