Mirage

Nervous. Hair between lips, nails between teeth.

Those first steps are tentative. We are guarded
like animals, circling in our cages, assessing
prey and predators, friends and foes, and over
months of sharing the waterhole and baring our
stripes and spots, we decide we are both cats.

They walk out of your life more quickly than they walk in.

We've rehearsed. The hunts, the dreams, the confinement,
but there's nothing like the real thing.
Breathing against ribs heavy with sadness.
Tending to thorny paws on my own.
It's not the end, but it's not the beginning,
and the ripples have dissipated
and the water is still here at home.

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.

Let it be

You and I, we are a splash of red and blue
against the bright skies
and rocky red plateaus.

You and I, we are a shared glance
and a hearty guffaw
in front of a flickering screen.

We are a breath of fresh air and
footsteps padding in tandem and
contagious smiles

We are interrupted

These pictures, these feelings
a self-inflicted torture
the uncertainty is suffocating
and we bury our heads in pillows
and music boxes.

malaise

Orange. Green. The blue bursts unpredictably across the square
the 28th forms an X only because its neighbors do
(inference by association)
you have to toss that marker, felt tip crusty with age,
one more survivor of the nine-year-old bunch
bites the dust.

Vague recollections of wandering the aisles under
fluorescent lights, finding one hundred colors, consuming,
adding them to a black canvas bag of paints and origami paper
things collecting dust and cobwebs and tiny tumbleweeds of hair
things intermittently resurrected
things let go: there, but no longer part of your life.

Thick orange like the skin of a clementine
has been your weapon of choice for this countdown
with no endpoint
and the bold lines simply remind you
that time drones on and on and the present
offers a brighter source of hope
than the future.