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I have to sew my memories inside the lining of my coat to keep them close but not inside, something to take on and off when cold grief needs warm reflection or remembrances flash painfully bright, when chemo and radiation makes it difficult to feel my teeth, tie my shoes, retrieve the…
I am grateful for those strangers who carry my grief in kindness, those who shoulder it with no thought, just a sharp awareness of the ache of death whirling inside as I balance between cancer and despair, the wondering of the value of a cure in a world becoming corpse. They pull me away…
His arms were too short to box with God, so God sent him down for more sparring. He boxed the devil over and over and over, the Father, Son, Holy Spirit doing the scoring. When he beat the devil every round, he tried again to punch the Lord. His arm were still…
What does a dog know of being a wolf, a wolf know of being a dog? The wolf howls not to understand the moon but to know itself in the community of nature, to shout out its place in the pack and among the stars. It knows hunger that a dog will…
What keeps me holding onto my old self, preventing me from casting it into past swells? Something detested, adored, hymned too, haunted, cancer ridden, inflamed, grieving and torn- yet beloved, pulled forward into an ocean of tomorrow and tomorrow’s swimming to hope or drowning in hopelessness, never knowing where my forgiveness exists…
The hospital gown they gave me is the same one with clouds my mother and friend once wore, a hand me down filled with the aura of grief and hope, of time and death. My name and date of birth are the only thing the nurses ask as I am led to the mold…
I can’t remember when death turned moments to memorial, gifts unfolded to blessings. The tan slippers of Christmas past snuggled my mother’s lost toe so the others never mourned. Those mules never left her feet, even on her final nap. “Bless me Papa,” her last words. I don’t know if they were…
Ay, florecitas clouds of white frozen in sugary divine, little flowers of my soul, taste of sweet desire of little boys in San Juan, Moroves, Ponce, exiles in Miami and the Bronx tasting the beauty of their mother’s youth— knowing love by the rattling of small blooms in the big tin, the maternal hand…
We tell our children not to wander in the woods, never to stop or enter the cottage with the peppermint scent and gingerbread façade for a naked witch is sleeping inside. Beware the milk weeping from an axe handle outside, the tingling inside that stretches from heart to toes that neither sinks nor swims…
