Affirmation
That crepey neck.
I’m going to look like my Grandmother.
But I refuse to wear blue tennis shoes like her,
and when my jewelry starts turning black,
I’ll stop wearing it.
I won’t use straight pins for buttons
or rat my hair and roll it in a bun.
I won’t save Cracker Jack prizes in canning jars
or give all my money to the Seventh day Adventists.
I will not save food in my purse to take home from family dinners,
and I won’t let so many cats sleep in the henhouse.
I Just Get My Religion from People
She hooks one long red fingernail
and her left ear disappears.
She points the nail tip to her thumb
and the table rises into the air.
She wrinkles her nose and the table
comes down but the lights go out.
When they come on,
she’s gone but her shoes are still
under the table,
one toe pointed backward––
one heel broken.
Music shows in the air,
hung there by its black tails.
I open a window, blow
jazz to the corners of the room.
I open the door and her shoes walk
out on the wrong side of each other.
“How’s she doing today?” asks the doorman
on my way out.
“We’re getting her act together,” I say.
Catch up to her shoes at the
taxi stand at the corner,
hail them a cab.
For the dVerse Poets Surreal Poetry prompt.
verseVV
New Birth
The phone rings four times in the very early morning.
I reach between the bars of the hospital bed
I have been sharing with you for the past hour
and grab the handset of the phone,
hear the long beep of the fax connecting
to announce Art Fest 2001
for the fourth time in the past two days.
Three times I’ve asked to be taken from their list.
Yet still, in this early morning
more intimate than our honeymoon,
the phone rings and rings,
as though even as you decide
to be rid of the world, the world is not quite rid of you.
At the end of your life, we pull ourselves into this house, then into this room.
“Roll the pain up in a ball,” I say, “and toss it away,”
And so, just as we had decided to venture once more out into the world,
the world rolls up into a ball of pain suspended in the air above your bed.
The morphine works only as a distraction.
You moan and make broad gestures, trying to pick the wildflowers
you see growing from the ceiling.
You say they are blue. “Not my style,” you say,
as though any flowers are your style.
You grow imperious,
calling out for chipped ice, not cubed, in the bottle, not the glass.
Knit socks become too uncomfortable, their threads pushing against your skin,
so you ask for those more finely woven.
I ease them over your swollen feet–like trying to squeeze gut over fat sausages.
You bark commands like a general, crabby no matter what the outcome.
Finding fault seems to be your new virility.
It is not the tender moments that fuel the long long days.
Your ill humor and harsh demands
raise a spirit in me where before I wavered.
I need not answer back to feel my strength growing day by day.
I can do anything–deal with any bodily fluid, most abuse.
I can take the blanket off and put it back again
a dozen times in as many minutes.
I take NoDoz for the first time since college,
trying to stay awake to drive you to the doctor’s office.
After so many nights with little sleep,
I pound my hand against the wheel to hurt myself awake.
Trying to make you comfortable
has become an impossibility,
and although it breaks my heart,
it does not break my soul.
You are constantly mad at me,
I always on the way to being a little mad at you.
That’s the way we get through this.
When you fall in the shower,
you lie as though crucified,
your body slight now–
Christlike in your suffering
as the water rains down on you.
When I turn it off and reach out to help you,
”Leave it on!” you snarl,
like a dog protecting his bones.
Ten minutes later, you are too weak
from the hot water
to stand on your own.
I put your arms over my shoulders
to carry you on my back,
like a penitent.
What pain feeds your anger these long weeks?
Is it the cancer or the slow hard truth
as your wife becomes your mother
and you, a child–
petulant, demanding,
are borne once more,
this time away from her.
The dVerse Poets prompt is to write a poem on the subject of birth.
The Passenger
I see her back her car outside.
She never offers me a ride.
I go the same way she is going,
but she passes, still unknowing.
After ten long years, I stand
making no sign with head or hand.
My legs are tired. My back is bent.
My footsteps follow where she went.
It takes two minutes to go by car.
I take an hour to go that far.
If she knew, perhaps she’d say,
“Would you like a ride today?”
She would have rolled her window down
to offer me a ride to town.
I’d dust my clothes and step inside,
grateful, at long last, for the ride.
And at the bottom of the hill,
as though, perhaps, she’d had her fill,
She’d say, “I’m turning left from here.”
And I’d assemble all my gear,
and give my thank-you, even though
I need to go where she will go.
Charity goes just so far,
I think, as I exit the car.
I live about two-thirds of the way up a very tall mountain in Mexico, and often as I drive down to the main road, I give a ride to whomever I encounter walking down the cobblestones—especially the women, most of whom work as housekeepers in the houses in my fraccionamiento. But now and then when I am in a hurry or when I see a man suspicious-looking or dusted by his labors, I drive on by. Then I wonder what he is thinking as I guiltily observe him in the rear vision mirror.
jdbphoto
Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, Inc.
Home Sweet Homeland
In homage to our homeland, we must keep it homogenous.
Protect it from the homeless, the homos and androgynous.
Being a homo sapien is not enough for entry.
To preserve our bonhomie, you must be white or gentry.
Now that you’ve ruined your homeland, must you come ruin ours?
Swarm across our boundaries? Infest our sacred towers?
“Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed” is seen as just a homily.
For the present powers-that-be, it’s only an anomaly.
America’s our “Home Sweet Home,” but it’s not meant for you.
We have no place for immigrants of your particular hue.
For the dVerse Poets prompt to write a poem making use of a Polyptoton. See other poems written to this prompt HERE.
Image by JJ Jordan on Unsplash. Used with permission.
Grossed Out by Liver
Have you ever seen the quiver
of a plate of raw red liver?
Shake it and you’ll see it shiver.
Blood runs right out and forms a river.
If mom cooks it, I won’t forgive her.
I will not eat a gol darn sliver!!
For Whimsygismo’s dVerse Quadrille (exactly 44 words) prompt of Quiver. Phew!!!
Canned Cantos
Behold the simple can of soup.
Outside it’s hard. Inside it’s goop.
Cream of mushroom, turkey noodle—
kids adore the whole kaboodle.
Crass men raid the chicken coop
to gather poultry for our soup.
They chop up onions, slice potatoes,
murder mushrooms, slay tomatoes.
Must Warhol then immortalize
this canned concoction I despise?
The world agreed. He must. He should.
They called his canned art very good.
Yet this icon that he chose
to paint and to overexpose,
I could easily view myself
lined up on my kitchen shelf.
Why pay a thousand bucks or more
for something that each day I pour
into a pan and then ingest?
I think, friends, that it was a test
to see how gullible we are.
As we made this elf a star,
fanned his fame, increased his rank,
he laughed his way right to the bank.
My husband was an artist and so it seemed fitting to write a profile/portrait of him that described him primarily in terms of color.
Portrait of the Artist
The artist in you
understood color so well.
And yet, even as you layered on
red and green,
so much of you was blue.
Your white hair,
loosened from the pony tail
and streaming down your back
in your wild man look,
prompted strangers to ask
if you were a shaman,
or declare you to be one.
But there was
that black in you
that altered it,
that shade created
by the blend
of white and black
you knew so well.
The red that flamed out from your work,
subtly put there even in places
where it had no logical purpose for being,
that red tried to make things right.
Yet all of us
who knew you well
knew the blue.
It was the background color
of all of your days.
It was the blanket
in which we wrapped
ourselves
at night,
trying to be close,
but so often
divided
by it.
For fifteen years, I tried
to paint you yellow.
There were splashes of it, surely,
throughout our lives together.
You on the stage, reading your heart,
me in the audience, recognizing
all the colors caught within you.
Finding the pictures you had taken of me
studying your work at the art show,
those pictures you had snapped surreptitiously
even before we met,
I discovered, after your passing,
that you had recognized
me even then, when I thought
I was the only one
angling for a meeting—
sure of my need to know
those secret parts of you
that I will never know
now that you have given yourself
to whatever color your ever-after
has delivered you to.
A new life later,
I am suffused
by my own canvas
of memories of you—
every other pigment
splashed against
a vivid background
of yellow.
The dVerse Poetics prompt is to create a profile or self-profile in verse. Go HERE to read additional poems written to this prompt by others.
jdb photo
Today I read a story about a man who led big game hunting expeditions whose claim was that he could guarantee a kill with one hundred percent surety. Ironically enough, after shooting a water buffalo and posing with his kill, he was fatally gored by another water buffalo. This was perhaps on my mind as I wrote this poem on the subject of extinction for the quadrille challenge. Please note that I am not in favor of big game hunting. In the last lines, I’m talking about luck in a general sense, not in terms of big game hunting. I took this photo in Kenya in 1967.
Extinction
If we all were always winners, winning would lose distinction.
Every hunter bagging game would lead to their extinction.
So to qualify my wishes, I guess that I’ll just say
I hope when it’s your turn for luck, that it will come your way!
for dVerse Poets
Waiting in the Dark
Why are you waiting in the dark
listening to the wind’s sharp bark?
Elsewhere is diversion enough––
Internet and other stuff.
Distraction is the modern mode,
emoticons to speak in code.
Don’t place yourself upon a shelf.
Come take a photo of yourself
and post it on your Facebook wall.
Introspection won’t do at all.
Log onto Tinder and make a date.
Only losers sit and wait.
For the dVerse Poets theme of “Waiting.” But, since I missed the post cutoff by 54 minutes, I’ll post it here!
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 