BUMPING INTO WALLS
POEM PUBLISHED BY SLIPPERY ELM
I killed another ant in my kitchen. Tiny ants, expecting death.
My garden is flooded from Storm A-Z. (you pick)
I stand ankle deep in mud and stare at the dark wet
earth that devoured homes belly-up,
unforgiving nature,
an angry mother.
The ants push on, clay soldiers
climbing up, out, to cracks
in my house, up cables,
over each other. March on!
No thought. (we think?)
Just missions. Purposeful ants.
One body part pushing higher
higher for water or life’s bit of sugar.
‘Till I smash them.
Truth be told, I don’t belong in New Jersey.
California’s got nothin’ on us. We got seasons.
(gets me every time)
I fell, down the hole, left by the hungry mouth-storm of heated
blood rush and grabbing hands,
fist over fist over fingers over hard saluting nipples.
That kiss, long and sustained these ten years,
promised me.
I wait like no one’s watching.
My want quiet and simmering
over a cherished enamel pot,
like the one grandma had,
fixed hard to a growling stove.
She could cook, that woman.
Thinking of her in that flat roofed Texas row house,
slinging slop for her brood of eight sucklings, gives me pause.
Who promised her?
Maybe she was on a mission, simple and heroic,
looking for holy water in the parched Dallas desert.
A yellow bloom, thorns and all.
Some folks are born knowing
while the rest of us bump into walls.
ALL THAT WAS, IS
POEM PUBLISHED BY SLIPPERY ELM
My mother died and left us with her walking talking body.
I call to hear her voice, but someone else answers.
The body, old, fat, wrinkled—stretches its arm to grab the phone.
It opens its dusty mouth, a hissing radiator spitting out my name in code.
We talk in “words” that we agree on.
Weather. Food. TV shows.
Until we don’t.
Then the words become impossible.
A foreign movie.
I visit my mother’s house to talk about her future.
The imposter sits hunched over in my mother’s shirt.
She is indignant. A petulant child.
She won’t go to a home. This is my home, she says. Her feet
swell in my mother’s shoes. She stomps them for punctuation.
She’s an angry ghost.
If only I’d known my mother had died,
I could have said good-bye.