Cover Photo: photo by Aditya Romansa/unsplash
photo by Aditya Romansa/unsplash

How to Live Without Ecstasy Every Day

On chasing ecstasy, finding tenderness, creating art, and experiencing motherhood.

As I write this, I am pregnant for the second time. The baby kicks me while I write, seeming eager to transcend his bounds, which are me. I learned from my first pregnancy that gravity endangered my ankles, so I write with my feet up on the desk, straddling the computer, reaching for it between my legs, giving a kind of birth to the written product.

To take in all the wonder in the world, all
Ӧmhet,ömhet.

ömhet

noyesyesyes

ekatasis,

Howl,

want

E!

Graceland

I love you too, mama Mama, it’s so glad to see you!

ömhet

and I’ve learned how to live without ecstasy
every day. But the tenderness,
oh, yes, the tenderness. I have that now
and the poetry is still calling and the trees
where I walk and hear your clear, light voice.
Tu lu lilla söt snut. I think about how you would be now, had you chosen
to live your life.

it’s so glad to see you.


Laura Goode is the author of a collection of poems, Become a Name (Fathom Books, 2016), and a novel for young adults, Sister Mischief (Candlewick Press, 2011) which was a 2012 Best of the Bay pick by the San Francisco Bay Guardian and a selection of two ALA honor lists. She co- wrote and produced the feature film Farah Goes Bang. Her nonfiction has appeared in BuzzFeed, Longreads, ELLE, Refinery29, New Republic, New York Magazine, Fusion, The Rumpus, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer: Logger, IndieWire, and Bright Ideas, where she is a contributing editor.