C R Y

Baby A has "a lion-bug-mouse-bug" in her throat. "It growls, then it squeaks. Growl. Squeak. Growl." Also, "I can't breathe very well, Mama."

She's breathing very rapidly. She sounds bad enough to make Big A take a listen.

And it completely panics me when Big A (he of the "Let them take a Tylenol" advice when I take the kids' pains and complaints to him) thinks he should take her to the E.R.

I take Li'l A to school, and set off for work, get all the way to the highway and drive the 15 minutes back to hug her again. And she tries to make me feel happy by gasping out "If you're happy and you know it, do like this [lifting my hair up in the air]."

So I think about that in the car and cry some more on the way to work. And then on the radio, Japan. Libya. Cry some more.

Get to the office, check e-mail read the wonderful, loving comments on my women's studies students' eval forms. Cry even more.

It's 10:00 a.m. I'm exhausted.

_

Ready for climbing into spring

Since it was a high of 38 degrees today, it speaks to either our extreme optimism or market-worthy prescience, that N, L, and I got pedicures. A post birthday celebration of two hours of massages, chatting, (window) shopping, pampering, and--for favors--twinkly toes.

I get massages and facials fairly regularly, but pedicures trigger my latent south asian fear of pollution and disrespect. And although it's been years since I watched a certain SATC episode, it stayed with me.  "The girls" are out for pedicures, and are able to perform that oughties form of consumerist power by way of a bevy of servile and--in the narrative--interchangeable, unspecified, east asian women literally kneeling at the protagonists' feet.

Perhaps things have changed? L's pedicurist had the same name as her and this symmetry illogically made everything seem decent if not downright ethical. The pedicurists we met yesterday were from all over south east asia, predominantly Cambodia and Vietnam (not Korea as was typically the case), N and I even had male pedicurists, which was so unanticipated that it immediately relaxed my political hackles.

Anyway. Onward, purple toes!

_

Little Red Worm

You come
you go

repeat of drum.
Little red shield

and skinny tail
and trailing snout

wending

latchstring.

Fickle as dreams
redeemed in December.

Indistinct as
the faults of spring.

_

B(l)eeping bed

Every night before I go to bed, I pray that no one sends us a fax.

Due to Big A's love for all electronic stuff--no matter how alien and unnecessary it is to our lives-- we are now in proud possession of a fax/scan machine. And because there are no phone jack things in the study, the fax machine sits waiting like an nascent weapon under our bed.

I bet even the President doesn't keep a fax machine that close as he sleeps.

_

Radio

"Live me?"
He asks.

(Or is it
"Leave me"?)

"Army kill me.
Live me, please."

_

Frangipane (Paint)

my eyes sip roses
light lurks lupine

~the contractions
of heart birth~

I throw my furies
to escape me now

~prowl the pretty
places we live~

_

Tired

My leaf self

finds

caterpillar trains.

These gods

tuck 11 maps

to my life

into safe folds

in my brain,

shape it shut

like 

a sand castle
installation.

_