Posts for June 26, 2023 (page 3)

On a walk today
I hear my daughter
saying words I never
imagined coming from 
her lips. Not that she
doesn’t love me, 
not that she doesn’t 
respect me. 
Responding to someone
talking about how I 
am perceived as a person
her words were,
“and I am becoming 
more like her everyday”.
My daughter,  who has 
met the life long 
challenge of being 
diabetic since she was 
eleven years old,
who has felt the harsh
reality of dishonesty 
and disrespect from
her father,  who has
been called the “smart” 
twin instead of the
“pretty ” one by 
insincere judging 
adolescent peers,
who has been working 
since she was seventeen, 
who was so angry at me
for so long because I 
couldn’t figure how to
get away from our 
circumstances, 
this child wants to be
connected to me.
My heart, my brain,
my world expanded 
because I’ve been trying 
to be more like her.

KW  6/26/23

The coolness of my

bed is so seductive. I

may sleep all day long.

The stuffed bunny sings

a siren song of sleep. I

can’t resist the spell.

A quiet day in bed.

Drifting in and out of sleep.

A day without pants.

Clinging to the last

bits of weekend. I dread the

coming of Monday.

a prophecy, a spell, a dare,
heavy with the weight of beauty,
often those chosen when composing poetry,
not exactly right, not exactly able to cite, but in my palm, starlight
uncloaks night
so that someone may read it, and for a second, find
around us, above us, below us
crimson marrow: sweet, plump, fragrant salve.

Here’s an exercise in imagination:
Who will soften the harsh rain?
The splash reaches the tip of my tongue,
some mossy crawling through the hollows.
I hover too, savor the fleeting
roars in forked tongues that lick the sky.
But hidden among un-
fallen fruit, I want the sun-
flowers as far as the eye can see into the horizon.

Later in another country,
you must share every note you wrote with one
barred owl, called before sunset.
(Or an echo of what you’ve wished
after there are no more blue things and simply silence).
Give me this one little thing.
My attention isn’t long enough;
I persist in echoes.

A Cento with lines by Jessica Stump, Pat Owen, Mary Allen, Sawyer Mustopoh, Pam Campbell, Shaun Turner, Libby Falk Jones, Karen George, Mike Wilson, Dilly, Tom C. Hunley, Sylvia Ahrens, Nancy Jentsch, Alissa Sammarco, Melva Sue Priddy, Kevin Nance, Catherine Perkins, Elizabeth Beck,  Ellen Austin-Li, Gwyneth Stewart, Goldie, Greg Friedman, Misty Skaggs, Victoria Woolf Bailey and Maira Faisal

I honor you! In your fishnet stockings,
rainbow flags painted on your arm,
earlobes dripping with jewelry,
layers of necklaces,
dressed for the parade. 
You’ve gone so far,
had to leave,
to find
you. 

Cold glass of grape juice
turns incandescent in my cheeks.
Nervous-
blush-
charisma which loosens
my grip
and tightens
my lisp.

I think I’m stuck in a time loop.
I always stare out at the setting sun.
Every day, I see the same ball of light before me.
The sky doesn’t have to choose between the four bottles of paint I keep on my desk at home.
I don’t even know some of the colors the sky turns are colors until I see them there.
Well, I’ve seen things that are red,
Things that are pink and orange,
But in the sky, the colors are arranged in such a way,
That they all start to fade into each other,
Creating something that I barely have words to describe.
The sunset is a contrast to the grey stone beneath my feet.
I stand on the edge of a cliff,
The ocean stretching on for miles in front of me,
And miles of bare stone, hot from sitting in the sun all day, behind my back.
I see my shadow, cast on the ground.
I can tell that I am holding my head high, because of how my shadow looks.
Even though my shadow doesn’t have any eyes,
I know its gaze is strong,
Unmoved, even by the waves which I can hear crashing against the bottom of the cliff face far below,
Slowly eating away at it.
The way my shadow stands reflects that gaze.
Because of how my shirt bunches up, if you were to see my dark silhouette, but not me, you would think I carry a sword on my back.
I look at my shadow, and I see a hero staring back at me.
It’s strange, because even though it is my own shadow, when I see it, for a split second, I see someone else.
“Help me,” I whisper to the hero,
“Across the ocean, there’s a beautiful city,
I wanted to live there,
But it’s crumbling.  
Now is just the right time.
I can build a boat, and the city’s just the right distance away,
So that we’ll get there exactly at sunrise.
Then, you’ll be cast behind me like you are now.”  
The ground beneath my feet always crumbles away, then,
And I fall towards the sea.
I feel the cold wind blowing off of the water, and just before I hit the surface, I notice my shadow is still cast on the cliff face.
It whispers something so softly, it’s voice could be the wind,
But somehow I know that the words are the words of a shadow.
“But I have no hands to wield a sword.”
Then, I open my eyes.
I’m lying in bed, and I’m staring at the drawing on my wall,
Depicting a hero, with a stony gaze,
Who’s a part of a fantasy world, which I had sketched out around her.
Then, every morning, I look down at my hands.
My shadow is sort of like the universe’s black and white pencil sketch of me,
Or maybe it’s the other way around.
Maybe when I drew the hero, I was sketching myself.  
Maybe I draw my shadow,
Because every day, I realize that there’s no shadow of a hero, without a hero to cast it. 
Every day I think that,
And every day, I wake up long after dawn. 
Every day, I think of the sunrise and the twilight when I see my shadow,
But during each one of the Earth’s rotations, when I look in the mirror I notice how the way I stand reflects my gaze.
I’m glad that I don’t have to set my alarm too early.

Sometimes the storms come later than expected
        wind blowing us over

                howling injustice as we seek shelter in our homes

        sneaking up, cutting through clouds with lightning
and thunder raining chaos onto our evening

ripping bits and pieces from every edge

        scattering them into yards and roads,
then gone just as suddenly as they began

leaving rainbows in their wake.

The house is always full
of people, food, and laughter.

Each meal is lovingly crafted
by my grandma’s deft hands–
experience rooted deep
in the map of calluses that covers them.

Card games and conversations
fill every free moment.
Traditions crafted and nurtured 
by them,
taught and passed down
to us,
in hopes that we will preserve them.

It is never silent,
never empty
when we come to visit.

I try not to think
of the day it will end.

The day that house becomes empty
is the day I will
as well.

On a bookshelf or in a closet,
never quite scattered
as was the plan.
You keep dusting and dusting.
Through the years you keep dusting.

Someday someone will ask,
Who was that?
and you will answer –
someone I once loved
too much to bury.

the current pattern
not what I’d hoped for
is it time to admit
I simply do not know
I want to cling to something
certainty or its near relative
but there’s nothing here to grab ahold of
I’m learning maybe that’s the message
I don’t need an anchor or rock
only the air I breathe