Eppie and Silas

"She can't stand being at the dinner table with us," Eppie shares
with a toothy grin. As soon as the words have been spoken her heart
stops because she forgot they were untrue.
What Mom would give to sit down and listen to medical talk
with those three bores! Louie brimming with enthusiasm for a
shared moment (otherwise unattainable for eighteen years), Silas
nodding patiently and chiming in with decades of bookish wisdom,
Eppie only conversational, not yet fluent--still but a listener
whose lips lack wings.

It has been one year since dinner. One solid year.
One solid slab of mahogany that swelled under the wrath of
rainwater leaking through a roof reshingled by underpaid Mexicans.
Lightning zapped the power and Mom thought, "I told you so," with
buckets and pots in a storm all over the house,
but she never said it.

The wood they replaced with something darker.

Silas is too true to his word to dine on pathology again.
Louie's lost himself in losing his liver.
How Mom longs for medicine.
Eppie finally learned how to speak it
(but that painful longing,
that knotted ball of fear and sorrow in her throat,
lodged in her heart like an unmentionable thrombus), but Eppie,
she will not talk.

The fallacy of empty vessels

She tells you why she hasn't been around of late
with concerned, kind eyes, a thoughtfulness few
of the others display--she knows
your hollowness. Like a chocolate Santa, an Easter bunny,
you will break if squeezed
you will melt if held
but you will be relished

Orange you glad?

Day 4: Orange you glad? – Write a haiku about an orange without using any of the following words (or variations of them): orange, round, citrus, sweet, juice, fruit, seeds, peel, rind, and squeeze.
--

Fingernail digs in
Olfactory neurons fire
Flavor burst; enjoy.

Shadows of

Day 3: Open to Interpretation - What does the word "shadow" mean to you? Write a poem about it.
--

We put things in boxes.
Sunglasses (frames white, lenses tinged with blue, two smiling
faces with an orca under the Miami sun); blanket
(velveteen fibers, blue and fuzzy, your insignia embroidered
in white); feather (peacock, multi-colored, marking my place
in a book too esoteric to read through. "Even the greatest
disobeyed," she told me, but I am no Prahalad,
I am not even greater or great.)
Packed away in a brown box, flaps with
corrugated innards sealed up with tape
from a bureaucratic post office.
We put years in boxes
and we become shadows of ourselves.