A CRAVING TO BE A POET

A creative outlet I sometimes like to share. My favorite poet is Fernando Pessoa, who's yours?

TO HAVE A CLEAN HEART

March 12, 2020

to have a clean heart

grandmother says a cry

while chopping onions is luggage weighted and lost.

touching the heartbeat on this onion’s skin,

mine cries too. upside-down

dangling

t e r

u h a

o t c

r

o

d

bloody tears drain

backwards into Mouse Tank,

where the desert whistles as loud

as these onions scream, drowning in oil

this heart remembers

Elephant Tusks of dust.

saltwater and grease

mix, blurring Aphrodite's belly

longing for her sky,

above that campfire.

I wish for a cage like hers

to feel more at home.

BISCUITS AND GRAVY INSPIRED BY ADA LIMÓN.

Feb 17, 2020

There’s a special on biscuits and gravy this morning.

We have four left in the kitchen.

And there will be four left at the end of the shift.

My pin-striped apron doesn’t seem to fit the feel of a kitchen.

Mimi’s kitchen.

She didn’t wear an apron much. There were carpets though, little squares under every cabinet.

Her cast-iron biscuits were delicious.

Served warm with the crispiest bacon and scrambled eggs to fill a platter.

Pass the chicken, Papaw sneezes after grace.

Your flowers still sit in my room.

I don’t water them like you did Papaw.

I think if I watered them it would feel how the biscuits in this restaurant flake.

After y’all moved out of the lake house.

After Mimi could not remember I was not my mother.

Afternoons I stopped by to hold your hand at that sick place.

While you held hers.

I miss sitting next to you on the pier. When we would slam the screen door stinking of fish

into the kitchen for lunch with a mess in our baskets.

I miss the moments I am missing with my grandparents that are still alive,

just to spend time in this fake kitchen.

To make money I will spend after my shift tonight on dinner that

will not taste the same way Mimi made it for me,

the way you prayed over it for me.

THE ROSE TONER MY MOTHER MADE FOR ME IN A MASON JAR

April 29, 2019

rose water sits slimy on tissues I used to dry from my face
plopped on the floor overflowing from trash can
tower of control
blue tiles of steamy floor still hurt
palms of my feet
twist of an ankle
twist of an ankle
stretch up on my toes to peak above the steam.
tilting my neck left
right
around
the ticks of my pain
rebound in my ears
like tocks of all my hours working.
I see them in my eyebrows
the left one especially
or is it the right
I bend. a dive
my nose brushing
white clouds of linen
to gather my shed clothes.
I melt back into normal air.

CAN I HAVE SOME OF YOUR HAIR?

February 20, 2019

Mom has red.

Red. Deep frizzy curls of hairspray.

Gran’s roots show gray, she’ll go to fix them soon

to match mine.

My rat’s nest, frizz town, blonde, big mess.

They all say they don’t know where I got it.

Dad’s is a suave speckled pepper and salt

He knows he looks good

Military shears and sometimes a beard

My April, hers is brown, no, even darker, not black.

Bangs, and tiger highlights in the summer.

She’s short, silky and stunning when she sways.

Her baby, he pulls her hair,

But his is like ours.

He’s got a long mess, blonde-tangled ouch.

My Mimi, flower-power working lady,

Atop hers was a pile of black bumble-bee-hive.

But it was really purple if you knew her.

Mine is dirty and tangled. But it is the biggest.

My rat’s nest, frizz town, blonde, big mess.

They all say they don’t know where I got it.

But it’s theirs. It’s theirs all mixed together.

Because I am them.

SWIMMING IN HONEY

January 30, 2019

if teeth could swim

like cookies in milk

i’d let mine sink in honey.

i’d pluck them and plop them

and let them soak

to sell them like sweets for money.

i’d wrap them in layers

of pretty pink papers

snap ribbons around them

and trade them for silver.

little kids and babies

gentlemen and ladies

will line up to purchase

my candy will nourish

their tongues will go swimming

in jars that are filling

with tacky teeth tips

shiny and grinning.

they’d wince and crunch

a painful blood would rush

from their gums now sticky with

-honey-

PIRATES MAKE BREAD DURING QUARANTINE

April 7, 2020

mixing dough with my mother

bored in the house

whirwhirwhirwhirwhir

you have to use strong bread flour

bread in the house

psftpsftpsftpsft

kneading dough in the kitchen

wash your damn hands

captain’s hook attachment

we play

pirates for as long as it takes to rise

i will –

- aAhhhHhHHHHAAAAHHRGGGHHHH

and not stop screaming after

ON 12TH

12 April 21

this house's paint creases like a grandmother's skin,

with clotheslines and garden beds

she grew old cypress trees from her window

and drew tall wallpaper up to the ceilings

when she walked on this sidewalk, it greened

the same way she drove over red pebbles

paving carport wrapping back

to back up the avenues

swinging outside her nest she dropped

twelve daffodils from her porch

that still bloom here in March

and die after April

FOR YOU,

1 April 21

For you,

I have never written a poem
while you have been sleeping in my head
sweet dreams—and then some

day and night brighten with the glow of
your moon shaped face. To remind me I said

I have never written for you,

I have learned to use my green thumb

with mustards, mums, making you smile

I hope you sleep good hon

in blackberry thorn hills fresh like snow cone

next to the dreams in my garden bed.

where I have never written for you,

I have grown used to the flow of
chasing clouds from the grass, misled

I hope you wake up rested love

athough my arm will become numb

you will wake and surely have read

I have never written a poem for you

I hope you have sweet dreams instead—