Tag: inheritance
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Family Tree
Family Tree began as an image of a house without windows and a river carrying away its debris. The poem explores how time erodes lineage—the way humanity sloughs into the river’s swell and becomes part of its current.
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Plagiarism
This poem began as a meditation on how renewal can feel like duplication rather than change. Its theme is the tension between natural recurrence and human fatigue—the way life reissues itself even when we wish it wouldn’t.
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The Book
wrote The Book after finding my mother’s old paperback on my nightstand—a relic of her insistence that language could save us from silence. The poem began as a study of inheritance: how reading becomes a form of haunting. Each line traces the movement of a child carrying a book through rooms, echoing a mother’s voice…
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Morove Cemetery
Morove Cemetery” began as a walk through memory and inheritance. I wanted to write a poem that refused sentimentality while still holding grief in its architecture. The poem is built from objects—signs, stones, flowers, fences—that carry the emotional weight without commentary. It’s a landscape elegy, where the dead are marked by what survives them: rust,…
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Stones
“Stones” emerged from a walk with my autistic brother, where the gravel beneath us felt like a ledger—each stone a record of what we’ve inherited and what we must carry. I wrote it to honor the physicality of memory and the way lineage shapes our future terrain. The poem resists sentimentality and abstraction, staying grounded…
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Reverb
Reverb” emerged from a moment of quiet recognition—when I realized I was speaking in my mother’s cadence, carrying her grief as if it were my own. The poem is built as a series of couplets that echo generational sorrow without resolving it. I wanted the rhythm to waver, to enact the instability of grief itself.…
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Arguing with the Dead
Arguing With the DeadBegin by calling her by name,not the one etched on the granite monument in front of you,not the one printed on the birth certificate—that temporary name another motherwas forced to dream upin the haze of post-labor fade,in the ecstasy of seeing youfor the first time—something that grew for nine monthsinside this other,and…
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Prayers Between Us
I do my laundryin the rhythm of my mother’s prayers—each crease a rosary,folding divineto divine.I count the timesher perils met mine—with hands that trembledat my fever,hands burntin a kitchenunseen,List the register of her and mine shared frailties:the way we flinched at sudden joy, unsure it would stay,All the letters written to my heart—the notes she…
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Quiet Remittance
Quiet RemittanceI didn’t follow my father’s instructions this time.I just tucked his ashes into my inner coat pocket,where they warmed me with the good memoriesof pregame paella feasts and watching the Hurricanes,in the built over old Orange Bowl now Miami Marlins Stadium.All the anesthesiologists, the lawyers, his employees—his old crew—performed his scattering script line by…
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Supermoon
My wife was still doing her hair and makeup before our meal at Cocina Abierta—a seven-course tasting circled in red weeks ago—a promise we weren’t sure we’d keep.So my brother and I filled the hour wandering the narrow streets of the city rooted in my mother’s heart and past, San Juan—where I’ve paused—for now—before our…
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Invention: Invention as Inheritance
Courtney Stephens’ Invention moves like smoke curling through rooms of memory: elusive, personal, and strangely ceremonial. It’s less a film than a kind of séance with the archive, gathering fragments of familial detritus—audio reels, feverish patent diagrams, domestic footage—and stitching them into a visual elegy that resists conventional closure. As a narrative, it flirts with…
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Opening the Package
I love the quiet delight that blooms as I unwrap a gift folded with care— how they showed me, instinctively, without words, the furoshiki way: the offering poised with symmetry at each perfect corner, beginning with the triangle (near your beating heart), guiding it to center. then echo outwards (the symmetry in silence); gathering each…
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Between the Waves
Between the Waves There was never a single border, only the shifting tide of language, guavas glowing in the heat, the churn of Spanglish rolling in before the tide could pull it back. At the checkout line, the cashier asks, “Paper or plastic?”—so simple, so sharp. I glance at Mamá, but her words stick, caught…
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Final Call
Final Call The screen flickered in the hush of enveloping dark, Michael Douglas pacing, his fate unraveling— *Fatal Attraction,* a movie about consequence, its shadows pressing forward. But beneath the flickering flames, something was wrong, settling into my gut like a held breath, bending the air—quiet rupture, breath held too long. Five minutes home, five…
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The Last Ride
The Last RideThe highway hums beneath us, a silver ribbon unspooling, stretching time, five hours folding into salt and horizon. She sits beside me in the old Chrysler— the Town & Country, once dignified, now a relic of polish fading into nostalgia. The wood paneling still whispers of its golden years, though the lacquer has…
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The Gate
Like everyone else, I can only step through the gate my mother and father took to enter this world. I must exist in the space their bodies made. Their walk set my path and determined my streets. I hear their voices in the crunch of the compressed gravel of every footfall—echoes of their stories I…
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Abundant Mangoes
This is the first time I’ve been in this mango grove, hearing the iguaca sing, since my parents left this islandIt is mid-July and I am wearing my dad’s old hat palm pava square and jaunty on my balding crownquietly stealing this fleshy passion fruit, its skin warm on my palm, eager to be sucked,…
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Trying on My Dad’s Wingtips
I tried on several of my father’s old Brooks Brother suitsjust before his funeral, trying to save myself the expense of an outfit I didn’t need. Each was too tight on the collars. too short on the sleeves, each crotch inseam strangled my manhood.I had outgrown them all.Almost all of it will go to Goodwill-except…
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On My Father’s House
On my father’s housethree slaves and six horsesdied when the old stable blazeda century and a half ago, and three union and two confederate soldiersslayed each otherin a forgotten skirmisha few years later.Their skeletons were foundtwo years after the war under an uprooted white pine.The county let the field return to forest,except for the old…
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Little Father
Because I can not bury my father in the skyI burn him and spread his ashes on the ground.He loved birds yet did not feed them crumbs—just caught them in the color of their being.He would watch the mower plow the field,watch the hand fill the feeders with seedfeeling the tranquility of the man-made ponddrift…
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Assembling the Crib
He lacked the skill to make it true, the crib, so he assembled it from a wordless diagram,an ark of 5 panels, 32 screws and bolts, 3 tools-tightening it just enough, until the memory of its creation fixed solid in his soul, well past the 1000 days of the child dreaming in it, the 30…
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Oracles
My grandmother was my oracle, speaking stained insights in a Spanish I hardly understood at the time. My offerings were small but true: kisses, hugs, “I love you” on paper scraps translated by my mother for her knowing. It was as if I had written them in blood and it became a forever tattoo of…
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My mother use to say….
My mother use to say whenever I gave I her one of my poems to critique-my mother whose grace and beauty lingers like the reflection of sun on water-that my words remind her of the time in her youth when her life was honey.But I am not a bee and she was never a queen—…
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I Inherited My Mother’s Nightmares
My memory is just bones-a clutter of heirloomsin the kitchen junk drawerwhere my mother’s soul is hidden in veils of tarnished tchotchkes.This women who refused to vanish has almost vanished from me,leaving these relics of unclaimed bones,this flatware she so carefully inscribed now rubbing out her initials in the consuming rust. There’s no place settingleft…
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A Small Post Christmas Miracle
He watched his grandma create this wonderful thing stitch by stitch, just for him, in her remaining free time.He was mesmerized by the looping and pulling, the unraveling skeins meldinginto this beautiful blanket of many colors.By November it had started showing flashes of his favorite hues: blue, green, yellow— black stitching separating into squares.He imagined…
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Things Hidden in My Ears
The last hum of mother’s lullaby gently lingers, cradles back and forth, creating equilibrium.Canciones en español,poems in English,birdsongs in the drizzling rain,the faint refrains of all that chooses to linger despite the silence inside.
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I Can Never Write Like My Mother
Am I left loving what my mother couldn’t? — writing on patchouli scented paper — words doused in sweet musky earth — unsent letters, all sweet and spicyI laid the stems of letters across wet pages—but they did not take— failed to bloom—I tired of the scent— wished for the beautiful unadorned line— divorcedfrom all…
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Black Dress
When she wears the black dress against herself and sees her every reflection in the mirror she knows it will fit her better than even her mother ever wore it.
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Going Up the Stairs She Heard
She heard her children going slowly up the stairs of the old grand house draped in linen solitude. On the peacock treadsthey chanted discoveries,whispered mysteries she intimately knew.
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The Fitting
When her maman died Marie flew ten hours to the ancient French village where the houses steepled the church,their mansard roofs brown from neglect. The Weeping Willow in front of maman’s weathered hovel did not match Marie’s feelings. It never did. Inside the furniture had aged into antiques.The handmade chaiseswith ladder backs and unadorned ticking,French…