Category: Uncategorized

The Maga will deliver what is owed
from a great hardware store
a department, the section
necessary fixtures and adhesives
for the job, guaranteed to cement
what’s so rickety, piles as they shift
rise majestic, up to high heaven
where Maga sits with open hands
open arms, flowing gown, granting.

I want to hold the hand inside you

My mom won’t eat Baby Ruth candy bars for a year. I look over her sins past committed and without thinking forgive her. Jehovah, Jehovah, come my Lord. She dreams of nothing and it hurts like it’s something. Who knew that emptiness could be a curse word?

I want to take the breath that’s true

I watch her through a window when she sits outside, talking on the phone, trying to be furtive as she describes grief symptoms with a therapist. I watch her hands subconsciously make a baby-sized oval that her tears soon wash away. Her chest rises and falls in a shudder-breath that could have started waves on the ocean.

I look to you and I see nothing

Heaven’s orchestra, she tells me, plays in her dreams and nightmares. Somehow, it always sounds the same.

I look to you to see the truth

Time after time I watch her drown. She is bedridden, curled up between the sheets with one earbud falling out, sucking in air, sucking in small pieces of nothing. A documentary blares in her ear. The words are meaningless, a foreign language, English and yet not quite. It’s a happy English that’s simply superficial in the light of earth-shattering grief, in the light of a baby lost before she could fight to stay alive.

You live your life, you go in shadows

Her nose is perpetually red from crying, from knowing that movies lie and tears cannot actually wake the dead. Innocence has died, and it too remains in the grave, fallen from grace. I try my best to let it survive, thinking maybe she appreciates the way my hands pull her hair out of her eyes. Or maybe she’d rather use it to hide. Sometimes I judge wrong. I let my mother grow up.

You’ll come apart and you’ll go blind

Bejeweled, she becomes it. She is bejeweled in misery and wonders why her face breaks out and her eyesight fails. The clock strikes nothing several times a week; everyone’s favorite number.

Some kind of night into your darkness

I hurt for her, and can no longer see either. I see so much of nothing. I see Ruth when I lie silently awake, drowning in my own quiet way. She is alive, somehow. This is all my fault, somehow. She is faceless. Emotionless. Is she nothing, or everything?

Colors your eyes with what’s not there

She is Ruth. No middle name. Just Ruth. Ruth Nothing-Everything. Was she coming from a set of divorced parents and keeping both names? All I know is that she was adopted too late by a world she was too good for. The only explanation is thus.

Fade into you

The ashes come to us later. No one remembers the name of the crematory who sifted through her remains to incinerate them. I still don’t remember how they come. Maybe they came home with my parents from the hospital. One way or another, they end up on my mom’s lap in a box that laughs at all of us with its careful carved beauty. It’s a respectful mockery, a silent twist of the knife, an accepted grudge.

Strange you never knew

Ruth did nothing and broke a hundred hearts by it. My mom floats through her days and holds on to a hope I cannot make sense of. It’s all senseless. People bring too much food and she slowly starves. I forget what I’ve eaten, I feel guilty I can eat. Did I not love her enough?

Fade into you

I lose track of the days. I pretend to be normal around my friends, who lose themselves in superficiality so they don’t have to address the elephant in the room. I feel guilty for smiling. Humor is there, but a shameful touch, the prick of the knife.

I think it’s strange you never knew

Pieces of my mom’s heart fit slowly back together in a jagged art form, and I am the observant Giacometti who stands and becomes a ghost. I try not to become my shriveling soul, dying in its corner of heaven’s hell. Nights get less worrisome when I no longer cry, but my mom keeps crying, so I don’t speak of babies. No one does. We are silent, and the ache cautiously edges its way out of my mother’s soul in flakes of fire

The sweet smell of cerulean seas
leaves me grounded by roots
in the only place I ever knew
the crashing waters of silent pleas

Do memories remain old
if they only exist
for when you last reminisce
I still do not know

She sounds of glittering sand
as she bluely floats near
with a sadness only I can hear
As if this was not planned

“What do you want?”
She came to claim my collapse
a dream explored but I had yet to renounce
“You know this was preordained, my
transient.”

I was aware of this and yet was
unexpectedly dismayed
“Will I still remember what I do not
recognise?

“Will I still feel what is impossible in the
other species?”
She said nothing but the response made
me disheartened

I felt tears come and hoped for more
knowing that this would be the last time
that pain and joy and love and hate would
be mine
but all I saw in the sea was someone raw
and sore

So I let this mourning take me by the hand
hope traded for grief of a life
that had to be handed over without strife
And let go, not knowing where I’d land

She drifted a presence through my hair
and I felt the shift of weight in water
as my limbs started to melt further
until I became a being unfair

She scooped up that little moon jellyfish
delivering him to the ocean
just as he had come before his dream
with no recollection of his completed wish

She knew that he would always return this
way
as he would wait out that favourable
condition
to the limit that his polyp could trade in
for that dream to feel just for a day

My mother is dead.
My father is dead.
My brother is dead.
My other brother is dead.
My sister is dead.
My nephew is dead.
My son is dead.
When will my family stop dying?
I’m never going to get used to it.

Surrender, sleep, then wake up
without the fatigue,
but the sadness you fled
still remains in the morning.

Last night, thinking,

“This will go away with sleep
and some dreams.”

This morning, realizing,
only the physical exhaustion
has abandoned you.

You thought melancholy might
disappear with
the arrival of visions.

And the dreams did come,
but carried despair into the morning

Within their floral-patterned case
Its colors ranging cool to warm
A pair of glasses rests.
Your perfume lingers, just a trace
Reminding me you once had form
And eyes, and hands, and breasts.

When we were young, you taught my peers
The science that describes the Earth.
You nurtured them: Well done.
My eye, behind your glasses, tears
How blessed I am that you gave birth.
Like me, you loved your son.

I love my son.
I loved your son.
Dear Mrs. Brodsky,
Thank you for your son.

This week in widowhood
I ran pass forty gates to the connecting flight
a return to nothingness
holding back the tears
each a reminder that you were not there

This week in widowhood
I walked into our very empty house
once our home
now, even the cats don’t reside there anymore

This week in widowhood
Insomnia has returned
and I’ve forgotten how to even take a nap

This week in widowhood
I was brave, and went to a doctor’s appointment alone
I even returned your stash of unused prescription drugs
each also lonely for you

This week in widowhood
I thought about returning to New York
where I was sure to feel your presence again at the Met
I posted something to a widow message board instead
the message board swiftly becoming
a new friend

This week in widowhood
I traded in your vehicle
and found buried
your glasses, and old school ID, and a pack of cinnamon gum
that cried with me

This week in widowhood
My father helped me purchase a new car
one without your smell
one that I could not bring myself to drive
my father drove while I stared, exhausted

I survived another week
I tell myself this
I’m a real tough kid and I can handle my shit
even with a broken heart

Her soft, brown hair tied up in her favorite scrunchie,
Looking at me with bright, green eyes that look just like mine.
The scent of her perfume that still lingers, almost like she’s still here.
Beautiful on the inside and out,
The kindest person I knew.

I see myself in her in many ways,
From the way I speak and laugh to when I look in the mirror.
It’s almost like she’s staring back at me.

Everything around me is a constant reminder of her, including myself.
From hearing her favorite songs in public to seeing anything the color purple.
Pictures of us around my room and videos of her voice are what I live through,
Thinking of what my life would be like if she had gotten better.

Infectious laughs, room lighting smiles and comforting hugs
Caring for me when I’m sick, holding me while I cry.
She taught me everything I needed to know in such a short time frame,
Always teaching me more every day, explaining it with such ease.

From planning our futures that fate will prevent from happening on the couch at 1 am,
To doing face masks together while watching our favorite show,
And eating the snack she bought for me because she said it made her think of me.

“God gives you two ears and one mouth for a reason – you listen more than you speak.”
She would always tell me.
Always full of encouraging and kind words getting me through a hard day,
There for me the second that I need her to be,
Always answering the phone on the first ring.

The woman with the biggest heart,
Always giving and putting others before herself,
But never wanting anything in return.

My biggest supporter and guardian angel,
The woman I received my name and blood from,
My best friend

Spider lilies brown, unfurling like crows lifting from a branch
in driveway light.

I knew mom would be late,
could feel it as I held dad, restless
in my arms, promise evaporated
before it left my mouth.

Weeks later in SoKo these same lilies bloom
as I rot quietly in bed
and make room for compost.

I think of how mom’s face looked
the day she died,
a memory now softening
under this empty sky.

I was told by a medium I knew her in several lifetimes
before this one, but now
it’s just spider lilies
and the sense
that my parents are missing
from the room.

I asked for a sign last June,
questioned my fragile life,
and now the lilies bloom
without pause, feeling
no different for the loss.

Blood-soaked bodies lying down
Inspired by the love for the undead,
The husband cries again and again, his life
Destroyed by death. The children scream in unison
“We love you mother” but their voices drowned in an instant,
As if they could be heard.
Alas life is a tragedy, lived by those blessed with money,
Suffered by those without. “Let us bury our mother” they said
Throwing the cents they possessed,
This is too little they heard,
Lo we shall join her instead.