Posts for June 8, 2023 (page 2)

I knelt in my basement-turned-courtroom, a judge presiding over a trial of twelve
years’ worth of immunization records, progress reports, cringeworthy
haircuts, and cardstock certificates, a lifetime of memories
to remember,
to forget.  

For an hour, I riffled through hazy recollections. 
Many sentences I sentenced
to oblivion:
generic certificates with “Outstanding Student” italicized on blank
lines, thank-you notes for gifts delivered not given.  These unworthy
memories wait to be paraded to shredder’s merciless maw, to be remade
into another third grade report card, to be stuffed into a bursting binder, to be forgotten
again.

Some memories I chose to spare:
scribbled Crayola drawings no sensible art museum would display, middle school theatre
programs from my brief stint as a starlet, letters that still make me smile.
These pardoned pages I will bury
in dusy plastic boxes I can visit like old tombstones
and remember past joys, memories that don’t have to die.

unaccompanied, unescorted
detach, disengage, disconnect 
lone, solo, solitary 
by myself, on my own
bliss of solitude
traveling light
seclusion 
only
me

on
a nondescript strip of interstate
between a dollar store and car
parts dealer an old military airport
with a razor wire fence sprouts
dozens of rows of low slung
barracks
converted to storage units for
anyone’s detritus seeking a home,
the bulbous billboard catches your 
eye:
A1A Self Storage
Built-In Shelves
Climate Controlled

you slow down
thinking of yourself on a shelf
a place for your Urn of ashes
in a dark cool room cut off
from the world, protected
from marauders or at least
from your next door neighbors,
you ask yourself if you’d have to
rent extra units for your id and
superego

It’s hard to watch you
spread peanut butter on bread
but you have to learn.

this isn’t really a poem

it’s more of a journal entry

to say “hey i quit my day job

in pursuit of more creative endeavors”

and then i found $20 in my pocket

if that isn’t a sign

from the universe

i don’t know what is

but i’m certainly paying attention

Sassy Jasper and her Master
Under the waxing moon
ablaze in earth shine

Under the swift hems of Venus
Entwined in Gemini
The dark side is much lighter than the sky,

Slate against indigo velvet
Illuminated like a bulbous bubble bursting from the
Blazing crescent

Tail and red trunk and stripes
The shadow of the leaves on the rock and the lady licking her paws

I can’t just smoke another cigarette 

Can you get this cake anytime, or is it only on your Birthday?
Is that a chicken or a dinosaur on the wall?

Smoke all the weed you want Jethro
If it’s what you wanna do 
Don’t smoke any weed if you don’t want to 
It’s the best you can do 

Bruce, Bruce, Bruce

I can’t just smoke another cigarette
that’s exactly what I can’t do

flying in a sky without a sun,
raise your wings high
and let them settle, like gravity, on the dust.

if you can’t see the stars,
trust your instincts, crows, sparrows, butterflies,
rest on the crowded air and it will carry you south
to the tree where you were once born
as the eternal sunset fades.

Ekphrasis: photograph of New York City, June 7, 2023

There’s something burning in the distance.
Much closer than the bitter, raging
northern blaze. 
There’s a fire a ridge or two over
that seems to be in control of itself.
The slow scorch sends up a steady plume,
and it goes on for hours, unceasing,
eating it’s way through piles of crunchy brush. 
The smoke smells like wet leaves
and a little bit of sassafras and I sit
out on the porch with a cup of coffee 
and a smoldering appetite to match, 
watching for signs and signals
that don’t appear out of nowhere
or anywhere at all. 

Simba remembers one of
her nine lives, the moon
like the night of their first tryst

I don’t know a word that means what I feel
when this bag I am dragging everywhere–
like a pillowcase stuffed with nightmares
of bombed hospitals, flooded zoo cages, landmines bobbing in rivers,
faces of mothers and of children lost in shootings–
can’t hold one more horror.

Invent a word that means I can let go of these horrors
and stretch my aching hands and feel
weightless, even if it’s just for the few minutes between mass shootings.
No sane person can take much more. Everywhere
these horrors follow me like the moon or the river.
Invent a word so powerful that it banishes the nightmares

that haunt me in sleep and the nightmarish
images that appear when I try not to think about anything horrible.
They’re like ghosts of bodies found in trees after the river
floods. Is there a word for not being strong enough to bear the weight I feel? 
Do you carry it, too, everywhere
you go, all of the time? The weight of all of the shootings,

all of the crimes against humanity? The shootings
and the nightmares
everywhere
the horror
so we feel
like rivers

swollen, rivers
churning with debris? I read about a woman shooting
a mother through a locked front door. That mother’s death feels
more heavy because I’ve seen her son’s face. Another word for a nightmare
living next door is evil. Another way to say horror
is living in America. Evil and horror have lived everywhere.

No sane person anywhere
can carry such collective trauma much longer. I am a river
trapped under an atmospheric river of torrential horror
filling my banks to bursting. Each shooting,
each war crime accumulates in nightmares.
Invent a word that means what I feel

when everywhere there is shooting
and every day my sanity struggles in a river of waking nightmares
and fresh horrors, the weight of which I can’t help but feel.