summer hours
long summer hours
when work is physical
yet redeeming
healing can accompany exhaustion
a give and/or take
push, pull, examine, evaluate
rest until morning
start anew
long summer hours
when work is physical
yet redeeming
healing can accompany exhaustion
a give and/or take
push, pull, examine, evaluate
rest until morning
start anew
Mother and grandmother – in black and white like storks –
crouch between the ribs of our stubborn field.
Behind them, where the day draws its last line,
cows pass by like hours.
People here steal a sliver of time between the holidays
to fill the earth with seed potatoes.
The shameless wind keeps working
its thin-bladed saw
through their human bones.
To my grandmother, that strip of land
is large as life itself.
And after life, she has vowed before God
to work in the Garden of Eden.
A sly, dark weed has pricked up its ears.
Grandma and the weed trade silent glances.
Then she rests on a thick clod of earth
and counts her rows.
People bend beneath the burden of time
as cloud-shadows carve the fields in passing.
The Garden of Eden hangs overhead,
furrowed,
waiting for its sowers.
purple trails
weekly cut
overtake showcase bed
ripped apart
stuck streetside
over a curb unfindable
inches of johnson and bermuda swallowing
fishing with trowels
succulent round leaves
from their demise
interrupting hookworm babies
and the snow
of grocery bag microplastic
black topsoil somehow creating itself on tarmac
while blaze red clay
holds bermuda rhizomes with the hand of roots
and tangle
and gravity
sweet potato vines no one seems to know the fruit of
then two neighbors finally speak to her for the first time
only took four years of waiting
and three hours sitting in the road
Don’t plant a tree or offer condolences during a meeting
Don’t give me a kroger card
Don’t send me food
Just walk your dog
Play soccer with your kid
Tell your daughter you love her, and visit your homeland
He had not lived with her for sixty years
but her street address emerged from his tangled
atlas of neurons. He shouted it with
confidence during the cognitive tests,
the only thing he’d said in days that made
much sense, even though her street was long
buried beneath the freeway, and her house
was as wrecked as his broken-down brain cells.
Surely her windows alight at Christmas
had sparked this synapse, the sheen on her stairs
inside the door, the little table-top
tree draped with ribbons, berries, and popcorn,
the curtains drawn back, a fire ablaze
in the grate, the damper wide open.
Peter Paul Rubens, The Consequences of War, 1638-39, Palatine Gallery, Palazzo Pitti, Florence
Aries pays little heed
wrenched by rage
Consumed by greed
whittles our world with
Frenzy, famine, disease
Solely fixed to bring
Plunder, outrage, injury
to the Valley of Grief
Fury stubborn leads
Belligerence brings
no excuse for reality
https://www.peterpaulrubens.net/consequences-of-war.jsp
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/war-is-not-part-of-human-nature/
Must we put on the facade of camaraderie?
You stand with me
beneath the flag that bleeds
Only I drip with rage, paint
a silhouette of my anger
and call myself
brave.
I pledge allegiance to the flag,
it answers with disgrace.
I clutch my bleeding heart again;
so thin is my reprieve.
If I stare into those pierce blue eyes
Will you admit deceit?
The tie hung around your neck
slung like a gun, erect
For me, no disguise is kept,
I keep my silent scream.
Is it solely me who bleeds?
No.
The stars and stripes, they weep
Red, I may stand stained
but I am not yet dead.
I am.
needed for violent iconography
of peace? Perhaps prosperity!
steal away some liberty, for you
Never for me.
To carry daughters before they are daughters.
To shelter generations inside one body.
To become a vessel of cells
before a mother has a name.
To be one of the greats.
To be raised among siblings.
The sole survivor of scarlet fever.
To outlast empty cupboards.
To then pass down resourcefulness.
She gains a new fear of never having enough.
To bring life to a grandmother.
To be the one who stood for equality.
To march in the streets towards women’s rights.
To return home to whisky on his breath.
She holds the bruises, wondering if she will ever be enough.
To give life to my mother who hides the burdens
Too determined to be anything less.
To work for a greater life.
To sacrifice for the greater love.
To bleed as she carries the egg.
He provided support, the sperm,
That transformed me from myth into flesh.
But what am I to carry?
To be raised with opportunities?
To be born with grit and grief?
To have the possibility to nurture my eggs?
There was a moonshiner in Harlan
who hauled jars of shine down his mountain.
Enforcers did find
he eluded their kind;
they could not prevent this clear fountain.
I’m wondering if I have the words to say
to wish my husband a Happy Father’s Day
We’ve walked through life together
like two birds of a feather
together through the joys of becoming parents
through the pain of losing one of those descendants
Figuring out our life’s path as one
through painful times and having fun
I love you until the end of time
as we do life together during our prime
