Author: poetryfest

In dreams
the miasma of rebirth flows and
I wake with the sheets stained red
between my legs

It aches, the bottomless hole of
life, where my babies were
cursed

To die again in the darkness of
ignorance, with the first flutter of life
beating quickly and without meaning
a cluster of endless
possibility, endless
death.

I cannot go back to sleep
chasing reason with the lame
dogs of science barking,
at nothing
at shadows
at lies,
barking at every answer,
useless.

Faith is worse,
for the labor of death is angelic
and I have seen that real angels
die
and god’s love blisters
into the fiery pain of this hell
I am trying to escape…

What is a mother?
our aborted children bleed and
the womb consumes all
sacred miasma of flesh
drowning flush of desire and
a heartbeat that echoes
echoes on the scans into nothingness.
A mother is all
of her children.

I need to move my mewling
yearling, darling boy,
so the blood doesn’t touch him,
or his older brother quietly
blissfully
dreaming

and the rabbit rots patiently in the ditch,
thrashed apart by the ravenous pickings of
some nearby crows and i think

of you

the beauty of her vivisected innards
are punctuated by the sultry light,

you part my legs and sit between then,
how could i ever leave when you

splice my intestines with loving admiration,
when you make me feel so
disgustingly adequate

with my ill-tempered manifestation of
grievances that pile onto one
another with alarming velocity

how could i leave you when you force
me to become such a volatile
subject of my circumstances, and

the sting of your harsh touch lingers, pulling
my shirt down, red marks winding
across my flesh,

her glazed eyes meet mine; the rabbit’s body
is jerked along the highway, bits of red
dotting my vision as you lower your gaze

and i am picked apart, undressed for your
satisfaction again and again and again

My grandfather was never more
than a tale passed down in
black and white pictures.

As a child I shifted through
the stories of a dead man who
put up with California

long after the gold dried out
and the missions became museums,
only to retire to a living room

in the sprawled suburbs with a black
and white television and children
drafted to Vietnam.

And now, his ghost
leans over my shoulder
to rewrite his past.

He uses my hands to script legend
into history; reclaims the antiquity
prescribed in blood.

What tools are needed to build a man?
A few oral histories and
anecdotes shared on holidays.

A signature from Elise Island,
some pictures of a second wife
whose never returned from their honeymoon,

A book published in the 1940’s
and a short story my father wrote
about finding him near death

The handful of knowledge given
to me doesn’t differentiate between fact
or fabrication, truth or invention.

No one ever told me why
he came to America or why
he ended up in the West, when

the rest of the cousins rested on
the East coast. No one told me why
a 44 year old man from across

the ocean would take a 22 year old
girl from her home and bring her up to
a country she had never before seen.

Perhaps he believes I will
stack stories of glory and
wisdom out of the tales past down

But he is not here to tell me what
I got right and what I got wrong,
and there are so many holes to explore.

He didn’t realize I had
the power to fill in
the missing pictures.

He didn’t realize the calluses
he created by embedding heritage
on freckled palms in absence of luck.

He never suspected the curiosity
stirring in the mind of a child
had the power to create or destroy

I
Want
To write
About my
Grandmother because
Her spirit follows me around.

She
Is
Like a
Shadow on
My right side and she
Has the presence of a green heart.

I
Crawled
Out of
My body
And saw a prism
In the middle of the ceiling.

It
Was
A green
Triangle
When Uranus first
Entered the astrological

Sign
Of
Taurus
In 2018.
It felt like things changed too quickly.

She
Was
Near me
All over
California and
It felt like I relived her life.

I
Think
Stan is
Stupid and
Told someone to mess
With my medication one time.

He
Changed
My meds
Once a week
And later on I
Heard voices telling me to kill

Jan
And
Roger
On a farm.
At the hospital
I almost died from too much blood

Drawn
Out
Too fast
And I blacked
Out and didn’t wake
And an alarm went off and then

The
Nurse
Freaked out,
The doctor
Ran into the room,
And they gave me an IV and

I
Puked
Water
All over
My body and shook
And shivered and passed out to sleep.

a blessed year of feeding
my babe at my breast
has changed me forever
at my baby’s behest

though my milk has just stopped
like I’ve turned off a tap
I can still feel her suckle
her little pout lap

at my breast, at my chest,
at my heart, at my soul,
I offered her everything:
she swallowed me whole

suckle and suckle
drop after drop
she took what she needed
yet knew when to stop

we lived symbiosis—
her yang to my yin
our bodies two curves
of a singular skin

but she grew & she grew
and I felt the time spin
she dawdled off crawling
and I knew it within:

she was ready to give me
some time to myself
for lips had grown lazy
as she rolled off herself

away from my breast
and off in a climb
chasing adventure
her own toddler time

away from my arms
and maternal embrace
her tiny hands shoved me
away from her face

so slowly, my mammaries
decided to dry
and thusly, my tear ducts
decided to cry

I cannot believe
she is no longer there
our bodies’ bond broken
with little fanfare

she is not at my breast
though she’ll be in my heart
more than marital vows
beyond death do us part

now she stands on her own
(with a bit of support)
and she feeds herself, too
(so I’d like to report)

but the clock’s grueling glare
has now ceased in a sense
I’m no longer a slave
to the pump & the breast

the time is now ours
to do as we please
clapping and laughing
and dancing with ease

I will give her my everything
she will swallow me whole
a mother’s duality
two bodies, one sou

I. Prairie Roots

Vast sky above, blue;
sea all around, green
waves of grass under wind,
the grown man stood
thinking of decades gone
when he was young
and another man who
stood here too.
Both linked by more
than one can say:
love and genes;
one paved the way
for generations
of the other’s life.
Immigrant here
and great grandson
on the same spot
of prairie land and love.

II. Challenge to….

A tiny house stands
old, weathered, abandoned
now – only evidence of life
and hope once here,
but life, and weather,
proved too hard.
The boast that trees
would bring rain
was not true.
Thousands of trees died trying.
Farmers moved on
to find rain
and new hopes
again and again.
Only a few could prosper
and stayed, but not farming.
We left
but for other reasons.

III Invisible Connections

The grandfather stood
where his great grandfather once
claimed land
over a century before,
though not a typical prairie tract
but on the edge
of a large shallow lake,
often dry.
The man cried,
the first to return
in all that time, but
now another link
to that man who
was special buddy
in his earliest years –
leaving behind his name,
his genes, and love
for his mother tongue.

IV. Fulfillment

Five years their lives
overlapped and
were part and time
with one another –
then loss came:
separation
for a life, but
memory remained:
the man, his words
and hometown far,
far away, where family
remained, and one day
there was reunion.
Grown boy found
familie heimstadt,
Reckendorf, Bayern,
and wept with joy
in longed for union.

Translated by Huang Guosheng

The relatives probably remained in sorrow,
But the others had already sung the happy song.
What to say to the dead?
Only the corpse is left to be buried under the mountain long.

Everything is at its loveliest
as it leaves.
All that is leaving has never looked
more lovable.
It’s the leaving not the being gone
It’s the departing not the being done
That’ll ignite faint aching sparklers in
Your gutsack.
The end itself is nothing: the definition of nothing.
The end itself is historically won, behind one.
It’s the long long landing, not the deplaning,
It’s the longheld fermata, and the long deferring of
The final calamitous chord, that
Will deforest the rich soulful glade in you.
It’s the last plaintive passage in the cadenza,
Not the suave genuflecting of the maestro
And his standing squad of string players, that will
Make you hamstrung and heartwrung.
The long slow descent before wheels-down, while I
Reminisce all the nimbuses of the players in my past,
Gives me time to see them take their bows. This
Is the parenthesis in which
The wrenching takes place. It’s within the brackets here —
In the borderland between Nostalgialand and Death —
That wistfulness deals out a thousand deaths.

In the stillness, shadows loom,
A whisper from escape from gloom.
A world of pain, a silent plea,
Yet echoes of love still cling to me.

Dark thoughts drift like autumn leaves,
Yearning for peace, but the heart grieves.
In the depths, a flicker of light,
But the weight of despair holds on tight.

don’t y’all cry over Me. I was a good woman. celebrate Me. ~OG Queen
…come celebrate / with me that everyday / something has tried to kill me / and has failed. ~Lucille Clifton

it turns out the ash ain’t ash at all
but bone burned clean

all remnants of life give in
to the flame but the marrow,

the remnants blessed, are
pleasant pyre purge. 67 years

of thick skin levitating, flesh & bone
giving in while standing up to

the fire. our brilliant Matriarch
found Her loophole.