Between leaking sinks and midnight murmurs, small rituals of care and persistence carve out space for tenderness, humor, and quiet revelation in ordinary chaos. Read this lyric essay and see if you can relate.

Thank you to Thea Swanson, editor of Club Plum Literary Journal, for seeing the promise in “Baby Sign Language,” a prose poem about anticipation, rooting, welcoming, and the paradox of parenting them to outgrow us.

It didn’t matter to us that our dad didn't go on to play baseball professionally, probably like how my kids won’t care if I land a poem in the New Yorker. What I guess they’ll remember: how I hard boiled eggs on Sundays. 

I ask ChatGPT for an estimated time of arrival based on my baby’s due date, my age, our shared health history, other available biometrics. And, technology-entitled human that I am, I expect real-time updates via text message like those of my Uber Eats breakfast – “Order arriving soon!”

Is there some kind of revelatory, existential euphoria six taco-dip-layers deep within morning-routine chaos for parents of young children? Maybe. If not, there’s at least some comedy. A mother of a four-year-old with one on the way reflects on a salient vocal command involving a hoagie and her artwork.

What defines the perfect weekend-morning outing anyhow? Maybe there’s more beauty in nimbleness than the delay of muddy shoes. A mother explores resiliency while on an adventure along a bayshore coastline surrounded by tidal ponds and flora and fauna that’s learned to thrive in brackish water.

An essay about roses adrift on the ocean and their unexpected fate in the hands of a stranger mother.

Lately I’ve been after an ordinary life. Dinner at In-N-Out (as ordinary as a burger nestled within twin leaves of romaine instead of a bun can be). 

Crows, a window view of a cemetery, and stories stuck within the brick mortar of a hundred-year-old Pittsburgh rowhome.

Poems in Aurora Poetry Anthology