Read it Live

Memories of Brown Penny   “I am looped in the loops of her hair” he wrote. And I, brown as a penny, sun-kissed, copper skinned, curl my hair around my fingers and wait by a well for the aimless collector of memories who quoted Yeats and talked about our tangled love – the devious beast [...]

Be patient with it, like you are tolerant of a petulant child.

My Bone Demon   I am throwing out the bone doctor’s prescription. I need an exorcism, not calcium.   You have made your way to my bones now. They are heavy with you cemented inside them. And weary, laden with the lead, dead weight of you. You swing at my joints – percussion – arrhythmic, [...]

I am another Aphrodite. I will suck that heart out, slippery with all it harbors – love and its wickedness. I am a peasant woman, with a beggar’s sunken eyes and a mother’s forgotten hunger when she feeds her child. I am a traveler of deserts and oceans, lost in between what is mine and [...]

Home lingers within me. I recite words of Azaan in half-sleep, half-wakefulness. I know them as I know my name.

Another one written in 2005. Salvaged today. A Picture of the Ocean I whimper the way sand thickens, softens, partially dissolves when the ocean consumes it. You roar, a storm threatening to make the waters wild, fierce, furious. Your hand-prints, warm, red, prickle on my face, reminiscent of small seashells abandoned on the shore. Your [...]

Poem written in 2005. Edited and revised today.   Eyes   Every night he tries to paint my picture. His nimble fingers dance and swipe the canvas with feline movements.   With a sigh of surrender, he stops, and his face gathers clouds and dusk.   “Your eyes are too sad, and I have no [...]

Disease   Your voice resounds inside me just before I sleep, when I am most certain of my bliss. It becomes a mockery of me and mine, an announcement of illusive happiness. When sleep recedes and I open my eyes, your voice slumbers, but I hear you again Just when your memory has diminished.   [...]

Sand snakes into my veins, Stealthily it clots blood into mud, And the skies rain over a city across the ocean. I am haunted by waters, trapped by deserts.

Not My Sin   I am lost in the iambs of your sonnets. One syllable after another, each reads like the melody you hummed and thrummed on your broken guitar that summer of rain and captivity.   I was caged in the places of your poems when it rained in our old city and water [...]

Ways to Kill Yourself   It seems easy enough. Plath tried to do it, wrote Lady Lazarus, and succeeded, when ironically she expected to be saved. Sexton did it, too, after causing scandal and mourning Sylvia in Sylvia’s Death. Carbon monoxide killed them, you know? One in the car garage, the other in her kitchen, [...]

A writing exercise (that turned into something more). Because I haven’t been writing. And I need to. This is for a lost friend. Demons and Smoke Like you are captive to yours, I am a prisoner of my own demons. You showed them to me, these fire-beings with forked tongues, orange bodies, yellow eyes, and [...]

The Imaginary Circle of Love   Perhaps love is defined by proximity, confined by the perimeter of an imaginary circle.   My sister calls me a stranger. I see us crumbling, brown pieces of burnt toast, with that burnt smell lingering in the air around us – her, inside the imaginary circle, me, outside it. [...]

My Mother’s Voice   My mother’s voice is like her belly, four times pregnant, loose now, and soft, injured, healed, scarred.   I see you old mother, young daughter, in an embrace that is meant to cure pains and aches that run deeper than skin, run deeper even than body. You, old mother, tighten your [...]

I came home to Davis after two weeks for just a little over an hour. I have been in San Jose all this time, living with my roommate Haena and her sister. There is a wedding in the family this weekend and I had to come back to Davis to pick up some clothes. Right [...]

Rotten Potatoes I remember a story My teacher told me Of him and his wife, When they were penniless, Like us. This couple with their ideals And their baby fat intact, Studying art and literature, Survived on potatoes. The woman with her Irish heritage Inspired a poem in the man’s journal. A sack of golden [...]

Duckie of the Yellow Journal and an Unexpected Spring Friendship It is rather strange when you realize that brief moments in the span of your lifetime can haunt you for years. What are a few months in the face of a lifetime, of my lifetime, 23.5 years? A few months should be insignificant. I should [...]

Reflections on the Train Ocean flows in patches between Richmond and Martinez, the South Bay, quiet, detached, familiar. Waves, weeds, rocks, sewn into the patchwork of a Californian quilt. I watch it rippling as if disturbed by my eyes or the vibrations of 528 from San Jose to Davis. I am displaced once more to [...]

Note: I almost never rhyme because it’s hard for me to pull it off in a sophisticated manner. This came out of nowhere, and the rhyming was surprisingly easy. It is NOT very strong as a poem. It’s what it is. And it is slightly corny. Sad, but true. So I Can Remember Us This [...]

The Songs My Mother Wrote For My Father My mother’s songs ring in my ears. Her songs and her poetry and her voice and her voicemails. She is silly. She sings to me in messages. Often, I hear her voice in my head from a time when she used to sprawl on the floor, lying [...]