#uncoffeed...

My daughter was born the day before my 27-week prenatal check-up.  Her father noticed at 1:00 AM in a hotel room on Airline Highway in New Orleans that I was literally crawling to the bathroom every half hour because, I said, I had to pee. "No, you are not having that baby now," he muttered into his pillow. But I did. I went by ambulance to Charity Hospital , got stuck with a needle, and held the nurse's hand so she could tell me when to push because I was no longer feeling contractions. By 3:00 AM, Baby Yaya slid out and screamed at the world - not fearful, but annoyed. She was cold and wanted people to stop messing with her. She's still that way. I knew she would be okay despite being early; that she was a complete entity of her own, not a part of me. I was just the vessel. There's a moment like that in the creative process, if I'm lucky. Sometimes I'm focusing so hard on the details of my work that I am absolutely dumbfounded by the final p...

My friend Meg played the catalyst this time. She bought me a Zombie Magnetic Poetry Kit and informed me I was to take it to work. "You have a kitchen at your job; I don't," she said. "So this is for your work-kitchen." Roger that. I scooped up a few words, sidled into the break-room and stuck them on the refrigerator door, trying to guess how many minutes I'd be blamed. Even if someone else had done it, my reputation would precede me. By the time I got back to my desk, I was envisioning HR's gentle admonishments in my head, so I went back and pulled all the death, corpses, and creepiness. Not an hour later, I found a new message: find out how unstoppable you can be ...and then I realised someone had gone and found the word be in a different set of magnetic poetry, and in fact had severed it from a longer word, in order to complete her message. I say her, because I knew it had to be Roxanne Jackson , who happens to be a wise person and...