this beer
cant’t help but
to cry,
as it sits on the bar counter.
it’s open weeping
so intense,
it makes me wipe
my hand on my pants
as I sip.
so cold.
so delicious.
ain’t it funny
how despite its
own melancholic episodes,
it still pushes along,
and helps me through my despair.
god always blesses a good Samaritan.
pour oil on my wounds,
but save the wine for later,
for when i’ve had a few more drinks.
A bruised peach. “Perfectly imperfect,” says a dark haired woman as she presses it into my outstretched palm from across the fold out table, an Eden of multicolored corn in suits of silk and fading green, plump and misshapen red tomatoes, and extravagant heads of lettuce. We share it on a bench under a tree. I bite first, showing you with my fingers the bright orange fruit, glistening with juicy sweetness. You bury your whole face into its flesh, grasping its shedding layers with your gums. Upon resurfacing, you squint your eyes, nose crinkling in delight, chin jutting out and smile revealing your sinking city of milk teeth, a chunk of peach stuck between them. When we return home, you shovel handfuls of microwavable rice into your mouth. I yell when you smear yogurt with your bare hands across the fake hardwood. At night, I lay in bed and promise myself all the ways I will be better. What does a stranger see? Do they see the moments of panic when I think about the future, the years looming ahead like a giant, or an infinite staircase of responsibility? Do they recognize the impulse to swat my son’s thigh when his toenails dig into my skin just so? Can they tell how many promises I’ve thrown out the window? I’m tossing them every day, discarding them like peels of a lemon. Do they know isolation so comforting? Every person feels like a rock in my shoe. Some are only a pebble, but still change the way I move.
A bruised peach.
The flesh dissolving like rot
on your tongue.
“how can you be seventy and not know that!”
rest of the day wonder
what i’m halfway
to not knowing
“Ouch” says me I lost my Grandma’s mole today
I lost my grandma’s mole today
a well loved mole-that in an earlier year marked a higher plane but as Shakespeare says
“though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle’s compass come;” my grandma’s mole drifted low and began to cause some pain
“Off with it and the one on your shin” the doc she say
Oh No- not the shin, I said with a tear; me mum thought that a speck of dirt-long ago and tried to “scrub” that one “away”!
As a child
my father
made me
write
1000 times
I will obey
I will obey
I will obey
It didn’t work
A poem a day, you say?
Can that be so hard? I say.
Oh no, I’ll find a way.
Not as hard as a play.
Just get started! Okay?
Hot warm bubbles in a peach colored tub
Big enough to hold her dainty feet
Swallowing them up in a froth
Glistening with the sheen of iridescent
The sunlight reflecting the light on the bubbles
The air perfumed with the sweet smell
Tangerine
Mamaw’s favorite body wash
Soaking her feet as my mom would sit
A soft, cotton towel in her lap
For drying
Only after washing mamaw’s feet
Ever so delicately
Yet with such care and intention
The warm water mixed with bubbly soap
Leaving mamaw’s crepe like skin
Even more soft
The blue of her veins softening
A lilac hue peeking through
The warm, reddened skin from the water
Pat dried feet then
Covered in tangerine lotion
Her sweet, little feet
A sweet service of love and humility
Between two generations
Bare teeth
flesh
bite down
hard.
Can’t you
see me?
Losing it
in here
alone
Fire
in the bones
of man
looking for
something
to burn
Something
to burn away
the rage
the spitfire
all
that is left
is the
ashes.
An ode to volatile organic compounds inspired by Sylvia Plath’s Mushrooms
We are
the smoke
on the knobs
of the Daniel Boone National Forest
Always
Stealing over
Weaving around
Wraithlike
Contradictory
Both born yesterday
And settling here long before
the first long hunters crossed the Cumberland Gap
Masquerading
as the smoke of man’s fire
We are in fact an optical illusion
performed by Mother Nature
Welcome sign for the diaspora
coming home to the coalfields
A comforting blanket
those rooted in the hollers can wrap around their shoulders
Perfectly voiceless we have inspired
artists to sing and sign our stories
and my sisters and I will shroud these hills and hollers
until the end of time.
i barely stave off fear
to face urban rush hour
in a two-ton car powered
on four hefty tires.
tired.
making it to work
is a struggle
and then I return home,
a concrete biome.
She weighs only as much as two peas,
a couple of flimsy sticky notes,
a postage stamp;
air currents and her determination
carry her tiny mass.
Spring and she has returned
from a mountain of sacred fir
in central Mexico –
a migration on marigold wings.
Her heart has bridged the divide
of 2000 wide miles.
i get in my car,
gird myself with a deep breath,
back out of the driveway.
Invincible,
she prepares to lay hundreds of eggs
in waiting milkweed
one at a time.
Todos somos viajeros,
pero Ella es La Verdadera Reina.
We are all travelers,
but She is the True Queen:
Her majesty, the Monarch.
