Tag: poem
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5/30
Compost It took me almost three weeks of shredding stalks of okra and ginger into the compost to really understand what lay before me, pulsing damp warmth onto the skin of my arms, To look into the slowly-warping scraps of vegetables, the crumbling eggshells, the thin white spinnings of mycelium, the dark, hidden mysteries of…
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3/30
Dear J, I had a dream a few weeks ago that I visited my grandma in the New Jersey facility, and her eyes were big with a fear I’d never seen on her. She told me she was going to die, and that she didn’t want to; it was so unfair. I drew her to…
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1/30
“Anyone pulled from a Source longs to go back.” – Rumi On days when I wake up angry at you, I try to be fair. I remind myself how I envy cats, their ability to curl themselves into any shape, surrounded snugly with a body. I remember, I fell asleep last night with my knees…
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10
Hiding Places The fingers of the fir treeI named Thomasout in the backyard. A table in the cornerwith a beer and an open tabwatching everyone watchthe people singing in the bright lights. The closet in the laundry roomsmelling my mother’s dresseslistening to footsteps thunder ondown the hallway. A screen showing mesomeone else’s story,as if it…
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9
Ways that Falling in Love Makes You More Creative With Language They challenge youthe way salt water challenges open sores. You work through itthe way a father works through the one weekendhis children are visiting. They are differentthe way life after a lobotomy is different. You learn independencethe way the tiny pink shoe on the sidewalkis…
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6
Why She is Crying When she looks at himshe sees a bright red woundhe does not seem to notice he winceswhenever he speaks he clings to her so tightly that she wonders if she made itdeeperevery time she breathed she cannot breathewithout feeling guilty she is alonewith a wailing childhe cannot see her armsare so…
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5
Thoughts on Silence 1. I remember reading that once you go from observing a conversation to participating in it,half of it is lost to you. The sound of your own voice ripples your vision, warps the picturebefore you. Your thoughts thicken like concrete. Certainty seduces you. You begin to forget how much you did not…
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2
The Unnamed I wonder if she is jealous of widows,who have a wordthat can describe the shade of lossthey have been stained. I wonder if she stands in his doorwaytrying to read it in the bars of his crib,the neatly folded shirtshe would soon outgrow, the windows fullof dusty velvet light.It is not morningbut the…
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9/30
I learned to write on my own,but I learned poetry from my mother.She will share with me a momentmost people would overlook –three deer in the backyardof her parents’ house –and still insistshe does not know the differencebetween my poemsand Emily Dickinson’s. She does not know the languagebut she recognizes the luminosityof moments;how our grandmotherwas…
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3/30
I asked a woman tonight about her owl tattoo. She told me of being in prison, of seeing the ground owls outside and caring for one who was wounded. She was the only one they allowed to approach. Letter from a Ground Owl I watched you wanderfrom wall to wall as I lay in the…