Posts for June 19, 2023 (page 8)

I was named celebrity
judge for Nashville’s foolishly
popular pet parade. My column

printed three times a week complete
with a headshot. That’s me reporting
on death, crime, the newest

Pizza Hut. I juiced mundane
specifics, the tangled
details—How many guns

in the arsenal?  Exact time
of death? I rarely fessed
up to what was mushrooming

inside me like the rhizomes
of a rootbound Hibiscus.
Please understand, I was

a success, a seasoned
professional. I met brutal
deadlines & kept my workface

face intact until, after clocking
overtime, I’d unlock my front
door & collapsed on the over

stuffed loveseat. Unopened bills
scattered on the floor like dead
trout. Once-green Calathea withered

to bacon-brown curls. One night
Princess Maragaret, my Goldenface
Parakeet, dropped dead in the cage.

Hard to talk about, I still
want to run. A family of mice moved
into the folds of the davenport, where they

begat chestnut-colored babies, each the size
of a coat button. Once a tiny one pranced
across my blue gym shoes. Was she

trying to save me from success, my personal
Chernobyl? I got better slowly. Recovery
at the speed of a rusty tricycle. No one

at the newspaper knew why I took
an extra week of vacation, that I’d started
meds, that my boyfriend left me

but came back determined
to help. It took four days to clear out
the trash, pack up what I could save.

                ~ with thanks to Coleman Davis ~

If I could plunge to the depths of my soul
I would see that it can never be cold
I would feel the contours without depth
I would trace the arrows of shallow needs.

If the doors of perception were open
I would feed my muse and not my patron
But they are clear
I am the dust they are near.

Christmas stockings hung 
on the mantle, that by magic
appeared at the foot of our beds
the next morning. I remember
soup suppers and early 
Christmas Eve services and 
finally being old enough 
for midnight mass. I remember
Christmas at Chase Lake, 
Adirondack snow and ice
cocooning us as chickadees
ate peanut butter and seed
ornaments off the outdoor
trees. I remember three, four
generations squeezed into 
my sister’s house, the loaves
and fishes miracle we pulled off
to feed everyone. I remember
the silence and freezing cold
of my first pandemic Christmas,
spent alone. 

When I close my eyes
You are all I see.
Crinkle nose, eyes that smile before your mouth gets the message.
Your touch and your breath are all I feel.
Healing my heart with tender words and caresses.
I am your open book of well read, dogeared pages
Every turn a new ending and beginning.

We’re asleep. Coma, coma, take
     the key to Roma,
because in Roma there’s a strip,
on the strip, a chalet
in the chalet, a bedroom
in the bedroom, a bed
on the bed, a woman—
a woman of want:
who takes the key,
who leaves the bed,
who leaves the room,
springs the chalet,
takes up her sword,
runs down the night,
to kill the man who passes by—
comes to his strip,
back to his home,
up to his rooms,
enters his sheets
who hides the key
who hides the blade,
remaining in complaint
     Roma without passerbys—
without death, and without night.
without a key, and without a woman. 

Author: Rafael Alberti
Translator: Manny Grimaldi

sittin’ on a tailgate
listenin’ to the dogs
run a rabbit out in
some big open field
forty miles away it
seemed from just
about anything else

beagles are a way 
of life for us; they
have always been
my great grandpa
my pappy, my dad
and then me too

floppy eared and
big eyed; baying
through brush as
they jump another 
one up and take off

we raise em up as
family; they belong
to us and us to them
from stoic pups all
the way to the end
I have never known
what it is like without
the love of a good old
beagle hound 

lord, what would it
be like without them?
I don’t reckon that I
ever want to know 

The disappointment I saw, over a salty ocean was a star that’d always fall.

Phi-lo-so-phy al-ways comes too late, I sta-ted ten mi-nutes in-to the date.

“The more you plan, the more that can go wrong – I just like to keep moving along.”

You keep calling me home,

the heart is a muscle

i’ve been not quite fainting. i get dizzy and drop to the floor. might be broken heart syndrome. something i already know. my shattered heart still cuts me, with shards of memories, confetti scraps of your baby pictures like razors slicing me.  

jude told me, “the heart is a muscle, and yours is working hard.” oh son, my heart’s job was to hold you, but you left. you broke my heart.

my heart is a muscle with chambers where i keep my sacred things: your heart, your mind, your kids, your life, even the way you sang. 

the left ventricle falters. my blood a movie monster blob. it oozes through my body, sinking me to the ground. my poor heart laboring, yet hardly working at all.