Reading the Sunday New York Times is my church, a sacred ritual of discovering the world as those dear reporters and editors see it. I savor their words in every section like I savor the chicken and squash I roast for lunch, like the butter cream icing on my tender-crusted apple dumpling.
 
Except the back of the Style section -- the wedding announcements. 
 
I used to savor them, too. Maybe more than butter cream. They’re kind of like obituaries in reverse. I even thought about working them into an art project. Until their cheerfulness felt like false optimism, like icing without the butter, and I found myself composing obits on the marriages.
 
And that’s not how I want to spend my remaining precious breaths. Unless for my next project, there’s something there…    
 

“Compassion is not a relationship between healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals… it becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.” Pema Chodron
 

After seeing the movie “Shoplifters” at the recent Milwaukee Film Festival, I realized most films and books and poems end on an exhale, a let-go, a silence.
 
“Shoplifters” concluded with a close-up of a girl and her inhale. I want to figure out how to end poems in mid-inhale. And then
 
 

I won’t be watching the movie, “Goodbye Christopher Robin.”
 
All that cuteness irks me. And those all-knowing, innocent gazes that parents never see in real life because they are too busy weaning their toddlers from diapers and their adult children from heroin. Without one thank you.
 
At movie’s end, I’ll feel guilty for wanting to slap him, my handprint embossed on his dimpled cheek.