Read it Live

Grandma Geraldine’s Geraniums
Grandma Geraldine
lived in Georgia
and grew exquisite geraniums.
Summer after summer
When I was a girl,
I used to sit on her window ledge
while she cried out the names
of herbs she grew in her kitchen garden.
“Look, child,” she’d say in her
Georgian drawl,
her buttermilk eyes
fluid behind her bifocals,
“This here is rosemary,
and that there is oregano,
and this here is [...]

Nostalgia

Asphalt smells rain-like, fingers fluid sing
Sonnets, verses – old haunts and poems new.
Stoic pen asks what Providence will brew
Amidst erupted skies, awakening
Memories – soaked, drowned. Cold winds bring
Enough words, taciturn, fertile, and true,
To write of moments – lost, forgotten, few -
As this weather silently spies to string
The old cities of youth – a mundane row,
Unfortunately [...]

Poisons
I am the poison
born out of your marriage,
and you are the poison
running in my veins.
Our loves
are misunderstood -
I wish to transform
your face into a serpent’s head
and feel an aversion
to each memory of you,
and sometimes to slit open a wrist
and see your blood snaking
lazily
out of my body -
deep red and
viscous
with too much love,
with too much hate.
And [...]

Another Poem That You Will Never Read
Your face ripples through
the poems I have written.
And you do not have the patience
to construct yourself
word by word,
joining
each dot and line,
a (logical) progression
in a manuscript of old poems -
rejected many times over
by literary magazines,
occasionally published
in nondescript
small town
community journals -
your face contained in my syllables
on cheap, mass-produced paper.
You call yourself [...]

Hi RIL,
I am posting nine new poems that I wrote over the course of the last few weeks to commemorate a coming of age of sorts with friends who have helped me improve my writing. I am including the “Foreword,” which was my tenth post to celebrate this coming of age in its slightly edited [...]

For Year Number Twenty Four
Do something for me,
Mr. Twenty Four,
be nicer than Twenty Three.
He was a nut job, that one.
Do you realize what he did to me?
He made me a Mrs. from a Ms.
Oh, the horror, the atrocity,
the absolute injustice of being
(literally) signed off the singles market.
Yes, my dear Mr. Twenty Four,
that little rat, Twenty [...]

For Time
I feel age in my knees.
Each unfamiliar crack,
each resistance of bone
against eroding bone,
is measured in years.
Was it yesterday
that I sat in the sun
with Mother
and ate tangerines,
each cold, juicy sliver
flowing down my throat
like liquid velvet?
Was it yesterday?
Was it another century?
A different era?
A dream even -
yet another trick time
plays on me these days,
the trickster that it [...]

For Self-Preservation
Places hold memories -
like mothers carry fetuses
in their wombs,
except these memories
float perpetually in the thick
opaque fluid that is the past.
I am breathing the air
of old cities,
sharing it with distant people,
through a placenta of time.
I will be born out of these places
an old woman or a lifeless baby,
strangled by the very mother
that gave it life.
I [...]

For Bricks and Stones and Walls (and to exorcise myself of grief that refuses to leave)
Never take me at my word,
irrational and unrelenting that I am,
being your firstborn after all.
When you asked me to come back
to the house you built,
the home of my childhood,
I said,
What do I need these skeletal walls for
now that you have [...]

For the Limits of Love
Today,
when you deposited me
at our doorstep
and drove away in your
routine rage,
I stood among orange leaves
of winter
(abandoned by trees,
trampled by pedestrians).
I soaked in the impetuous
December rain,
but my eyes remained
uncharacteristically
dry.
For the first time
I crowned fury,
allowed it to consume
love and its
constituents;
sans remorse or guilt,
I wished that you
never come home to me.