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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

For The Constant One The first thing he said after he brought me home was “Didn’t I say I would marry you one day?” It was an odd way of conveying an ordinarily irritating expression, a hidden “I told you so.” He didn’t mean to be so unromantic! He’s just not very good with words, [...]

For Providence Divinity lies with The Unknown – this truth we roll in silks and chiffons, stretch it long and thin, malleable as it is. I pray quietly with my thoughts, noisily with my rosary, absently with my breath, asking for alleviation (of make-believe hurts), redemption (for weaknesses of character, convictions, flesh – common sins [...]

For Medicine and Poetry Yesterday, I practiced my prodding on a doctor, a diagnostic tool for pain honed on a physician, the ideal test subject. “If you want to see patients,” she said, “chop your nails off now, they will dig into skin. Make this sacrifice for medicine.” Last night, I cut my nails close [...]

For Me, The Cartographer The river I wanted to touch and the fisherman on its bank, distant, foggy as a December night when your breath thickens, white puffs from a tightened throat. A fort not far from its shores, on the stone floors of which I read Yeats and dreamed of cohesive endings, of kinships, [...]

Absence In the streets and alleys of the cities we visited, stand stoic and silent all the landmarks we named. And we are scattered, colorless, wingless, fateful moths – with our combined frustrations, inconsequential ideologies, tangible successes, intangible losses – thinking there is still some good left in the cities we deserted, in the landmarks [...]

Memory Acquaintance I met another room in California, and it showed me the decay in its memory. An old fifty-cent piece, the color of a penny, abandoned on the mildew covered window sill. The floor unsteady, the walls hollow – insect food. A clean square on the aging whitewash and a hole in its center [...]

DRAFT ONE – EDITED MILDLY The Procession of Loss I am leafing through Eeya’s old journal. It is in tatters. The spine is fractured, small golden threads spilling out of its faux leather binding. The cover says 1988-1990 but the pages are not dated. Her poems are written with impeccable neatness in blue ink with [...]

Blasphemy Your song, my relentless, religious ritual, is thick on my tongue like the film of congealed milk fat that forms on my chai, A brown, wrinkled, circular palette, protecting the hot liquid that burns down my throat, takes me to you (and your music), inspires me to write at an ungodly hour about blasphemous [...]

Trying times. Trying relationships. And tiring. So very tiring. “Certain hard days ahead,” Li-young Lee whispers to me in my almost-packed, chaotic surroundings. There is a time for love. There is a time for hate. And then there is a time for despair.

The poems gather like a dust storm on the far horizon. I sit in my Bedouin clothes with my nomad belongings, bare, empty-handed, sun-scorched — a wanderer waiting to collect words, assemble thoughts, write…once again. One day soon, I must make my way home.