Today I sat as dark poured into the room
and did not make dinner.
I did not light candles or place the challah on a plate.
I did not feed my child, which is likely not criminal,
she has 5000 packets of cheez-its in her bed.
I let the night come – it is only 6:42 and I can right this wrong –
turn on the light, take wilted flowers from the vase
and consider my other failures (a long list):
I forgot to get married.
I went to Alaska and slept with someone I didn’t love, at all, because
In Philadelphia I slept with someone who didn’t love me.
My hair is unruly and now it is gray.
The myriad unmailed thank-you notes and birthday cards in drawers,
(to say nothing of the ones I didn’t write at all, each one a little reprimand I carry around in my pockets,
in particular the one to Dan Harper’s mother and apologizing to his sister for thinking she was nine,
during the Reagan administration).
I never gave birth.
I yelled at my child so the neighbors heard.
I failed English in the tenth grade.
I didn’t take Greek.
I couldn’t inhale.
I have bills for unpaid parking tickets, aborted newspaper subscriptions.
I dropped a word in the first line of a parole memo so that it announced brightly,
“My client has had a drink since the night of the murder!”
I grumble at hair flippers on the train, women applying makeup, the men who don’t mask.
I don’t garden.
I stopped drawing in fifth grade when I saw someone was better.
I said “@#!# you” to my mother and also to my daughter.
I am sentimental.
I have “not lived up to my potential.”
I have cried at work.
I know the Mommy Wars are real.
I enjoy writing long emails excoriating people and I save them to read again.
This list is endless, there’s no reason to stop here, but
I go back to the kitchen, I pull Shabbat out of a rabbit’s hat
(since this is a poem, I should say a rabbi’s hat, that would be funnier) —
tomatoes with onions and dill, watercress, fish,
I give the dog a carrot, I set the table, light the candles, bless the child, and wait for the next mistake.
