I mean, what I’m trying to say is that when you write in Midwinter Day that you write all night, that it’s not romantic but desperate—that these moments are stolen during naps or night time when you can have your brain back. It’s okay with me that we still do most of the caretaking; babies are precious and that time irretrievable, but let’s acknowledge it—you can’t say these things without sounding whiny or bitchy, but it’s a job like any other and it’s two jobs: mothering and writing but the classified ad never reads that way and the pay for both sucks. It’s still tragic and yet it’s archaic or bourgeoisie to point out the obvious disparity, not that it stops people, but who’s taking it seriously. It’s okay to talk about you being the only woman in that Allen’s new american poets anthology because we’ve come a long way, eh? But when you brought it up at Naropa in 2008 during a summer writing panel, people laughed. It was a way of containing it—the possibility that we hadn’t come very far at all. It was a way of drawing an edge around this Bernadette who might say anything—the way dangerous animals appear cute and cuddly at zoos—it’s absurd, but there’s some dynamite, some threat to the standard, if we start talking about numbers in publishing in relation to gender, there’s always some jackass who says it’s the fault of women for not doing the work…But what is the work? It’s hardly drunken dumbshow when I’m changing diapers and pumping breastmilk in the wee hours, putting down pen at a furious pace to tuck in and hold and caress and bathe and again. I’m always at work and twice as hard for half the show. What’s funnier is that I can take it (what choice do I have?) someone pointing out that I, a woman, wanted to have it all. Maybe you get a list of experiments to keep you going. It’s only the smaller ratio if you pin your life on it. There are all kinds of tricks for sleeping through the night, for getting the words to flow (you survive by surviving) turns out the glass ceiling is a series of nesting dolls but at the center, where the world wobbles, you uncurl tiny fingers to touch, touch, touch, not afraid knowing any true power is in the making: moon, water, eclipsed, we who tread on night’s dreaming.