#jo cox

In the fall of 2015 I sat in a chair in a coffee shop and wrote a poem on a legal pad, which is where most of my poems begin. I titled it “Good Bones.” The poem was published online in the journal Waxwing the following June—the same week as the Pulse Nightclub massacre in Orlando and the murder of MP Jo Cox in England.

You’re reading this book, so you probably know what happened next: the poem went viral. Reporters emailed, messaged me on social media, called. Meanwhile, I was parenting two children, ages three and seven. I was Violet’s mom and Rhett’s mom most of all—that was how I was known to people in my life, and that was fine with me. Even after the poem went viral, I was still hidden, cleverly disguised as one of the least visible creatures on earth: a middle-aged mother. As I told a reporter from the Columbus Dispatch, my hometown paper, “I feel like I go into a phone booth and I turn into a poet sometimes. Most of the other time, I’m just Maggie who pushes the stroller.”

It’s cynical to think the end of a thing is tucked inside its beginning, like the hidden pictures in a Highlights magazine—an umbrella, a pencil, a roller skate. Or a pinecone, a postcard, a poem. But my marriage was never the same after that poem.

Sir David Amess,69, MP Stabbed to Death at Constituency Surgery

Sir David Amess,69, MP has been stabbed to death at the constituency meeting where he regularly meets with his constituents. Armed cops swooped on the church in Leigh-on-Sea after the 69-year-old, who represents Southend West in Essex, was attacked just after midday. The 25-year-old knifeman is understood to have stormed the Belfairs Methodist Church and stabbed Sir David several times. Essex…