Chandra envies your pearly teeth
brighter than Mt Everest’s snowy peak
your tongue tastier than saag paneer
spicier than chicken tikka masala
your breasts, surely, softer
than a newborn lamb’s wool
your dainty feet, so supple
how do they hold you up?
allow you to escape from me?
In just the first half of this year
my brother and his wife bought a house
my parents sold theirs – the inevitable downsize –
and I signed a new rental lease
on yet another divorced person apartment.
Three factions of family
in three very distinct
stages of life.
So much of the remaining inventory from the sprawling family “compound,” as we called it,
conveniently shifted to my brother’s first house;
just as my parents transported so many well-loved things to my now-former house
just four years ago,
when my life had a very different hue.
I am now nearly nauseated by the thought of
“Things;”
at least the kinds that go in cabinets and on shelves;
as I’m filling boxes for the second time inside a year
I am rampantly relieving myself of so many
“Things”
that were packed, moved, and unpacked, only to sit.
I have no use for sitting,
not anymore.
This stage is one of moving, both
household and heart,
boxes and body,
and I resent what weighs me down.
What’s weightless, I think:
The river breeze on my closed eyes
those cirrus clouds against the powder blue sky
that bunch of clover and yellow trefoil (the carpet of my childhood)
bird feathers and seashells as treasures
and time…
soul tended by the music
his hand in mine
sure-footed steps
somewhere I’ve never seen.
6/15/26
I see the future, always hovering in shadows.
How the afternoons sail by, short
in hindsight, so indistinct—blur of soft
dove-gray, goldfinch-yellow. A shell-pink spell
in which she’s bending, supple
as a willow, green, sanguine
or dune grass blowing on sandy
slope splashed with navy shade—
Do you still see her? Waist deep in shallows,
sun-warm? Time sparkles, shimmers—
swells in magic circles, then slides off, white swan
vanishing into a mute reflected sky.
You needed me
for only one reason.
To carry your sins.
If I had stayed,
I would be
the one who
disappoints,
misunderstands,
argues,
complains.
I become the problem
so you can sleep at night.
We both know you’re guilty as hell.
I hear haunting echoes
of your howling cries
carried through others.
Claiming I’m the one
who broke it all.
They branded me evil.
Funny how people
defend blood
without asking
why it bleeds.
Ovid, Varro, Virgil, Horace, The Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493
Poesy, please lead us not astray
But to us, for all time
Whether we are wrong or right
descants left behind
Meta-morphs in plain sight
mellow on the vine
Woven trials and tragedies
temper our pattern ryhme
Verse letters, chats, witty attacks
salves of twinkling lives
Poems weigh these more, with grace galore
for the sieves are human-kind
Just so this rain hushes down into a culvert
that drains forty acres of Ft. Mitchell.
Sixty-seven years ago a similar sounding rain
swept over West Eighteenth Street
into the storm sewer of the alley above
my grandma’s yard. Dolores and I
put on plastic raincoats and rubber boots
and jumped in gutter puddles.
That rain was on its way to Willow Run,
the creek Euclid Avenue and all its houses
had been built over regardless. So
any significant flood invariably backed up
into everybody’s basement.
Dad, Mom and Uncle Henry would get out
old coal shovels, and heave most of the mud
out cellar windows into Mosers’ driveway.
My paternal cousin and I were born October
1952, 12 days apart. There’s an ongoing joke
between us about the christening gown
passed down to female kin. When it came time
for her baptism, her mother said
my mom didn’t relinquish it.
I love when my cousin retells this story
every year on her or my birthday.
We laugh, reimagine what happened
to the gown passed down through 5 daughters
in my dad’s family of origin, and many cousins
born before us—Dad the second youngest of 10 siblings.
Both our mothers gone now, hers 19 years ago,
mine 6. So many things we long to ask them—
questions we never thought to voice
when they still drew breath.
Still one to one, I am
frozen inside the world
of the poem. I desire
to make sense to the reader, yet
I am better off tucked behind
the trees in this forest. Build me
a ladder, would you? I’ll climb out
of this mess, freed
from the “bondage of self”
repeated in the Third
Step prayer. Never mind
if you are not privy, dear
reader, to the chill of folding
metal chairs in church
basements. We all descend
alone before we join a circle.
Snap.
The app—immediate—knows.
You are a prick-madam.
In which plant shop did I discover you?
This lens, it also detects
when you decline, charts your symptoms:
too much water, too much stress.
Oh, what a wet month!
The screen warns you fit a profile:
difficult to care for.
Only recommended
for those ready for challenge
and greater commitment.
But you are tough.
You do not need daily sun—
only to absorb the wealth
of Mother Earth’s dark soil.
Share nutrients with your neighbors.
Soak it all up.
Today marks fifteen days.
Fifteen more to go
until your roots take hold.
