Tag: loss
-
Bone Confession
Bone Confession began as a way to name the physical weight I carry from the people I’ve lost and the ones I couldn’t help. The poem grew from a single pulse in the wrist into a record of how the body stores memory—through objects, breath, and the small actions that prove we’re still here. I…
-
Photo Stop
This poem began as a meditation on gesture—specifically, the act of photographing something not to share, but to preserve a private emotional truth. I was thinking about how grief often manifests in small, unceremonious rituals: lifting a phone, deleting and retaking an image, placing it back in a purse chosen for protection rather than style.…
-
When the city leaves you—
When the City Leaves You is a poem about the aftermath of abandonment—personal, civic, and emotional. It unfolds in fragments, each stanza a vignette of silence, gesture, or failed connection. The speaker moves through a landscape of urban decay and quiet witnessing, encountering figures who reflect their own disorientation. The poem resists resolution, instead dignifying…
-
The Box My Mother Kept
The Box My Mother KeptI find her in a boxlabeled “Misc.”full of not-miscellaneous things:wrinkled receipts—pollo, jabón, stamps from the 70’s and 80’s,movie ticket stubs to matinee rom-coms—each neatly placed under curled daisy petals.Birthday cards with crooked suns,one written by my six-year-old selfin tortured handwriting trying to be tender:“Te amo, Mamá”in Sharpie and crayon.A drawing of…
-
Snow Globes
Snow Globes There are tableaux we make out of dinner plates, a child’s lost sock,a father’s coat on the bannister,the silent, stuck smile of a motherstirring steam into endless errands—windows frosting into the same patterns,altars of dusty decades accumulating unnoticed in twice told stories, reupholstered sorrows,all the slow cyclones of repetition caught under glasswaiting for…
-
Walking in the Rain
Walking in the RainI don’t know why rain breaks my heart.No one I loved ever died on a rainy day.In my life, it has become an elegy to sunshine.Maybe, it’s because rain feels like tears.I go outside when it reduces to a soft drizzle,just before the scent of petrichor has settled into the earth,my dog…
-
Answers to the questions you always wanted to ask the departed:
Answers to the questions you always wanted to ask the departed:(A counter poem with answers after Ellen Bass Inquest)https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/inquest-ellen-bass-poemShe loved apricots, not figs. Olives reminded her of saltwater, and the yellow irises—those were never hers. Her feet stayed clean because she refused to walk barefoot, never trusted the ground, never trusted much at all. She…
-
What Will Not Survive
Sharp as an edge that does not ask what it is cutting. whole as a thing that does not need proof to exist,thought arrives in full motion before meaning—color before shape, light before weight,not as process, not as method,but truth already formed, unwilling to be held,which needs no tending, refining, It is not a single…
-
Aftermath
Aftermath The crash happens, and then everything waits. The tow truck arrives—sleek and gleaming, its midnight-black paint absorbing the streetlights in a perfect, polished hush. It is not a wrecker—it is a machine with purpose, its curved chassis hugging the ground like a race car— the quiet arrogance of a predator. The hydraulic arm unfolds…
-
The Nacre of Survival
**The Nacre of Survival** After all the operations, after the slow unraveling, I trace the shimmer left behind, a pearl forming in the absence of what was— the weight of my steps lighter, not in grace, but in uncertainty mixed with hope. I do not run anymore Yet, I watch Tom Cruise sprint, sprint— limbs…
-
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,…
-
When the earth is no longer a womb
When the earth is no longer a womb,just a shriek and whistle of once uttered prayer—a long, puncturing howl of everything that was once you turned into casualties of silence, then you know that death has arrived, noiselessly, silent as a missile. All the clamor outside- it’s the hibakujumoku, (the survivor trees) insisting on life…
-
A Son’s Lament
It’s been over thirty-five years since I felt your motherly touch, and I no longer try to shape a garden of sorrow. Instead, I let the new grass flame, its green distinct from the old cold fire, whose embers tighten their ring with each passing year. I find joy in the crepe myrtles unfolding into…
-
Once Upon a Time: Miami
(after Richard Blanco)I barely remember myself in the sway of these palms Fifty years on I’ve lost the language of these breezesalong with almost all my childhood Spanish.Good Morning, Buenas Dias runs into Good Night, Buenas Noches. I can no longer live out the passion of my youthwithout cancer intruding some melancholy lyrics.On the good…
-
Skin
SkinI felt the skin of my father—his thumb a soft shawlthat enveloped our intertwined hands.And when the embrace broke— how my tiny fingers traced the moss line of his skulluntil it became a familiar garden.How he would embrace mother, after-wards in her floral gown, so tenderly, thatI would sneak in later to smell the trace…
-
Light
When I was a child light shone angels through my fingerscrowning my parents’ faces,blessing the simple tasks of theirs: table setting, pouring water—how it lit the world in my upturned smileand flowed through as I grewand how it followed me homeand stayed, even in the dark.Light was the water, earth,reflecting off every animal, every street,…
-
Old Elm Haiku
Its leaves fold,curl inTheir grip yields to the cold windThe elm knows their loss
-
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…
-
I Hear the Gapped Heart
My past is blind, locked in its own code.The sunlight is the only gold I own.Grief, birth, the scent of night rain,time’s count down is my inheritance.The wind that lifts the sea, leaves it’s salt drying on my fingers- a dream salvaging the tideline’s gleanings for things oncegenerous, intense, yet lush and lean. I hear…