This Day, Minus Love and Cold Potatoes

Put off cooking. Pour Horizon low fat eggnog into Solar Roast coffee. Sit on the couch where you slept last night with two dogs. Leo yours, Lucy a travelling friend’s rescued rez dog known for fearing men.

Her barking calls you out of sleep. Dimly take it in: your lover rising in warm bare skin, silhouette calling out the door, down the hall, voice high and kind, unlike the one he gives your cat: “Lucy, Lucy, shhhh….” She does not stop. Thirty-two toenails tap the bamboo floor, pace in a state of high alert.

At first, you are proud of Leo’s vocal restraint, then concerned. Not much of a protector, his specialty is fending off grazing deer. Touched by your man’s tenderness toward the animal wrecking his sleep and feeling responsible for taking on dog-sitting without his consent, when Lucy starts her ruckus yet again at ten till one to warn you of your son’s peanut butter and jelly driven post-party intrusion, you rise, slip into a t-shirt, backwards, inside out, lie down on the second-hand sectional couch, call the dogs to join you. The fire he made still ablaze, without a blanket, you doze in its orange window, dogs quiet now, and dream.

You wander a land of Mormons, testing sanitized realms, re-reading pre-internet tracts, artfully dodging earnest, clean-cut men and skirted wives. Certain you could never return, you wake relieved and fall asleep again. Twice you dream of going back to bed, to him, only to wake in two separate dreams of Lucy’s barking, after which you really wake, drooling on the couch in moonlight, fire licking lowly, dogs snoring or nervously skittering. You let them out to pee. Lucy barks at night in general, laughing coyotes north of here, cousins of her friends at home a mile uphill. Leo smiles at her audacity. They settle in a final time. You leave the couch, return to bed’s oblivion. It might be half past three.

Kitchen sounds pull you partly out of sleep, imagining your love making cinnamon rolls, the KitchenAid churning, flour sifting snow on countertops while coffee drips its promises. You think this life is good, arise, vaguely plan to write, even though, entering the kitchen, you see he is only doing dishes, tall in thick cotton navy robe, the king of morning. You bury your face between shoulder blades, steam pressing against your clasped hands. He thaws.

Then begins the gathering of packages and cans of your mother’s Thanksgivings: King’s Hawaiian Sweet Rolls, Great Value French-fried onions, French-sliced green beans, Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup, Pepperidge Farm stuffing, Full Circle boxed chicken broth. The month’s belt too tight for most organics, you shake it off, decide there is no hurry, abandon cans for the couch and coffee and him, where this poem begins.

When his little girl wakes, she goes for the iPad first thing, begins her Roblox binge. Soon, you coax her from the screen, together start the pies with Libby’s can of pumpkin, three fist-sized Granny Smiths. Rolling your actual granny’s butter-flavored Crisco-burdened piecrust, you feel blissfully, not quite ignorantly, thankful, take your place in American history, happy despite your interrupted middle class night and economic iniquities, pray the destitute in Crestone’s nearby mountain caves can forgive you the way you forgave the rich for selling you this day, minus love and cold potatoes you dug up yourself: purple and golden knots of hard hope you found beneath the freeze.

The Andersons' Thanksgiving Turkey

They feed me like a queen.
Ahk! I’m too fat to stand on my own feet!
Please give me more of that fancy seed.
Why does this red water make me so serene?

2018
I wrote this riddle poem as an example for my middle school students who are learning how to liven up their writing by using all four sentence types: declarative, exclamatory, imperative, and interrogative. Their riddles were sometimes hilarious, sometimes cryptic, and they learned something about the power of sentence variety to boot! Woo hoo! Who knew I’d love teaching middle schoolers this much?

Dissolving the Body

Brown curls fade like meteors
Across an inner sky.
My head, a solid thought of starlings,
Parts and spreads.
Fingers fizzle out like sparklers in July.
Arms swirl like sand bars
Stolen by midnight prairie flood.
There goes my heart, a shattered
Glass in slow motion rainbow.
Blood, what becomes of blood? Mist?
Lungs disperse like a careless cough.
My lunch is carried off in my guts
By invisible vultures.
Hips loosen their grip on motherhood’s
Lingering ache and break into light.
My legs explode and lift
Like two burst pillows in a gust of wind.
These feet go walking as dust into dust
In a million glinting rays.
My stories move and move through
Edgeless space like radio waves
Transmitting all the tongues and songs
And breaking news and silly sitcoms
Of humankind. I laugh a laughless
Laugh track, completely uncanned.

2018

On Chickens: A Pastiche

Small town Illinois girl, once London-lost,
now Colorado-, I feed chickens
plastic-packaged crumble. Crumbled what?
It’s non-organic. Half the cost.
It worries me I can’t afford to do the right thing.[1]
It’s winter. Foraging is over. Grasshoppers live
in my omelet even when I forget every bone
and bird and worm has spirit in it.[2]
What spirit lives in crumble?

Other times, excruciatingly alive, [3] I flinch.
Once, a white local rancher/landlord told my man
(must you know he’s Black?)
The previous tenant—white trash—
nigger-rigged the bathroom plumbing.
We didn’t say a thing, just blinked.
Later, chewing chicken fajitas, he laughed,
Maybe I’ll just Digger-rig* it. He didn’t say,
Cast down your bucket where you are,[4]
though this is what he has to do. Unruffled,
Nebraska born, he perfectly plumbed
that bathroom. He didn’t say, We wear the mask. [5]
Unemployed, last night he dreamed his legs
were white like mine when he removed his pants
to give them to the homeless San Francisco man.

What does his skin have to do
with mine? Middle aged, I have cried
that we will bear no blackish child [6]
nor have to hide my father’s
cherished 19th century will
in which a slave was passed down to a son.
I won’t forget my father’s gleeful, childhood
march to Beethoven. Kill the Jews! Kill!
he dreamed they must have sung.
Or ever hear him say,
Let those I love try to forgive
What I have made. [7]

Instead of eat[ing him] like air, [8]
I [ache] as if he were already gone. [9]
Unlike my solid daughter, I crumble,
feed myself to flightless chickens
I’ve never had to steal
nor slaughter.

April 2014

 _______________________________

*A small town high school football team is called the Beetdiggers. Fans refer to themselves as “Diggers.”

All excerpts are from The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Concise, 1st Edition, edited by Paul Lauter:

[1] Sherman Alexie, “What you Pawn I Will Redeem,” p. 1603
[2] Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera, p. 1457
[3] Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera, p. 1458
[4] Booker T. Washington, “Up from Slavery,” p. 517
[5] Paul Laurence Dunbar, “We Wear the Mask,” p. 465
[6] Gwendolyn Brooks, “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi,” p. 1052
[7]  Ezra Pound, “CXX,” p. 637.
[8] Sylvia Plath, “Lady Lazarus,” p. 1175
[9] Alison Bechdel, “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic,” p. 1637

One Friday Morning

Exactly one week after a young man drops
three feet to the ground from a piñon branch,
landing–his mother imagines in quiet horror–on all fours,
crouched like his childhood superhero, one hand
pushing himself up in slow motion, the other rubbing
his throat, coughing, gasping, eyes watering
as he begins the walk home, hoodie pulled tight,
stars winking forever behind the gibbous moon,

she is dragging crushed cardboard pizza boxes
and five bags of household waste—two of which
she has marked with T in red permanent ink,
the other three with R—to the end
of the grey gravel drive under the piñon.
With clear packing tape, she attaches to one bag
a $30 check in a business sized envelope on which
she has written Thanks to the thin local man
who picks up the bags with his van every week.
An hour passes before she realizes it is not Monday.

Against weekend bears, she carries the bags back
to the storage shed, sees the beer box on a shelf
she has filled with kitchen knives, painkillers,
flu meds, scissors, extension cords, hammock
straps. Gently closing the door, she turns a key
in the padlock. Thinks of where to put her keys.
Catching her breath, stepping out from the car port,
pacing the drive in no specific direction, she notices
Russian sage, the bright rising mist, scans the forest
at the foot of the Blood of Christ mountains,
now indebted forever to the unknown tree,
unable to untie her son’s broken hope from its limb.

Late Blooming

To decide if you need to buy tomatoes, you visit yours.
One rots on the rock upon which you propped it
to avoid moist soil. Prehistoric armored insects
encircle it like centuries, or sentries, overseeing its
slouch, its decay, waiting their turn. Nearby, volunteer
marigolds riot gold despite blighted potato leaves,
freckled black. There may be nothing underground.

In another bed, mixed greens and red
nasturtiums flourish with volunteer snap peas
still wearing their purple hats, climbing
gone-to-seed arugula. And here, more volunteer
marigolds outlive their curly-seeded cousins, calendula,
offer shade to yellow-tongued violets’ small bloomings.
You couldn’t have anticipated these fall palettes:
complementary, analogous, too pretty, too tough to eat.

Nearby, a hammock of similar hues hangs between two
piñon trunks on straps that recently have come to mean
unfathomable lethality to your thought-hewn son.
You must take the hammock down. You try to shake
off grief. You shake needles from the woven cloth,
lay in it beneath the branches, swing in your cradle.
Somehow, in the dapple, you decide to trust
his wooden wisdom, fate-earned, your dark Odin
who survived his own terrible world tree.

Still Life

Hiking trails of the greenbelt between Crestone and the Baca for almost a year now, I can’t help but notice the random piles of old junk left by squatters and wanderers of bygone eras—hippies, or even further back, miners—under the pinion pines. Stripped trucks, ancient refrigerators, gorgeous mounds of rusty old tin cans whose lids still hang on by a thread decades after feeding someone who didn’t mind cold beans.

Last night one smallish can caught my eye so I picked it up, thinking I might draw it. The inside was full of dirt, powdered rust and bleached grasses caught in abandoned spider webs. When I shook the dark red powder out, the can coughed and spoke in a voice old and gruff, like a slurring drunk bachelor with chew in his mouth.

“Whaddaya want?” the old can said. “I can give it’ya.”

“I want this,” I said, surprised at my spontaneous conviction, and even more startled by my lack of embarrassment or personal concern to be talking to an ancient can.

“This?” the can hissed. “You want this?”

“Yes, this. This sandy, cactus straddled trail. This dog smiling, tongue flopping, as he zigzags back and forth, peeing on every rabbit brush he passes. My house with dishes crusted with Cream of Wheat in the sink. My husband piling wood. My job corralling restless kids into words and paint. My loving, befuddled, Fortnite-comforted sons struggling to become men in the outrage of Trump. My aging face. My ratty hair threaded with wiry white. All this.”

“Your wish is granted,” he said with a force that spit out a piece of grass that picked up a small draft and floated away.

I studied his fragile edges as dusk fell. I placed him on a shelf. He hasn’t spoken since.

Music of the Spheres

We're all here, and we're watching a concert that will never be replicated exactly the same. Ólafur Arnalds

A soft voiced man from Iceland
samples mute pianos, feeds the songs
to lovely code that sends the notes
again to ivory. Euclidean algorithm,
the disembodied spirit plays the keys.
Did he say code arranges songs
more human than hands can fashion?

Unimagined tinkling patterns grow,
play one time and ever gone. Inimitable.
Choked, we scroll. We scroll. Commenters
weep without knowing why, string together,
post, well-timed slide shows of nature photos
matched with Arnalds’ almost-sorrow sounds.

Marry wood and spring machines to new
machines to snow, to ice to ears to hearts,
to eyes fixed on handheld windows. Kitchens,
beds, desks and couches glow with solitude.
Outside, choirs of crickets mix the stars.

2018

A Fall Poem

White fuzz on the potted rosemary might kill it
if I don’t do something. Lazy or too busy.
I don’t make the nontoxic spray.
I place the pot in the rain, hope its spores
don’t drift to other plants. Accept its days
are limited. Late summer. Three volunteer
delphinium in fake terracotta, ferny mysteries
that came with the house, are dead, the basil dwarfed,
petunias barely blooming one per scanty stalk.
High altitude abundance pulls back into a paler self.
I rip open papery tripartite pods, cast black seeds
like pepper over the deck. Don’t hope.

Just weeks ago delphinium were cornflower blue,
my childhood’s favorite waxen color.
But I am writing to forget the smell of crayons.
I am writing because my words are scabs
doing work on the cheap while Poetry shouts
and jabs its signs at air, wanting something
more than tired father woe. The scabs
have nothing else to say but this: My dad is dead,
my dad is dead, and I don’t dream or even sense him
in his favorite songs. I can’t project my grief
to make him seem alive in Jacob’s ladders.

What did I expect? I dropped his church
in a canyon south of Lehi. Red rock. So what
if I fed him ice cream in a busy parking lot, drove him
restless up to witness Mount Timpanogos
one more time while listening to LDS radio broadcast
hushed tones of patriarchs and tender wives
in interview selling the dream
of eternal benevolent fathers. It almost felt true.
I’ve no pendant of his thumbprint on my throat.
I only have his hands. And feet. Huge chin. Square cheeks.
I passed them on to children, as will they. Eternally.

It doesn’t matter. Everything you have,
he proudly told me once, you’ve done on your own.
Or something like that. A backwards compliment.
Another way to leave me nothing but myself.
Another way to slap the back of his own sunburnt honesty,
polish this facet of his charming self-loathing:
how great I turned out without him. His absence:
the great hand that rolled, coiled, fired and filled me.
This cracked pot can’t hold him anymore.

Reading Selene’s Essay When My Father Died

For Mad Max

Reading Selene’s essay when my father died
a self-confessed father-loather, father-broken,
I didn’t feel him pass. No whispers, chills or visions.
Her words carried no parting words from him
except perhaps, in a story she told
on the first day of class with no hint of known patricide:
I was named for the goddess of the moon.
Selene, daughter of Hyperion, the High One.

Often, a girl’s significance, outer & inner, is born
of her father’s mess. Hyperion—son of Gaia & Ouranos
(Earth & Sky)—one of twelve Titan children
who, encouraged by Earth’s child-loyal vengeance
and led by Cronus (Time), overthrew their father.
Only Oceanus cried as Time castrated Sky, tossed
his genitals into the sea. From their foam sprang Love
& other things. Aphrodite rising on a half shell.

The over-throwers were, of course, later overthrown
by their own brood. Let it be a lesson unto you who kill
your fathers with this belief: others’ truths of him are lies.
Bury him whole. Name his fathers. Your sons, daughters,
too, one day may spring from a sea of your half-told life.
Perhaps half-grown their love of you will wax & wane
like sideline Selene who soon lost her name, a moon
of memory swelling and undressing tides of grief.