I’m tired again,
And I’m not looking for invigoration.
I don’t want someone to make me feel young
I don’t want a shot of energy,
Caffeine
Electricity
Unexpected adventure,
I want a soft place to land,
A pillow for my head,
Someone to caress my shoulders while I find a dreamy burrow to lay my mind down for sleep,
I want
Rest.
Mar 17, 2019
Mar 17, 2019 at 10:34 PM UTC
No matter which window I look out of,
the world is still on fire.
Upstairs,
Downstairs,
gleaming with the orange-gold of
indiscriminate destruction.
When I was young,
I thought the framed oil paintings were real,
and enjoyed the pleasant, static serenity-
but one day,
I noticed a shadow glance across the edges of the curtains,
and when I parted them,
the glass was aflame.
Every bay,
every aperture,
glowing hot and chaotic,
apathetic to my plight.
I scoured the halls,
reached high on the basement walls,
searched the attic,
but every window framed the same vision-
a fatal inferno.
It wasn't until I caught fire myself that I realized-
the world is not on fire.
My house is.
Mar 17, 2019
Mar 17, 2019 at 10:27 PM UTC
There’s a silhouette outside my eyelids and a deep, dark color that rose up out of a dream I had as a child.
There’s a forest green and a slow, methodical movement that suddenly becomes lithe and deliberate under the influence of art.
A small part of me recognized him from the visions I created as a child, but I never thought he’d come in the form of someone I love so much.
The best kind of love-
The kind that stays even when the weather is poor
And the roads are winding,
The real kind.
There’s no romance,
No flowery words,
But just like the man from my made-up narratives as a kid,
He’s sturdy
and he feels real.
I can read him and hear him and feel him even when the lights are low and life gets loud,
And he does just fine no matter what.
He survives.
Despite my desperation to escape the company of every other person,
Frantically crawling back to the solitude of my home,
I hesitate to leave his company.
Because friendship is the finest balm
For the singe of human emotion,
Moonbeams and a night breeze after the severe, summer sun.
That’s the truest kind,
The most authentic kind
Of love.
And when I dreamt man as a young girl,
I thought I’d find him under a jasmine arch,
At the end of the isle.
Instead I found him in a classroom,
And became his best friend.
Jul 31, 2018
Jul 31, 2018 at 7:33 PM UTC
On dusty streets leading from market to to the edges of a resort,
elderly men with three teeth beckon you.
The commercialized exoticism sweeps you up
and you hand over pesos
in exchange for a piece of parchment with hand-scrawled symbols...
There is no Mayan alphabet.
They'll tell you that they're writing your name,
you'll take it home and display it on a shelf next to framed pictures
of you and the family in Chichen Itza,
but nothing about it is real.
We never grow up and learn not to believe,
we just learn piece by piece what's real and what's not.
Children learn about the tooth fairy,
and mermaids,
teenagers learn about soulmates,
young people learn about their dreams,
but even as adults,
there are things we still believe in.
There is no Mayan alphabet,
and yet grown, educated people
pull coins from their pocket in an attempt to connect with a culture that seems too fantastic to be a part of reality.
There is no Mayan alphabet,
but people still believe.
They believe in utopias
and countries without debt.
They believe in world peace and infinite resources,
they'll write checks to conmen
and work for checks from them, too.
They believe in honest politicians
and perfectly healthy food.
They put stock in organic remedies
and all their trust in online articles,
and every time they think they've learned the way of the world,
they'll turn around,
and learn something new.
Adults may not believe in fairy tales,
but they will believe in the Mayan alphabet.
Jul 3, 2018
Jul 3, 2018 at 5:14 PM UTC
My chest is a clay ***
The kind with the round body and small mouth that your abuela hangs on the porch
And some obscure thing grows from it,
Brown in the winter,
Green in the spring…
My chest is a clay ***
It holds in everything it needs to,
And it seems perfectly sturdy,
But when the insides get to be too much,
Or the weather gets to be too bad,
It shatters.
My chest is a clay ***
And inside it is a growing thing.
I don’t know when it’ll become too much to contain,
Or when I’ll have to reach inside and take some out
In order to survive,
But I pray each day that its chalky exterior doesn’t become brittle
And crack.
My chest is a clay ***
Jun 29, 2018
Jun 29, 2018 at 11:57 AM UTC
Shadows move with my feet on the cobblestone
from the sunlight dancing on the picado banners
that stretch between buildings
And offer some reprieve
From the Texas sun.
The mouth-watering scent of pan dulce
Draws children to the glass fronts of the old bakery,
And they flit between sweet breads
And figurines of brilliant colors
Crowding stands run by elderly craftsmen and women with big smiles-
San Antonio,
There’s something in your streets.
Something binds me to your old, leaning buildings,
And the murals that decorate them,
San Antonio,
My first memories of reading
Reside on 600 Soledad Street
between the shelves of the Big Enchilada,
And dapple down through the glossy, colorful limbs
of its Chihuly spine.
You exist in the border between coastal plains and the hill country,
Mesquite trees and palm trees living side by side
Just as the German and Spanish settlements do,
The missions becoming as much a part of the land
As the Guadelupe.
With tequila on my tongue,
And boots on my feet,
I’m prepared to bask in the warmth absorbed by sandy loam
And breathe in the smell of elotas on a Sunday afternoon
To the sound of San Fernando’s bells,
Oh, San Antonio…
I’ve never wished for a better dwelling,
Even one with cooler summers
And smoother streets,
Oh, San Antonio…
I’d be a fool to leave you,
To call another home,
And I’ve never found myself foolish before,
So my dearest, sweetest, most proud San Antonio,
I am here to stay.
Jun 29, 2018
Jun 29, 2018 at 11:45 AM UTC
Hat pulled low over my face, I pull the lever of the pump,
getting back in my car,
hands placed on the steering wheel as if I'm going to drive away while the gas is going,
I just sit.
Alone.
Trying to clear my mind before the day.
That's when I see them.
A pixie-like little girl in denim and cotton,
tennis shoes untied and scuffed,
long hair trailing unkempt,
summer hair,
barely brushed,
she skips beside a man who is undoubtedly her father,
a serious-looking man dressed for a day of adventure,
the same nose as the sprite hopping along beside him.
At once,
I spiral into an invisible shoe box of photos...
then it's me with my hair down and my shoes untied and a big smile on my face as I accompany my father in the most mundane tasks.
Everything is an adventure with daddy,
everything is a game,
a brand-new experience tied up in shiny ribbons,
even if it's just going to the gas station.
They reappear from the store,
and the little girl excitedly pulls a bottle of chocolate milk from the plastic bag.
The colorful snacks look silly in the father's large, rough hands,
but he opens each package carefully,
handing her napkins,
and in her unrelenting grin,
anyone can see that she owns him heart and soul.
I shift uncomfortably in my mental shoe box,
and I see myself again,
overalls and a small bag of donuts,
licking the glaze from my fingers,
my father reaching over with a towel to wipe my face clean of chocolate glaze.
He chastises me, but he's smiling,
and he pops a donut into his mouth, too,
two best friends on a summer adventure,
nothing can stop our fun.
The father starts their rickety old suburban, and the little girl bounces excitedly in her seat, eager for their next stop. The mode of transportation could be a rusted row boat in the middle of a swamp,
but to her,
it's all a part of a beautiful memory that she'll never let go of.
And one day,
when her daddy is gone,
she'll drive up to the gas station in her own car
and sit in the driver's seat to take a breath,
and she'll see herself, fifteen years younger, prancing happily along her father's steady gait,
and she'll fall backwards into an unexpected
invisible
shoebox.
Jun 20, 2018
Jun 20, 2018 at 12:28 PM UTC
Under the unforgiving summer sun, their small, winged bodies hover from one flowering plant to another, working tirelessly in the sweltering heat as we laze in the shade...
Their work is endless, the product harvested in minutes. Smoked into a stupor while we steal their treasures, and if some of them die, so be it...
Melissa, Queen of Bees,
revered before by human royalty and great innovators,
Melissa, Queen of Bees,
who connects life and death,
whose children killed the demon Arunasura in India,
and were prophets to the gods in Greece and Rome.
Melissa, Queen of Bees,
her bees fell from the sun in Egypt,
aided the first living man in Uganda,
and created man from the back of a mantis in the Kalahari Desert.
Melissa, Queen of Bees,
her children are the origin of magic in Eastern Europe,
a source of fertility and a connection to nature in North America,
and fierce, terrifying warriors in the South.
Melissa, Queen of Bees,
the Great Mother,
the root of being,
the bridge to the afterlife,
we owe her children our lives,
the least we can do is spare them their's.
Jun 15, 2018
Jun 15, 2018 at 12:56 PM UTC
I used to be a Glock 40,
my aim impeccable.
I made the decision,
I pulled the trigger,
I hit my target.
Lately, I've been a musket shot;
unpredictable,
and somehow even more dangerous than usual.
I miss the center and wind up somewhere in the corner of the paper.
Dust flies from the shrapnel
where I used to have a single trail of smoke indicating the bullet, crumpled but whole,
placing a hole where I wanted it to,
and one unbroken shell, slightly charred,
dropping near my feet.
But here I am watching people take cover
as my pieces go flying, destroyed by my own chaos,
tearing anything and everything apart in its path.
I used to be deadly but precise.
Now I'm not sure what I am.
I'm certainly causing damage,
but more to myself than anyone else...
I confuse and startle people more than strike fear in them,
and that's insufficient...
I want to be better,
but I keep going off without warning,
and people avoid me to avoid getting hit,
but they're not scared,
they're simply learning,
and I don't know how I feel about that,
maybe I'm not a gun anymore,
maybe I'm the target,
I certainly feel like a piece of paper,
flimsy and vulnerable against the onslaught of lead,
blown to bits and drifting off in the cloud of dust...
maybe I don't want to be a gun anymore.
I certainly don't want to be a target.
Maybe I don't want to be a pistol
or a musket
or a bow or a knife or a clenched fist,
maybe I want to be a person.
Jun 6, 2018
Jun 6, 2018 at 1:22 PM UTC
The sound of stripping boughs stirs in a dream,
Leaves plucked and prepared for tapering steam.
Thy senses awaken, ravenous beasts,
Satiated by boiling, liquid feasts.
Darling china cups, looking sugar spun,
Perched, gathering dust, till the tea is done.
And the table must be clear for the drink,
Aside from the vases with rosebuds of pink,
Awaiting the whistle, too long to bear,
Silent, aside from the creak in my chair.
The kettle calls, I move, roused by the din,
And out, the nectar comes, hotter than sin.
Slowly it steeps, so graceful and tender,
Bitter and rich, it fills me with splendor.
Apr 26, 2018
Apr 26, 2018 at 5:35 PM UTC