our yard: spring heaven–
filtered crabapple flowers,
burgeoning aspen
red tulips bursting
while puppy and Daddy rest
for Sunday funday
crabapple city
beckons my perfect cycle
through pink and white parks
renewal
Subtle Spring
the crabapple bloom
has taken its time this year
to brighten our yard
There’s Still Hope
a new world view:
a high school stage set with love
inclusive of all
PowderPoo
pomapoo powder
won’t complain of April snow
snow play any day
Spring Forward
words have been long gone
too many pics and lives lived
since when i last wrote
Seasonal Adore Disorder
a cloud beneath us–
powder day brings heaven home
as flakes float our love
Fly Us Home
Wanting a better life for her family, my mother uprooted us to move to Denver when I was 11. Contrarily, her own parents had ripped her from Park Hill Elementary at the same age 33 years prior in the 1960s “white flight” migration. Always burdened by this blatant racism, my mother told us, “We’re moving straight to Denver, and you girls will learn the value of diversity.”
I attended Merrill and Cole middle schools and Manual High School, the latter two hosting the burgeoning Denver School of the Arts.
Unlike my tiny town in upstate New York, DPS offered me a side of society I’d never seen: racial violence in forced-integration hallways, a Chicano Mathletics coach, and a set of friends from multiple races, language backgrounds, and family dynamics. DSA offered me a spotlight into the world of LGBTQ acceptance and the privilege of the most inspirational teacher anyone could ever imagine–Mrs. Jana Clark.
Mrs. Clark and DPS are the reasons I became a teacher and the reason I came back to this district after teaching stints elsewhere.
Because Denver is my microcosm of what the world could be. What my mother wanted and what I was lucky enough to proclaim: I am a DPS graduate. I am a DPS parent. I am a DPS teacher.
DPS represents our world. Its teachers represent DPS.
Listen to the teachers. Their right to strike is your right to make this city the one we want to fly to, not fly from.
Dear Governor Polis
I am begging you, as a father, a son of a teacher, and a former superintendent, not to intervene in the possible teacher strike at Denver Public Schools.
DCTA has been negotiating with DPS for fifteen months. All we are asking is for a transparent salary schedule similar to every other school district in the state, not one plagued with unfair bonuses given to some teachers and MANY administrators. We are asking for deep cuts to central administration, where millions of dollars are wasted on positions for non-student-facing employees. We are asking for a salary that will help us pay the exorbitant healthcare costs this district offers (I’m talking $12,000 deductible for a family of four!!).
We have already had a mediator who used to be the head of the Colorado Department of Labor. We have done everything we are supposed to do to make fair proposals and meet the district at the bargaining table in good faith.
We need your support, not your intervention.
We give our lives for our students. But all of us will leave this district–this profession–if we must face a future where we are vilified by the press and our superintendent, where we are not paid adequately for our high levels of education and certifications, and where our governor doesn’t support us.
You have the chance as our new governor to show the world where you stand as a human being. Rather than giving into the corporate greed of charterization, I’m begging you to support the faces who face those children, who love those children, for more hours than anyone could ever put a dollar to.
Please, Governor Polis. Show us who you really are, and who you really aim to be as the leader of my home state.
Color Me Home
sometimes blue linings
found high above the city
make silver feel frail
This Is Why I Will Strike
I just want to think about how hard-won this moment is. This day. This five of us skiing down a mountain together. This money we didn’t have before that we have now.
This fresh powder.
This view. Could you beat that view if you went anywhere else in the world? Well, could you?
I don’t want to think about the five years we, a family of five, lived on a frozen, constituents-unwilling-to-vote-on-a-mill-levy teacher’s salary of $48,000. The $10,000 out-of-pocket expenses we paid to give birth to our third child. The penny-pinching. The laying-out-$400-every-three-months to earn those goddamn fifteen credits so I could get a raise if I … changed school districts.
I don’t want to think about how Spain screwed me out of a decent salary and we came home afterward with $19,000 in debt, more than any we’ve had as a married couple.
I don’t want to think about the TWO 1998 cars we have outside our house right now, car-payment free.
I don’t want to think about a teacher’s strike. I don’t want to think about my refugees trekking across town on two buses and being huddled into the auditorium to wait, without teachers, the long seven hours until they trek back, because if they don’t wait, they might not have a meal that day.
About the hundreds of hours I, and every teacher I know, has put into grading, planning, meeting, educating (ourselves and them), in the ten months between August and June. Hundreds of hours outside our contract day listening to students tell us their traumas that are greater than any soul could bear, listening to our admin and school district rate us as failures when we wake before dawn and go home after dusk to bring our best selves into that classroom every day, listening to our coworkers decide between renting a slumlord shithole or buying a house an hour away…
Listening.
I don’t want to think about the thousands of union workers who died for this day. For this choice. For a society where corporate greed is not the only answer.
I just want to see my husband and my three girls gliding down this Colorado slope, this Colorado hope.
I want to ski. To smile. To rejoice.
I don’t want to go on strike.
But I will.
Just like I walked in and out of Manual High School in 1994 when my teachers asked me to support them.
Just like I lived on pittance pay for the early part of my children’s lives.
Just like every other union member everywhere who’s looking to find empathy in the eyes of the corporate monsters that rule our society.
I will strike.
And I will ski.
And we will win ourselves a bluebird day.
Step Write Up 