I saw the ghost of my mothers in the reflection and they opened their mouths and spit out my eyes because I wasn’t supposed to see the woman I should be.   And my ears are on the nightstands.  They keep me awake at night. Do you hear them wail? The versions of you that […]

I like to believe they will weep when they lay me to rest but I’m afraid they will only cry if they once found me pretty. “Beautiful girl,” those people would say, “Such a shame.” And perhaps still only if I remained pretty, laying there in an open coffin, young, pale, and peaceful. Dead is […]

In the continual flux of this seasonal rut there are certain callbacks some might call them drawbacks of being in your eyes’ limelight. Perhaps one day soon ignoring your casual remembrance will become more than a failed reflex. And karma will stop sifting through my memory’s index.   But for now,  my nerves enter a […]

There are thousands of boys and men Being sent in planes and ships To a land far and foreign And only a few well-disguised crooks, And perhaps future history books, Could tell you why.   The pretense is security  And the innocent’s purity When asked hard questions They blame past presidents, Making the death of […]

Lately I’ve been happy That line alone sounds like poetry Because it’s true Lately I’ve been smiling At a bird flying low next to a pond While the sun drops lower on a long spring day At a yellow monarch flitting weightlessly On a breath of wind next to a lake That sparkled, electrified by […]

I didn’t know what it meant the first time I saw you, standing in the triangular median by the stoplight that I would grow to know as the signal for “almost home,” one of the last stops before I reached my temporary home of three and a half years.  I remember you seemed frantic, nose […]

You recommended that I ignore the feet under me.  They’ll guide me. They’ll do all the work. And I bent toward you like a plant toward the sunlight and saw an asymmetrical world. It was only right. I now had character misfitting of you.   And I wanted a deed to your mind. You gave […]

Their stepmother had warned them to check the license plates before they got in. It was half right and perhaps it’s because us females learn to rebel against the ingrained teaching to be scared or perhaps it’s because memory is a fickle thing, especially paired against the strong impulse of a moment, or perhaps it’s […]

I used to wonder what it’d be like— growing old with you. How you might clutch your cane in one hand and my hand in the other as we hobble down our street  on achy hips and arthritic feet and how you might forget my name every once in a while  or even that we’re […]