Posts for June 12, 2025 (page 9)

and i watch from helpless floods

as my patriarchs fade into the hallways

of humid hospitals as their organs

leak into the yellowing smoke

crusted into the walls; Abuelito’s

brain is bleeding, and my father’s

heart is weak, and he says it is just

one thing after the other ever since

his mother’s cancer came to rock

the saltwater shores of our comfort,

all the ignored calls and days spent

rotting in front of screens. And all

of the sudden I am helpless again

like a child again yelling again

where did they go

where did he go

is a brain wave
in a woman’s remembered
understory
an electrical pulsing
of bark and bloom
whimsical sunset companion
vivid ripples waiting
wanting only
to be acknowledged
as a keepsake
the glory
how light baptizes leaves                                 

                                                               For Stella     

Is it the ADHD?
Or is there more wrong with me?
The longer the damn list gets,
The more on my ass I sit “

Fucking loser,” I mutter…
Insurmountable clutter
Mocks and snickers as it grows,
The Undone aims to overthrow

Frozen by the need of me
None of the things let me be,
The piles nor the people,
Worn hands can’t thread a needle!

Instead of doing “the things,”
To this page I plunge and cling
And now, as I near the end,
Checklist ready, but… NO PEN?!

this single number
is enough to shatter my
whole self confidence

Having moved to the south
with our own predilections,
my daughter was doomed. 
By two, responded fettucini alfredo
when asked her favorite food.  

As peers discussed beloved chips,
she was lost.  Same, during the bible story
game introduced at a birthday party.
When they said grace at preschool
she insisted the first three syllables
were not God is Great, but Honest Gray,
which we felt was a sweet interpretation.  

At home, it was with affection
she renamed nightly dishes  –
warm mush, soggy lettuce salad,
and following a kitchen mishap,
upside-down-oven-lid-surprise.   

Now in her forties, she is organized
and wise. Surely more sophisticated
than I, cooking from directions
on her laptop dictated by culinary artists
foreign to me.  Sometimes, as the years
go by, I can’t help but wonder:
Will any of the stained and marked-up
recipes amassed from my lifetime
in the kitchen find a place in  hers?                                                      

We tossed our watches out because our phones
told us the time and so much more, like when
to go to bed, how many steps our hearts
required us to take. We had an app
to order food, another app to flag
a ride. So when the grid went down, we had
no watches, and we left our sense of time
somewhere back in the ancient past, and now
a cyber bully with no social media
must find his prey in person. Tell me now:
who’s got the time to tell you to your face
that they don’t like your face? What did you call
me? How’d you call me with no phone? Face it:
the algorithm’s gone. The sun, the shadows, and
thr trees are calling. Now’s the time. Pick up.

Her once black muzzle is all white.
Her short legs can no longer propel
her long body up to her spot
on the sofa. 

She can still bark.
Lift me up. Put me down.
Mostly she sleeps, on any lap,
or wrapped in a blanket. 

Around her swirls the chaos
of a household of three adults,
two small kids, four other dogs. 

        For Emily Dickinson

I go to the beach on my phone,

scrolling instead of strolling,

scrolling with my sand-colored hands.

I stop on the image of a cliff

then stop again on the image

of a sea cave, carved not by the sea.

When the walk is over, I plug

my phone back into its charger,

neither of us yet recharged.