Category: literary

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Tweet That

Sparrow beaks tweet ticket-ee tee tee tee

Yer mate tweets back, “Impeach the dude”

And all the kerfluffle of sham and shatter

Nattering a morning’s cuppa jo unsweetened

Enough to make you hate your neighbor or

Honk your horn at a red light to waken her, 

Lap-staring, brown-haired comatose waif.

 
But I read somewhere that choice cuts the

Day in two, yours and mine, theirs often 2

Late 2 make 2 more light seconds matter.


Close your eyes, blink twice, and it’s over

By the next exhale’s end, paused like ice

As you draw the next breath inward ho and

So it goes, so it goes and so it go, go goes.

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We Witness (for the Poetry Patroness)


Insurmountable: to palm someone’s blinding grief in your hands 

to show her–the griever– 

the terrifying, sublimity in bottomless agony. 

You can’t help her picture that pure, petrified stance on the bridge 

mid-way between his suffering and her own, textured so distinctly, 

galaxies apart in their partnered struggle,

his fraught with the tortured, focused fight against pain, and hers, 

witness, empath, limb, mother, wife, married to his suffering. 

Her body pours static breath into his mad-gnashing vortex.

 
Where does one end and the other begin? 

At the point of internal harrowing, razing cells that scream 

in hysterical, frenzied death and reproduction, 

death and reproduction, 

with no end in sight, for these crazed, cracked-out enucleate disks don’t quit, 

bear no mind but to destroy in their very giving–as if human.

 
I’ll show you the petals of the wide-blooming, morning rose, 

heady as your bejeweled wedding day,

the dewy, pale, opalescent-translucence of redolent, velvety dalliance, 

stained rust-dry at the edges–

a picture of blossoming, ordered DNA

perfectly-formed, fragile as your first-born’s, infant fingernail– 

carrying its own prescient death at the borders.

 
She’s beautiful, 

not as a symbol, not as obedient structure, 

but as herself, fragrant joy bleeding. 

I’ll cup her in my gardening hands to grow a path between us–

sorely aggrieved and floundering shadow, 

clumsily consoling your fear and mine, 

both corraling an other’s-brother’s-father’s-husband’s-son’s fluxing end. 

Could you crawl outside a minute to see?

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Corpse Pose

I lie in corpse pose, tracing my breath from belly upward, 

The rise and sinking of life’s fill while my mother dies in

The next room, eroded to the bone, life struggling to breathe.

The disassociation drifts from front room to back, cold to warm.

The back room, where my mother lies, nearly inert, heats up

The temperature rising with the sun and falling just so too, 

While the front room, where I lie as faux corpse, posing, is

Cold as the window faces the backyard, which stays sunless.

Her blood runs colder now, though she always felt the chill of

An early morning, her time, or after dusk, when she’d wish us

To bed, free her to herself, what mothers do as children sleep.

Now, the cold doesn’t penetrate, her defenses gone with decay

Just as I gain the weight I never had, she always had, in our 

Twisted turn of events that find her at the head, me at the back,

She never behind, always the leader, me the child, now the mom,

Oh, it’s all wrong as a matter of right, bad timing for an ending.

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Two Children


 
Two children live here, now straddling the yard’s fence,

one she calls “my pet,” and the other “peeved.”

Why peeved? What injustice writhes in the willows today–

a bird-pecked worm, a spider-spun gnat, or perhaps, a rattler

gargling rat blood? Yes, you bemoan those victimized but what

of the black widow’s guillotine or the Venus’ trap door teeth, do you, 

oh peeved? Does she, my pet?

We recognize her, the way her head tilts to catch the sun’s

catered rays to the swan of her neck, the hint of heather on 

her breath, chamomile in her hair.

Dawn loves her perfect poise and light; there she’s her 

element. Why argue with nature, my pet peeved? She’s

who we are. Be sweet now, love and comfort smile us happy.
 

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Zero-sum waiting game


 
They say a watched pot never boils. And pasta doesn’t cook in the 8 minutes they say it does on the box. Forget about my oven. Add a half hour or more to every cooking time mentioned in a recipe, any recipe.
 
My oven is old as is the rest of my house and the inhabitants in it. My children are now 21 and 18 (in a matter of days)–older children, not grade schoolers any more. And their parents’ late fifties make them older parents. And my parents, who had me when they were in their early twenties, are old. My father will turn 83 in a month, and my mother won’t live out the month. Though younger than my father by four years, she’s older than us all. Her demented body attacked her and made her old.
 
I’m awaiting her death. She breathes laboriously, with her whole body. Her lungs can’t do it alone any more. She needs to breathe with her belly, once ballooned with sweets now shrunken down into her spine. The hospice nurse says this belly barely breathing is yet another sign of her “transitioning.” I tell the caretaker to give her morphine. She doesn’t look like she suffers but just in case. She’s tired of living.
 
I wait. I watch her chest rise and fall. She doesn’t open her eyes any more. Her hands have begun to swell, turning her fingertips purple. Weak kidney function. Soon, maybe tomorrow, she’ll forego all food and water, her body turning on itself for a little peace, just a last bit of peace, for fuck’s sake, mercy, mercy, please peace. She’s waiting–and we too wait, watching her wait.

 

image source/pixabay

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The Door

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An edge borders time on which thrush plagues a fallen wren,

Small fright fringed in imperceptive tremulous fever.

No one intuits the thin cry.

Where’s the door?

She coughs up her last lap.

They’ll come now. Now that it’s almost done.

Funny, you can outsource love but not death.

No more false starts.

This one’s true.

…the door?

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I told you I don’t want to know.


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Can they not understand? I said I wanted to bury myself in work. I meant it. What do they mean, leaking toxic waste into my air-tight, sealed cave? I thought they couldn’t see me, didn’t know I existed, like hiding under the blanket when you’re scared in bed as a child. If they can’t see me, I’m safe.

But no, they found an opening. And all those words, words upon words, upon which I built my impenetrable wall, well they were just too airy thin, too porous. The poison seeped in. The words I didn’t want to read, they were all there. I thought they had left me in peace for a while. Yes, they did. I remember the relief. Maybe I got too used to not seeing those oozing, infectious, pus-filled pockets of venomous ink.

And no wind, seagulls, rain, wave, or chimes will wash them away clear now. My fingers curl under their weight, and my arthritic knuckles ache. You’d think I’d be grateful that I have any words at all. But today’s not the day for patience, compassion, tolerance, or ease. Today’s the day they sullied my ocean’s ark along the curb, street side of nowhere else to go. 

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Stinky Fries: Ten for Today


 
Saturday night, stool-side at my usual digs, the corner wine bar. I come here to write in the evening, when it’s time to switch from coffee to beer.
 
“I have Stone on tap. Interested?” The bar tender knows me. I’m past the initial flinching at that recognition.
 
“Looks like you have two.”
 
“Yep, this one has pineapple and tangerine with a…” Jason, I think I call him (I hope that’s his name).
 
“Whoa, no fruit in my beer,” interrupting his pitch.
 
“Agree.”
 
That first sip…not sure which bliss compares aptly, not quite orgasm, but not far below. Not three steps, anyhow.
 
Uh oh, the guy next to me peers over at my screen and squints.
 
“How do you see that tiny print? I mean it’s so…”
 
“I manage.” Yeah, I’m a bitch. Pick a different intro.
 
My stinky fries arrive just then, anyhow. The sirracha-ketchup is the bomb.
 
Long day nerding over AI and healthcare. Auditioning a piece for a real journal. I’ve claimed expertise in the area, but it’s really just gushing sci-fi enthusiasm. Yes, I’ve written a few thousand words on it for my weekly health tech start-up gig, but this is big-time. My head’s a bit spinny.
 
“Ready for another?”
 
Shit, I washed down half the fries with an entire tall one already?
 
“Okay.”
 
I still have a half plate of stinkies. It’s the melted cheese over them that lends them their title. Ah, I’m going to hell anyhow. As my father reminds me daily, “I’m going where it’s warm.”

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Niagara Falls: Ten for Today


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I fell down to the floor, no hands to break my fall. The floor met my right shoulder hard. And maybe holding my head up to avoid the wood prevented further harm than the headache and haze I ended up with from having my brain jostled. I felt the mush of that organ slam squishy splat against the right side of my skull. Nauseating.
 
I planned to finish up a piece due for tomorrow. I taught my class this morning and two more classes for someone else. Seemed like the only way I’d get motivated to put in another two hours of brain work was with a little incentive. So I planned to get out of the house. But which would it be caffeine or alcohol on this late Thursday afternoon before a long weekend?
 
And just at the verge of a decision, rounding the corner of the bed, coat flung over my shoulder and trailing behind trying to catch up to my fleeing body, purse in tow, boom! Down. The slight bell of my pant leg caught on the wheel of the bed frame, somehow. Something sticking out of the wheel to brake the frame still, a lever. It caught, and my recognition of that fact registered a half second too late to stop the forward trajectory of my intentioned body.
 
Before I realized what happened I was flat on the floor, the Husky pup immediately at my upturned face to sniff out the trouble. The shock. The confusion. I lay there unwilling to get up until a vision of my prone body lying on the floor for hours before someone found me flashed before my eyes. I eased myself to sitting.
 
I sat up and turned to the dog who gazed at me eye to eye now. Her eyes asked, “What’s all this about?” Just as my eyes wondered into hers, “Can you believe this?” We sat puzzled that way, each in our own assessing postures posed for no one, unwilling to further go.

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