The Leaf Cat
If you stare at something long enough it assumes a life all its own.
Even the wind carries a child in a rucksack.
The child’s name could be Leaf,
emblematic of green, its mixture of yellow and blue.
Our tortured world loves the color green,
its promise of better times.
Oh, to be green in the long night of terror.
Meanwhile, the leaf-cat reclines on a padded porch chair.
The cry in its throat is red
New American Writing Issue: No. 37
Mother once told me my wakefulness took
up an entire floor—that’s
why I house myself in the woods. All
the tree knows of cover is moss. All
the child in Aleppo knows of cover is run. I can’t
reconcile what’s happening in the world. Night
leavens its darkness, buried
in hypocrisy and vile
politicians. There’s a fog
catcher in Lima who brings water
to the poor. I’ve asked him
to speak to us.
https://www.sukoonmag.com/responsive/wp-content/uploads/Sukoon-Mag-Issue-9-W-2018.pdf
Sukoon Vol. 5 When my husband caught the trapped hummingbird
and freed it from the screened-in porch,
his big hands, a woven bird’s nest,
a few fingers opened into an escape hatch,
I held my breath as one does before the delicate—
that spot of bird, singular in its journey,
wings like small lead windows.
It seemed strange to see a big man
who could easily crush the body of such a small thing
release to air the hummingbird, who once in flight,
turned as if to say, I’ll remember this.
Your Daily Poem, on-line, 2014
I am reading a book loaned to me by a very old woman.
Her hands are on the pages and they are slipping into mine;
flesh of a book against my brow as I close my eyes to rest.
What I love best about this book recommended by an old woman,
is how a single strand of silver hair becomes my bookmark—
between two pages, a single strand of hair tells where I left off.
Where I left off is not where I am or where I intend to be.
Further into the book than ever imagined is a story about being
an old woman who reads a book and recognizes herself
in a character. The old woman looks out from the book,
an old woman’s eyes large as an oasis and clear as sunlit sand.
Her hand is a vine of many veins that intertwine and signal something.
Something close and dear as song expresses itself on her lips.
She is sipping lyrics from the air through the straw of a strand of hair.
Her hands are on the pages and they are slipping into mine.
Published In England’s Aesthetica Creative Writing Annual 2014–Finalist
Fugue
I wish I could tell you more about the man
bent over the drawing of his daughters
Sofi and Sonia, how like Saint Bartholomew
in Rembrandt’s painting, the man becomes so intent
that his pencil is now another finger,
and the man himself leaves, as though absorption
in what one loves calls the being from the body,
and being, the only true state, shapes the careful eyes
and lips of his girls. I would like to tell you the man’s name,
but I am sworn to silence on the prisoners I work with.
Were it possible to portray the man
accurately, his skin sewn in a tight weave
of tattoos, I would start with his eyes,
tell you how I see in them the brown loaves of bread
his mother made, his mouth about to form what he is unable to say.
What we cannot utter must write its meaning elsewhere—
the fragments of language building the innovative.
If there is a heaven of words, or at the very least
a storage place, what goes unspoken must send its roots
into a future we know nothing about.
It’s yard recall, but the man, still absorbed, draws
his daughters, his head so close to the paper
that he could be outlining himself—
the shapes of their lovely mouths,
butterflies with spread wings.
First he showed him how to hold the cleaver,
where to make the best cut,
said to keep his eye on the meat’s grain,
hold the blade steady,
and how beautifully the meat opened
on the maple chopping block,
gracious host to its own body,
the apprentice wiping his bloodied hands
across his heavy cotton apron;
his sigh, such finesse,
a sigh a lover might make,
satisfied before ultimate
pleasure—but, no climax here,
only the calm of knowing
one did the other body right,
and can’t you tell
that the one being trained
seeks the best advice to finish meat,
especially since fine butchery is nearly extinct,
for why else
would the Master train
the hand coming back to fingers,
to opening, carefully at first,
the red flesh that was once desire.
While I count my potatoes’ worth,
calculate how much they’ll yield the village,
they widen their space against silence.
They push with the walls of their skin
against the unknown, peel back
their desires. Today, I grabbed a wheel-
barrow to cart them inside, bent at the tub,
rinsed their pretty heads, a scrub brush
in hand. When I wash something else,
I also cleanse myself. Who dare flaunt
the fluency of growth, how a spud’s roots
sink to take hold? I too have known
moments inside earth where each birth
was promise of something else. I slept as my
potatoes sleep, mute at the breast of depth.
There have been potatoes I’ve favored
more than people. Because of their adherence
to mystery. How it works to enhance.
Even the earth-worm knows the richness
of tubers cloaked in their drab burqas,
how all things wrap into something for comfort.