You child

You child

left unsaid

where time sometimes trusts love

brings us back to where we know

love seems easy

maybe simple

time tempers desire

leaving pain blistering and love hanging

in some place that we recognize

holding our hands

holding our breath

holding our trust

holding our love

making it real, molding it like clay

love is what we make it

love is what we imagine it

love is what we breathe it

it is what we live

sometimes the world ends

sometimes there is a time ticking by

maybe love lasts three days

maybe love expires in three days

you are turned up and wrinkled

left to refurbish what is lost

what is yours

what is love

what is life

even if it is all over,

where everything expires

there is still one thing

You child will love more


Link to trifecta 

Dear Mother,

This is how I dream blue. 

I dream about water.

She balances over the jetty rolled out over the clear, calm ocean.  The tide is out.  She is looking for fish, bent over trying to keep her balance.

There is no life unless it’s blue.

She is thinking of the Turkish toilets in Paris.  She remembers the rain pouring in sheets and moving through the streets slowly.  She’s there hanging over the toilet.  Her back gives out and she’s slapped against the wall, shifting her weight.  The man eyed her with suspicion as she raced to the back of the brasserie looking for the bathroom.  She was a wet dog, dragging her weight toward a hole where she would force all the food, the looking, the crying, the eating, the terrible parts of her outward, into the toilet.  Her mouth is open, gasping like the gargoyles over the sink, spitting water over her hands, cleansing them from the sickness.

Just the night before, she’s sitting in the Madame’s window room, looking over the street watching what happens as the sun starts to go down.  Her sister just phoned, dialing the long string of numbers that would reach her in France.

Mom’s in bad shape.  She won’t stop crying.  She’s on the floor and I don’t know what to do.  She’s really sad.  I’m afraid to leave her alone in the house.  I can’t get her off the floor.

She remembers bathing her in the middle of the night.  Her mother, huge and grossly overweight, still one moment and banging on the ceramic the next.  She kneels on the floor, feeling awkward and angry, pouring water over her naked mother.  She thinks, if she could disappear down the drain like shiny little soap suds, this is what she would do but she wouldn’t do that and leave her mother.  She speaks with soft and comforting words, ravaged and blue, trying to soothe the woman in front of her and her blue eyes too.

link to Trifecta challenge "blue"

this is her alley

it is the heat, maybe.  the sweltering, longing, non-forgiving heat wrapping around you separating comfort from survival, keeping you alive.   settled in the bassinet, wrapped in dirty rags, umbilical cord, messy and erect. 

the girl enters the street, an alley filled with filth.  the sounds of loneliness inflate and contract—obvious and not so obvious—she hears it all.

the child-woman hears her voice.

her breath is bare, nearly translucent in any form, so slight that she cannot make out any words.  the sound is merely a syllable, the intonation--young—yet translated.  no delivered.  as heard from the hollow walls of a large pink cavernous conch shell.

she has stretched this voice, her bottled voice over walls and floors across bathroom tiles and kitchen counters, dragged through arguments and weeping, introduced her to mothers and fathers and lovers.  belted to her side, exhausted from fits of anger, keeping with the speed of running from suitcase to city.

time stops when

she hears the woman say

      “…the truth left

        between you and I

        is the girl---the mute child…”

and now

     she is ravaged, born across these sweaty sheets

     bed woven bare

     her sex lashing broken chords

     better kept unsaid

     the girl undoes your eyes

     she’ll breed selfish greed

     a child left to haul the mattress

     from the floor, where a mother’s

     hand put the blade to rest,

tomorrow.

this is her alley, the flag above her war.

link to trifecta week 31 "alley"

her breath

This is how the Girl holds her breath.

There's the night when it never stopped raining
cracking at the windowpanes
tearing up the glass

                 The Woman is fisted,
                 folded with uncertain blows.


I say her weeping skims the water on the stove
always boiling a dinner for four
first chopping then rinsing
She is counting the lines on the cutting board.

There's the night when
she never stopped breathing
stretched bare over the linen,
Her skin working against heat.

Scathed over round surfaces,
where ordinary touch please Him
and Her.

This is how a Girl holds her breath
sick for it, saturated---uncertain and blue
the color of eternity


                and Mother.



link to Poetry Pantry

gracie square hospital

                 


             (...is madness fickle?....)

Do you remember the room

with sallow yellow walls

defrosting madness and 

thickening time, the recycled 

bed linens, a window 

and nothing else.

The bathroom bathed

an old woman who 

wet her bed and left

the toilet bloated

settling hell and odor

alive in my room.

Numbered graves, some empty 

dressed with starchy sheets

a tempered pillow and blanket

thin and bruised.

The captain of our vessel

filled the paper cups 

with pink, some white,

others blue for the dead

to swallow and breathe again

and mumble senseless words

and never once

looking in your eyes.

Some vaporized 

on the old brown couch,

others paced the sterile planks

soliciting for show

how to be crazy barnacles

feeding from a ghost ship.

one single impression 

is love vacant

some houses are empty.  she thinks this is true.  she begs for the walls, someone to hold her, wrapped around this vacant fortress.  does love grow-- kept silently and secretly-- inside these tall and looming walls?  this is her army.  this is her war.

link to Sunday Scribblings the meme being "fortress"

sleep

Where the beds were crawling

     soaked and furious with nappy

     newborn hair, sickness too---the old fan

     came around and turned his blades

     laundering the air.

She was there

     and kin to the rice fields

     toiling in contractions

     from summer fires

     and remembers nothing

     not even the nurse

     with the nameless hands.

Some beds keep crawling

     later

     when the porcelain tub was flooding

     plugged with soap and tears

     and mother's blue eyes, too.

The girl will die

     a child-woman, wife and soldier

     and refugee born mother

     sheltering silence for you,

     my daughter,

sleep Guineviere

the girl is the lover

This is the Lover.

     

     The girl

     swallows the death of her--

     injesting years

     at bay

     with mindless vultures

     picking and tearing forgiving flesh

     familiar blood in this child's arms.

    The girls stares

    wild and fragile

    blazing unadultered eyes.

    She speaks silence well,

    a language between walls

    turning in the bed sheets

    and simmering on the stove,

    she breathes this silence

    heavy, carefully

    down your arm.

    She is sick

    mad for this voice---

    forging,

    mere sounds

    her deafening rapture.

The girl is the Lover.

love poem

The girl stares.

     out of reach and away from the light

     she is all eyes, saved up

     sitting years to tear them out to

     wash, dry, sterilize and bandage

     all for waiting and wanting

     these Virgin Eyes

     bravely dressed in mother's clothes

     behind these Virgin Eyes,

     the body dissolved---no

     stuffed in the drawer

     with the cigarettes and keys

The boy sleeps.

     smell alone undiscovered

     between the sheets,

     against the linens

     between his legs and warmer

     against his lips

All hers now.

     claiming the heat of his breath

     seizing each curve of his face

     relentless,

     her intravenous eyes

    she weeps for blindness

    heavy and safely

    at last undressed

    her gaze preserved.

unbooba

                                         
( Korean translation:  "Carry me on your back")

The girl breathes hard--one, two, three.  She hangs her eyes in the dark, where the light burns blue, yellow and red.  She is counting.  One, two, three.  Again.  One, two, three.  

The girl fixes her eyes on the blood spilled over her legs, hardened and thick glazing her bones.  Her knees are bruised from the floorboards.   She lays still and hears nothing but her lungs pounding the dense, heat swelling around her body.  She murmurs a lullaby for a moment and then saves her breath, clamors her lips together to keep from vomiting.  The wood smells of rot and soiled skin, yet she finds comfort in the moist and humid planks with her head tucked aside to hide from the glow of the lantern. She wishes for sleep, heavy and long sleep.  The door is ajar and people can be heard moving through the grass.  She hears the night flies chirping in the fields, the old woman humming in the distance and the children crying down the road.  Soon, someone will bring her water.  She waits.  The blood holds the wounds for her and eases the pain.  If only she could wipe the sweat that drips in her eyes and burns. How does one gently lift those once raging fists, now surrendered at her side?  Oh god, where are they? She wants only to feel the softness of her skin, the curves of her hand near her face.  They are awkward and still with the rest of her body and lost.  The child-woman does not hear the infant screaming nor does she feel it's unnatural motion between her knees---only the yellow light settling on her eyelids, keeping her awake.

a link to trifecta

the water on her dress

this is not new.  the ocean blue, her wild eyes. the girl child sees him.  she wishes it was new.
she wears her paper hat, her linen dress.  she would like it to be new. for him.  but she is old.
old because she wears her love so close to the sea.  she is new. where she is. where the birds skim the sky.   this love is new.

a link to trifecta