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Multigenerational Mom Muses on Twin Toddlers & Twenty-Something Daughters

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More Than Kin

I saw our family’s matriarch this week.

Spent a night and afternoon bathed in her love.

Watched as she delivered candy heart grapes

and chocolate chip cookies to attendants

where her husband now resides –my uncle,

but no more like my uncle than I am 

to Hercules, so bent and gnarled is he,

a Joshua Tree inside the endless

pale expanse of his nursing home walls.

We signed the guest book where her name repeats

uninterrupted and boundless in the

otherwise bare pages, her Palmer-Method

perfect loops and whorls as precise as the

fingerprint of her love on him, on me,

on all blessed to call her kin and more than kind.

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Grits and Gravy

Hearts as good 
as grits and gravy, 
passions that run 
like over-easy eggs, 
my first block class 
of seniors
is a heaping helping 
of Heaven Help
with a whole lotta
Gotta love ‘em 
thrown in too.

Scattered, smothered, 
and covered up – 
that’s what they keep me –
along with on my toes
and on my No’s,
but oh-so-many 
Yes-es, too.

We should all be 
this way, their way,
full of pushing ourselves 
and our limits,
pouring our magic 
into this, our magic hour 
in this wild and precious world. 

We should all be grabbing our minutes 
by the forkfuls, the spoonfuls, the plate and bowl and platterfuls, 
with hearts as good as grits and gravy, passions spilling off the edges 
                                                                                        like	
										             over-easy 
											                   eggs.

Before the grit 
and grave
overtake us all.



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We Need Women Writers

for honeyed light,
and fuzzy blossoms,
warmer breezes,
brighter days
daffodil and
cricket whispers
Mary Oliver
songs of praise.

calmer seasons,
softer reasons,
searching, finding
helping ways,
words of wisdom,
sanguine answers,
Barbara Kingsolver
takeaways.

calm reserves
and ample courage,
understanding
of the mess,
fortitude
to band together,
Margaret Atwood
cleverness.

Mary Shelley’s
flip the monster,
Virginia Woolf’s
collective views,
Madeline Miller’s
new perspective,
Alice Walker’s
use the bruise.

Perkins Gilman’s
righteous anger,
Angelou’s
escape the cage,
Angela Carter’s
dark and twisty,
Hansberry’s
take center stage.

Women Writers
came before us,
Women Writers
writing still.
may we read them,
may we be them,
grab our quills,
exert free will.

do some damage.
wreak some carnage.
sound the gongs,
and right the wrongs.
strong solutions
and ablutions,
lead the way
to brighter days.








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These Winter Sunlessdays

I woke to the shrieks
of blackbirds roving.
Again.

Every day
for the last 20-something,
they’ve picked at anything
trying to wriggle a little life
out of this cold planet —
their raucous beaks slicing
as if the world is on fire,
when in reality,
there’s no way.

It’s blueblack cold and cracked here,
with frosty hearts on full display.

I wanted to say hearts unfrosted, but that would have been wrong.
The White House Valentine, with its chronic anger and bulbous, floating heads, proves that sentiment wrong.
Oh, also sentiment is wrong.
Inefficient. Fraudulent.
Surely a liberal initiative and thus dismantled completely by dodgy, draconian beaks as too woke.

I woke to the shrieks
of blackbirds.




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Paris: A Mother-Daughter Trip One September

We three wore comfortable shoes
and smiles on our cheeks
while chasing windswept leaves,
chocolate croissants,
and all the sights we could see:

the coyly smiling diva beneath her pyramid,
the Grande Dame in her scaffolding,
the famed tower on the Seine,

the tree lined boulevards,
marble-mouthed accents,
cigarette smoke and accordion chords,
the hushed blend of crepe trousers,
bicycle spokes, and Shakespeare and Company crowds.

The harsh scrape of blisters
and bistro chairs
clustered like the grapes
pressed and poured into glass balloons
poised near berried lips
as perfumed hands snapped selfies
beneath silk flowered awnings,
ribbon-braided balconies,
and stone so creamy you ached for a spoon.

All elegant and expected
and somehow, so not –

like the massive teddy bear
tucked in the crotch of a tree
and the painted elf carousel
at the street corner in Montmarte,
and all the memories that spilled
like sepia-toned love notes
from my daughters
when I spotted a stuffed bear
in the corner of my son’s closet
this Valentine’s week.

Notre Dame
blisters
and berries
Teddy
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Earl Grey Morning

Earl Grey Morning

Even the name of it soothes. 
the violet soft of it, 
purled, curling stir of it,
rising through cold
like a promise. 
From dark there is dawn --
first fog, then a song.

And even the sense of it soothes.
The cupped balmy breath of it,
pressed against palm of it,
steeping the dark
like an oath. 
From warmth will come glow –
soft first and soft-slow.

Easy, the taste of it soothes.
The deep woodsy heft of it,
rich malted zest of it,
breaking the black
like a vow.
From dark will come light, 
cool bergamot bright.

So, for now, just feel
for the sunrise, 
the wayfinding blessings
are always unwinding and
binding themselves 
like a pact.
Find fragrance in the dark.
Seize promise. 
Feel the spark.
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Summer Haiku Sequence

Fast and furious

Apollo’s gold Bugatti

banks chlorine blue sky 

 

asphalt, a stovetop, 

boils order to turbulence,

air rifts in ribbons

 

lawns, deep-fryer crisp,

once locust feast, now famine,

amber waste of grain

 

poolside barbecues

swim-suited shish ka barbies

rotate in the heat

 

collarbones glisten

sweat stipples bellies, arms, breasts

salt crusted temples

 

silk Bernini saints

cut from farinaceous clouds 

clot in curdled air

 

sunsets melt so fast

ice cream too, fireflies blink and

summer’s gone away

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When Rain Slips Through Sunlight,

silver tinsel sliding from angel palms
to slicken evergreens and other greens, 
white oaks, red maples, hydrangea-blue poms,
my vision rapt with heaven’s garland strings --

When ribbons of rain thin as fishing line fall 
from hosts of rods in the sky, casting, catching 
rainbows in their threaded, shimmering haul,
my pulse entangled and splashing --

When champagne streamers spill from glistening,
sun-scented fountains, filling the tender
flower flutes with honeyed nectar, fizzing
my soul – 	sublime-stoked, I seize the ember.

Burning, I haggle with poetry’s muse,
drunk and in debt to ephemeral views.

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Making a Fuss About a Groundhog, a Haibun

That groundhog is cute,
I say. He’s covered in bugs,
you say. No that’s layers

of fur, I say. They’ve got two. And look how he holds up his cute little paws — those tiny front paws — like a toddler in prayer. He’s nibbling a nut, just look at those teeth, his gold chicklet teeth and that slack-bottomed jaw. Watch him whittle his food. Get a load of that nose as it twitches and stills, watch his wobble turn stone at first sign of threat. He’s so cute! I go on. Get a load of that bod, that pudge full of pudding, that folds like dough. It can twist all around to that itch on his back, to that two-coated stubbed silver fur on his back – see that weak-whispered chin of his going to town? He’s the cutest, I say. But you say, so unmoved,

Your pudge pudding boy
just ate bugs off his back. That itch –?
that nut –? Both were bugs.

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