Longevity
My mother cannot move
Her joints flexed are rotted corns
Hardened with stubbornness and crystallized pain
She is a mighty oak
Every branch exchanged sway with immobility
Each embrace skeletonized love to closet ghosts
The price of living past her prime
Is shattering wind, erasing green hope
Her fatalism resembles gravity
Time fulness is her elongated death, a promise to me
“You will remember me when you too are here”
RENDERING
Fat stores poisons
Like stashed dowries
The doctor says
Like wedding sheets
Frayed from bodies
Thrashing for decades
Of marital bliss or distress - either way
The rendering tears evaporate its moisture
Making the blubber safe to keep
Along dispersing the toxin like
Wrung white-out anger blizzards
The rivulets of hot oil
Tattoo your heart
With genealogy’s traumas
Oh so permanent and cannibal feast of attachment
A bad eye afternoon
Mother, your
Slicing words, a disco-dizzy
Of meanness danced this afternoon
And four decades of sour starter
Masterfully baked
An ill-will bread
Memories are ash-grey and
Green, both envy
And riches hues
But the cursing eye is steely blue
Much like the blue bird of happiness
Fleeting from tree to tree
The diagrammed journey
Aquatic to breath, bobbing adrift
Passage to opening, the circle breached
Dark to light, shapes assumed
Flatline grey, to rainbow’s thirst
Pitch to buffer, endless registering
Breast milk, to sugar’s bondage
Dry skin, touch’s Morse code
Anchoring attachment, to an endless quest
The nuance of being, your will must be formed
Choice is king, evil and virtue
Monumental battle, the river can never go back
To the origin of you
