Primero Dios

Crumpled scrubs rings the doorbell with on-the-way-home pie in hand
straight from work in the summer heat, baby Einstein hair
dishevels beads of sweaty forehead.
Voices inside crowd out the familiar ding-dong and
it's unlocked anyway. Crumpled scrubs opens the screen door slowly,
deliberately, edges her way around sticky wood,
at once graceful and awkward, pie in hand,
holds her breath at the sight of cardboard boxes
near the stairs, the sheen of clear packing tape, a mirror for
incandescent bulbs and the rotating shadows of a ceiling fan.
These faces are foreign and her inner wallflower blooms.
T-shirt and gym shorts is out back with a cold IPA,
laughing and entertaining people from this place he won't miss.
Buyers hauling away the couches tomorrow morning,
cleaning crew scheduled for two, books and clothes shipped,
and a flight the day after
to the new place. New dawns, new dusks, new dreams.
His eyes' magnets drawn to a silhouette at the kitchen counter,
she steps outside straight-from-work hungry with a piece of pie in hand,
draws a fork to her mouth, pie on lips,
catches sight of t-shirt and gym shorts catching sight of her.
For a darting daring second their eyes lock and they feel
what could have been
crumble away

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.