would nonsense be so awful?
I eat pistachios
drink my grapefruit juice mixed with grapefruit sparkling water
late afternoon
the precipice of summer
darkness though, as a storm blows through
I’ve received little subtleties, of late
signs I take as encouragement
now, the rain
if it were possible, I would ask
would an allowance leave you any worse for the wear?
Don’t be afraid of gettin’ older girl
Your twenties might be nearly over
But the lines next your eyes
Were put there by thousands of smiles
You’ve been belly laughin’ all your life
You’ve got a grey hair or two now, girl
Each one earned by the fight
You drove your feet into the mud
Refused to accept a narrative preemptively written
Please keep being stubborn
Neil told you – don’t stop looking up
Don’t be afraid of gettin’ older girl
The next decade is filled with so much love
28 trips around the sun
280 more still wouldn’t feel like enough
Rain runs down my face like someone else’s tears
Washing away your words from the world
Words which are people which are days which are my life
Until all I have left is the space in my mind where you used to be
This is not therapy:
I already understand why I lose teeth in dreams.
I replace my real toothbrush every few months.
But, how often should I replace the cinnamon sticks my daughter and I hung over the doors?
This could be a confessional:
my grandbabes are All.
They arrived after the cinnamon sticks we hung:
my daughter’s abundance, both boys, my Joy.
They are why I brush,
postponing my slow going
the way of sea turtles and elephants and gorillas and….
The oldest learned last week to say Turtle.
I hope he learns names of countless once and living things:
a name connotes Holy.
Every night, I hold my grandsons’ faces in my mind
and think their names,
willing their safety,
willing them whole.
I, as powerless as a toothless turtle flailing in an acid ocean,
wave a stale cinnamon stick at falling bombs.
Once upon a Friday night,
she waltzed down those rickety steps
she helped her dad build out of plywood
and two-by-fours nailed together
next to the porch, grinned as she sashayed
before her parents and the hound dog;
the latter didn’t pay any mind.
Mind you, it wasn’t a balmy Friday;
frigid wind swept through her cold-shoulder top,
up the flouncy skirt that had been so cute indoors.
She shivered from her perfume-spritzed curls
to her merlot-polished exposed toes
all the way from those first few wooden steps
to the neon doorway of a downtown club.
Probably once upon a Friday night it had a name,
but most of the names and faces that evening
would spin into a hazy tequila Saturday sunrise
before she even realized her Uber never came,
unlike that boy buying all the Patron shots
whose name and face she can’t seem to forget,
even more than a decade later, as hard as she tries,
as many salty tequila tears that she has cried.
The air is thick and lazy.
All day it’s grown hotter
baking into my skin,
smothering like a wool blanket
pressing me into a lethargic lull
melted right into my rocker.
By afternoon, I see clouds rise up like
forgotten dough over hills in the distance
until thunder cracks over the hum of the AC,
leaves turn up on trees, and
I smell rain in the air
as crisp as an ocean breeze
brushing through the porch railing
gaining speed with each blackened cloud,
kissing my face with the promise of relief.
The late-spring heat presses itself upon us
our sweat drips, nearly sizzles when it explodes
like a supernova across midnight black pavement
We walk slow
our movement a small resistance
a chance to let the atmosphere know that we are worthy
of nothing more than this parched existence
in a time of constant change, “new normals” always
moving with record-shattering speed
I take pause and wonder when the earth spirals from its own axis
where will she spit us?
how will it feel when we soar like shooting stars across the remnants of yesterday’s sky?
what will survive, if anything?
Heat and humidity laugh with hoodlum mosquitoes at the party.
(American sentence for Pam Campbell)
