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Multigenerational Mom Muses on Twin Toddlers & Twenty-Something Daughters

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Ode to Pillars of Salt

But Lot’s wife looked back, and she became a pillar of salt. Genesis 19:26
Scrolling social media
I see the headline --
Salted Watermelon: 
the “New” Viral Trend.
I roll my eyes, 
toss thoughts 
like spilled salt…
back to the ice-cold 
flesh of my childhood,
to the grosgrain-ribboned rounds,
chilled with river rock, 
freshly fished from
glittering undercurrents
and displayed, 
gravid & sweating, 
on weathered pine planks
bleached as the afternoon sun.
                               Thwump
goes the blade, sharp
and curved for cleaving,
heavy in my father’s right hand,
parting the Red Sea and
spilling juice and seeds 
in abundance, driving 
wedges wide and deep
as the smiles on our faces,
the shade in Mother’s gazes
as she administers
the covenant of salt,
eyes glittering 
with undercurrents,
hands chapped as weathered planks 
                               when
she upends the yellow-skirted,
umbrella-girded maiden
trapped in her canister,
salt like tears raining down,
before she turns, before she 
leaves him, this
bold salty beacon,
guiding us beyond silence
and taut apron strings.


              By Heather Peters Candela





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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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What I didn’t expect after my hysterectomy

I expected to feel less than whole. To mourn my uterus, to miss the procreant cradle where my babies rocked until I rolled them out and raised them up. To perhaps feel like I’m missing what makes me a woman. But that’s not what I felt.

I’ve felt missing completely. Lost in a head full of white static, my body lost in post-anesthetic cotton batting. Muffled thoughts floating in half-dreams and white-sheet other-worlds opened by robotic arms and pain-numbing canister snaps. So disconnected. So dejected. Missing parts and missing people.  Body blue and punctured, matching my mood. 

I also didn’t expect the exhaustion. Weights hooked and hanging at the end of my limbs, the start of my thoughts. Everything sluggish and sidelined. Everything empty. I shed a lot of tears. Felt sorry for myself. Felt forgotten and alone.

But that was far from the truth — was all the fallacy of post-surgical funk. Because I have had so many people rally around me and my family. So many people shower us with love. So many meals delivered, texts sent, pickups and drop offs completed, prayers spoken. I grow weepy (with gratitude this time) just thinking about it.

And today, the cobwebs and cotton batting are limned in a see-through-the-murky-to-better-days brightness. I feel like I’m closer to the other side now – the side where my family is, my friends are, where energy pours like sunshine and waterfalls. It’s shimmering there in the haze like the northern lights I missed the weekend of my surgery. The shine is returning. I’m nearly there. 

And it’s all thanks to a little help from my friends, my family, my people, my village.

Featured post
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Feeling Salty?

There they stand, pretty maids all in a row.

Salt of the earth #tradwives, wrapped in aprons

and humility, baking sour dough rolls

and buns in ovens since two became one.

The glory of their lord shines all about,

pillar cocked and smoking, an inferno —

a raging reminder of what’s been vowed:

be fruitful and multiply, trust and oh-

babes, you’ve let the laundry pile up and re-

sentment rush in, gathering here, drifting

there, coating your once-fertile crescents in

barren grains of sand. Your mindsets must shift,

be pliant, dutiful, beautiful, not

lost shakers of salt, defying your lot.

…I mean how much good could should would truly come from plumbing your depths beyond the breadth of your womb your tomb your lead balloon waking shaking breaking (no mistaking it) free willy-nilly I mean really from your perimeter placement on the parched and patterned pages of that aged staged staid and time to be waylaid patriarchy?

by Heather Peters Candela

Photo by Lorena Martu00ednez on Pexels.com
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Spotted

Like

a calico kitten or a Dalmatian pup?

An appaloosa’s flanks or a speckled green toad?

Ladybug shells or butterfly wings?

A giant giraffe neck, a ginger’s freckled chest?

Cheetahs? Leopards?

A lantern fly nymph?

Or more like

Blueberry muffins

Or chocolate chip scones?

Or more like red-capped, warted

mushrooms? Poison hemlock stems?

Or spotted like

Cruella Deville’s floor-length fur coat?

Daisy Buchanan’s skittering pearls?

Desdemona’s strawberry handkerchief?

The sleep-haunted hands of Lady Macbeth?

Gertrude’s black and grained soul?

Or spotted like

The hiccupping sun’s surface,

Brewing disruption in planet-sized

Storms of magnetic mayhem…

Pretty much like this thing

Spotted

There on the monitor,

Blooming like Rorschach’s inkblot

Amidst the hollowed-out, round, sound-

Waves spinning didgeridoo vowels amidst

Rumbling, bubbling bowel sounds.

A shifting, sizable storm cloud.

A pale and pockmarked moon.

A shadowy, seething portent.

Marring the vault of a once

procreant cradle.

A dappled dollop of disorder.

Spotted.

Get it out, out.

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Spring Blankets

Just yesterday morning, rain clouds filled the sky in gray velvet folds draped heavy over the newly hatched woods, leaves shivering, sagging from the weight, the wait. The dogwood blossoms — bright as match flares – trembled, knowing soon they’d be doused, tender petals downed and drowned. The cardinal couple, wings flame-stitching the shadows as they lit from sod bank to branch and back again, banked on a breakfast cut short and shared their worm like Lady-and-the-Tramp pasta boiled well past its prime. While the cat, shoulders knuckled, crept toward them, one ear cocked to her prize, the other to the threatening cloudburst, the roll of thunder overhead. Then the clouds split wide –not with rain, but golden sun – showering treetops

in cream soda light,

leaves glowing lemon and lime,

blossoms blinding white

Today the same skies are different still, pale pink haze over lavender-blue, lying whisper-soft as an infant’s shawl above the feathered limbs of fizzy trees. The cat naps on her pillow. The dogwood blossoms tremble still, at the brevity of it all, the beauty of it all, as does the cardinal couple singing cheer, cheer, cheer through the

baby soft hiccup

of this morning’s scene, dogwood

blossoms losing steam

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Easter Boys

Last night, I watched a dozen preteen 

boys hunt Easter eggs in the pixelated

gloaming. 

 

Too big for their baskets, they chose bags

for their haul, grocer’s plastic snapping in

the wind

 

as they raced. Each new prize plucked from

its hiding spot settled snug in their sacks, 

until, from

 

the ends of their peach-fuzzed arms hung

lanterns of multi-globed splendor, synapsed

and pulsing

 

with LED portent. Soon peach-fuzzed forearms

turn to timber-lined jaws and egg-hunting spring

turns to

 

university fall. And so on and so on until one day 

quite soon, these too-big for-their-baskets egg-

hunters

 

become fathers with sons who choose the pull of 

plastic beneath their fingers to the heft of handles

in their palms.

 

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Paper Doll

She walks

in beauty like a

Joan Crawford/geisha

girl, like a paper doll, silken

kimono cinched tight at the

waist, soft sleeves ballooning

beneath shoulder pads, fabric

flaked with the fragments

of your love, with the

 fragments

of your

whims and shifting moods.

Blue like the jet stream from

that trip in September to Paris,

the one where she spilled coffee

(your coffee) at that café and it got

on your newspaper, and it got on

your nerves. She wears that

memory, you know,

deep inside.

She wears it

 like the azaleas

blooming at those houses

you toured in Savannah last spring,

their pearlized pinkness nearly matching

the sunset and her lips, before the blood and bruising.

 Before something, a misstep — a missed step on the historic

steps — broke a heel on the Prada pumps you bought her just

three weeks before, so you broke something too. Some

thing you regret, of course. Something that turned

all those little pink houses ghostly gray, the

 pinch of your fist erasing her smile, the

soft light in her eyes. The wind will

rise, she’s learned, and she can

only try to curl inward for

shelter, to erase her

self even more.

Her center

is cinched

tight, but

her fold-

over

tabs

flap loose as,

broken-cheeked, with blackened-brow,

she walks in beauty, diminished by night.

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How Can We Fix This?

A child was lost.

A child lost.

The world beat him

Battered him, bruised him to breaking,

And – go figure —

He broke.

 

His spokes gave out.

His wheels flew off.

His handlebars torqued.

And he tumbled.

He’d been tumbling awhile. 

But this time, 

He tumbled so far

He could not,

Would not –

Refused –

To get back up.

 

On the front end of a warm Tuesday 

At the ass end of a cold month,

Sick to death with hurt,

He took charge.

With a discharge that fixed 

And dilated 

His pain

In a huge, gaping hole.

That opened to a ravine 

That swallowed a family

And shook a school

And rattled a community.

 

His mother unhinged

His father undone

His siblings unstrung

His promise unsung

 

His lyrical, beautiful, 

Guitar-humming

Soul-strumming 

Sweet promise,

That could make this place beautiful

– so, so beautiful –

Left unsung. 

 

How can we fix this? 

 

Not this, that’s impossible —

Fixed forever in a curled dark hole

Deep in his family’s ribs 

Howling unchecked —  

But this? 

 

This brokenness

This curled dark hole

Deep in society’s rib

Howling unchecked

… and ignored.

 

How?

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