I keep a list as close as my phone, and draw a deep sense of satisfaction each time I strike a task from it. In such erasure lies joy. No matter how much I give of myself to household chores, each of the rooms under my control swiftly unravels itself again in my aftermath, as though a shadow hand were already beginning the unwritten lists of my tomorrows…

A convex seer, this rear-view mirror lets me peer into the landscape unwinding behind me, but it cannot show what is ahead, nor how I should turn next.

In choosing to carry a pregnancy, a woman gives of her body with a selflessness so ordinary that it goes unnoticed, even by herself. Her body becomes bound to altruism as instinctively as to hunger. If cannot consume sufficient calcium, for example, that mineral will rise up from deep with her bones and donate itself to her infanct on her behalf, leaving her own system in deficiency. Sometimes a female body serves another by effecting a theft upon herself.

In choosing to carry a pregnancy, a woman gives of her body with a selflessness so ordinary that it goes unnoticed, even by herself.

In the mirror that holds both of us, my dark hair shadows her fair, and there, I observe her reflected scowl at her mother: a real little girl.

I don’t know what it’s all for, but I keep going anyway, in the misguided hope that if I can simply exhaust my obsession it might come to bore me, eventually. It’s a foolish approach that only makes things worse, because the more I read, the sharper my rage grows.

..my favourite element hovers beyond the text, in the untranslatable pale space between stanzas, where I sense a female breath lingering on the stairs, still present, somehow, long after the body has hurried onwards to breathe elsewhere.

Instead, I'll think of new words, and then I'll follow them.

We cannot know from whose mouths the echoes of our lives will chime.

Never in this quest have I found a simple answer; every lead is always a prelude to more questions.