January

I keep on feeling my thoughts

You too?

It's a knife--

in the shape of a puffy heart.

*

My child is grandmother's.

Her child,

my mother--

serenades every sunrise.

*

I sit here, the sun sets too

an earthling,

lost on earth, 

feeling the slide of inertia 

_

Took the kids to yoga today

almost every bite at breakfast
is all please and bargaining
every footstep up to class
echoes with reluctance
every pose is desolate
as exit wounds
                                            I'm holding, steadying, angling
                                            them in my side vision--where
                                            they're right there--by the door
                                            so my practice speckles with
                                            chuckles overfilling and now
                                            spilling from my lungs

We're nicer on the way back
loosened and relaxed--me
from yoga, them because
they're done, by the time
we're home again, it's all
already a memory
                                          And I think there will be other classes
                                          warmed by them, memories of them--
                                          keeping unspoiled from year to year;
                                          the quiet, slow wonder of a stone
                                          released and now flying lightly
                                          borne forever over the water


_____________________________________

Took the kids to yoga because the health chart was a desert (Friday, Dec 28th).

_

Station

Her eyes grow cloudy
soon there will be rain
her thoughts steal past
like slow, noisy trains

No, that's really not me
No reason it would be--
Her heart mourns parting
mine's torn from certainty


_

Meditation

water bridges these banks
sun must spill everywhere

I can ask, I can seek
who knows how long

as if it matters--
there's no reason

for despair
(if so it is)

#MSU #RedCedarRiver

A Plan

I'm traveling--or so
I have been telling
everyone--so now
travel--will unravel

Perhaps periphrastic--
or no--logic underlies
my disguised, feigned
un-annotation of terrain

I prep through these fears--
it helps a little that millions
of years of orbital earth will
still spin in place for me

_

In the Old World

I am to reread their wrinkles
search their weeds for memories

even as ancestors' eyes are forced
to close, go masked, invisible.

It will make sense
until you ask about it.

*
They want to open my mind
wrest, twist it wide

then tip it like the overfilled point
of a plate, at the moment when

you're suddenly sated,
free of the desire for it.

*
I mime their scolding for I have no will,
and I am meek. Still they are forgotten

even so, every time--memory by memory
in a language my children will never speak

Aiyo--to think I meant at the start
to hold and shape love

as it pooled its fast and fluid
escape in my heart.

****

Year's End

Arre, what would you do?
You too are split between
this year and the new one

these hopes are damsels
dismal in the silent dark.
I take their place myself

until I am inside myself
--oh, what have I done?
I too am waiting to know.

_

In the Machines

The ghosts call me late
most nights, rocking
the cradle of the landline

we never use. I never pick up
but I see their faces vaporize
in my icy breath,

their empty mouths asking
You put away all the leftovers? 
Do you know who we are?

I can see their mouths form it,
feel their curses touch my body
I mumble irritably

and try to solve their hungry
riddle, without magic:
pointing them to the fridge

_

Fragment

Hopping on the threshold I can taste
the sunshines of every past and future
tears magnify all my dreams

-

Company

I start with the titles of food
attaching surprise ingredients
until label matures into recipe

Tomato-cucumber-salad with
cumin-roasted eggplant + feta
layered on a spring mix base...

Sadly like a mom, I bring jokes:
autumnal hope springs eternal--
I say--before everyone leaves.

_________________________
At went back to college yesterday, and three other students driving back up to Alma stopped to have dinner with us.

In Autumn

My hands are birds praying
in time to heart beat, my feet.

Fingers flying across the open
face of my phone, I am looking

for you in a midwestern town
where you have never lived

I am looking for my father
I am looking at my father

I am writing our name in pain
even as the pen runs dry, dies

-------------------------------------------------------



*This was supposed to be a picture of autumn tones in Bakersfield Park, but my phone died as I tried to take a picture. As best as I can tell, it died... from the cold? Apparently winter is coming for more than just tropical me.

The Beautiful Problem

It's that golden
moment in the year
when I race
into empty rooms
thinking
I forgot to turn off
lights again, damnit.

But it's just
the golden light
of the year
filling the space
around me
filtering every thing
before it reaches me

_

తెలుగు

yes, of course, this is
merely the lisp of lips,
a slip, not apocalypse--
only the clumsy glamor

of Telugu scripting round
tripping slow, deliberate.
Daughter to my mother
and to mother's mother

whose words were fated
to immigrate too. I am
stuttering, I hear kinship
knocking, coming on in.

_

The Fall

Sunlight still pirouettes
but fall thrusts its cold nose
into my face this morning

just the raw edge of power
"see what I can do?"
listening for applause

for their noble restraint,
looking for my gasp
of surprise. Gasp.



_

Dog-Eared Day

dog-eared day:
our ears are knotted with burrs
delicious burrs from dashing round
and round the garden looking for squirrels
looking for some deer, looking for turkeys, people
people like our family who then sigh loudly
when we come into the family room
when we've got more burrs than fur
--but they've got us

___________
This is both Scout and Huckie; but Huckie is the bigger criminal. She had stuff ALL over her face especially around her ears, eyes, and mouth. Big A is working tonight, so I had to cut it all off with tiny scissors while At and Nu held her still and spoke soothingly to her. It was HARROWING. I was terrified I'd hurt her or that she'd jar me with sudden movement and get hurt. Nu gave me a hug for being brave later on and said she could feel my heart jumping right through my chest when she did. Our non-human part of the family is nuts.

Also, as the kids said, we should get Big A to do this in the future, he is the professional, after all.

__

An Augury

An Augury 
Here my children are making spaces:
blanket forts, jokes, eye rolls, faces--
spaces for just them

Their sweetness swirling from cyan
to scarlet to sonnets nibbling,
unfurling in my heart

The gates that once swung between us
when they were young now lie
translated, behind us.

It seems yesterdays are gold, are spent
and tomorrows are vague presents
here at summer's end

May my empty be their success, I pray:
Take the clay of my blood and milk,
my loves; blaze away.

--

These are the three poems I sent DA

Muse, After Hours, Asifa.

Now we wait...

(Super full and very grownup day today: Search committee work and meeting, candidate interview, CASA visit, CASA updates, Tamil class, book club (Little Fires Everywhere), kid cuddle time, sending poems to DA.)

_

The End

Is it the end of Sunday? I've done nothing all day but work on something I was supposed to have finished nearly a month ago. I guess I might have actually felt like I accomplished something if I had met my deadline. Instead, this is just reminding me that term will be upon us soon, and there are still so many OTHER things I have to finish.

One good thing I'm happy about today is that I signed up to work with the poet Doug Anderson one-on-one. The other good thing may be the gnocchi-primavera I invented for dinner from the pantry/veggie drawer.

_

"One whale mom/ did all our crying for us"

Paul E. Nelson: Elegy for Tahlequah's Calf

These are the stories the children of our
children will tell if there are storytellers
in their time. How we slept at the switch
ignored the clear signs of doom, how we
were scholars of war & good tweeters

had nice dinner photographs and saved ourselves
from Muslims, immigrants and every vague
threat the cruel majority could conjure
while the world burned and one whale mom
did all our crying for us.

Paul E Nelson
9:24am – 7.28.2018

_ 

Muse

I imagine entering bodies:
kissy     wormy     secret
tendrils bloody, tender,
cobwebbed.

Rejection gathered like:
skirts  breezes  friends
smiling achily, saying
farewell.

Still until creation erupts:
caves      calls      papers
becomes melody, menace,
practice.

_