Poetry

I thought I was lucky

impervious but salt eats

away at everything        eventually and

the sandstone bluffs collapse and

twenty-nine is a landslide after heavy

rain

            a total loss the cliff

can’t rebuild but it can erode

into something

new like the sand

I am breaking

away from the rock

I was cut from

A battalion is born

from former police officers,

wear a chevron

take the patch and medallion.

Training ahead

blood, sweat, and loss,

shame, I’m in a warm bed.

the lamp is my new favorite

it’s brass

and the whole thing gets hot when it’s been on awhile

and the lights bend and move

and it’s perfect next to the pull out bed by the fireplace

and it reminds me of the ones

in my grandparents’ house in hendersonville

where squirrels come to the porch for walnuts

where sometimes, reading in the green chair,

you can see a black bear roaming

where my sister and I used to sprint

without abandon down the golf course hill

in our swim suits while the sprinklers ran

back when catching fireflies in jars

and looking for frogs with flashlights after dark

was enough

I found one that still had a tail, once

not a tadpole, but not fully a frog

caught between one thing

and the other.

Wooden bow, arrows, and gun,

the knife is near a belt.

Once, our childhood was full of fun.

We ran through the fields

with village neighbors

taking a sword, a painted shield,

without adult worries and labor.

Time has passed,

harsh life befell our fate,

Russian missiles strike

the heart, a cherished pain

I hate.

My mom reconstructed our lives from junk.
Unbleached cardboard Orisha beaded masks,
Glass-shard mosaics of proud Mary’s face,
A twisted crown of bottle caps and barbed wire,
Found relics, littered our tar-paper house,
Each objet d’art, a fetish, meant to stave
The shame of being poor. We ate, each night,
On painted plates of resurrecting suns.
She formed so much what others tossed away.
Now I scrounge through virtu and bric-a-brac,
The scattered trifles of remembrances,
To find her, traceless, gone. My soul sets bare.
Unfit to curate memory, I house
No rags, no cracked cups, no heart, fit for pawn.

The re-racked tops, bottoms, frocks beggared us.
Remember, bodies, once, possessed this cloth,
My mom reminisced. When we took the bus
Past bodegas, the hot-press mill, the swath
of storefront churches, tarpapered shotguns,
A land of corrupting rust, engorged moth,
To purchase, for the next fall, clothes the nuns
Found fitting, we, too, made out like a thief
At night. She dressed me like the rich man’s sons,
And gave herself, yet attained no relief,
Cried out, “Come, Jesus!,” where, then, was the Lord?
Without memory, one can have no grief.
Now, she is dead. My loss, my pain, I hoard
Indulgence even beggars can afford.