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.
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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
o
d
bloody tears drain
backwards into Mouse Tank,
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where the desert whistles as loud
as these onions scream, drowning in oil
this heart remembers
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Elephant Tusks of dust.
saltwater and grease
mix, blurring Aphrodite's belly
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longing for her sky,
above that campfire.
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I wish for a cage like hers
to feel more at home.
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BISCUITS AND GRAVY INSPIRED BY ADA LIMÓN.
Feb 17, 2020
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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 brushingÂ
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—