Tag: Memory
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Looking Through Water Finds Its Softest Truths in the Drift of Memory
Looking Through Water offers a butter‑sweet meditation on family, memory, and the slow work of forgiveness, anchored by Michael Douglas’s understated final performance. Though its flashbacks wobble, the film’s present‑day emotional core delivers a gently resonant farewell.
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The Purple Glass
The Purple Glass” began with an object my mother once handed me—useless, she said, but beautiful. The poem traces how that uselessness became memory’s last vessel, holding what language can’t restore.
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Vestige
I wrote Vestige out of the memory of my mother’s rituals—how care and vigilance could harden into preservation. The poem began with the image of towels draped over thorns, a gesture that felt both protective and sacrificial. I wanted to explore how domestic acts—counting, tending, washing—become ceremonies of control and grief. The poem’s tone is…
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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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The Road They Will Leave By
The Road They Will Leave By” began as a meditation on exclusion and memory. I wanted to write a poem that refused sentimentality and simile, one that relied on physical detail and emotional pressure to convey the quiet violence of being remembered wrongly—or not at all. The soldier’s camouflage, the elders’ breath, the locking of…
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A Thing I Do Instead of Sleep
This poem emerged from a sleepless night and a remembered sound—an owl’s hoot imagined against the silence of a hospital corridor. It’s a sonic elegy, a gesture toward the moment my mother’s voice carried the weight of my deafness.
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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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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…
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Undo
“Undone” emerged from my lifelong reckoning with memory and survival. After losing family members in a tragic accident, I found myself haunted by the idea of reversal—not just of time, but of blame, grief, and the unintelligible aftermath. The poem imagines a world where trauma rewinds: collisions un-happen, blood disappears, and the dead return to…
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The Empty Chair
This poem originated from the ritual of watching films with someone I loved, and the chair she occupied became a consecrated site after her passing. Each line mimics a film frame rate—24 letters per line—so the poem itself becomes a reel of memory. Commas and dashes act as cuts, splicing grief into cinematic rhythm. The…
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Treatise to My Old Magnificent Maples and Sweetgums
Treatise to My Old Magnificent Maples and Sweetgums began as a procedural elegy—an archive of leaf blowing, tarp dragging, and displacement. My autistic brother and I enacted these rituals season after season, until the house, the trees, and the basement were lost. The poem resists metaphor and sentimentality. It trusts objects, gestures, and consequence. The…
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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.…
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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…
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Flash Flood
Flash Flood is a poem of witness—set in the Tennessee hills during a sudden flood—and traces the unraveling of lineage, memory, and land. The poem honors the quiet promise to stay, even when everything is being undone.
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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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The Birds Remember Everything
A lyrical meditation on city birds, memory, and instinct. This poem honors the quiet rituals of return, grief, and the histories we refuse to name.
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Brief Encounter on Aisle Five
Brief Encounter on Aisle FiveIt is this way:She sees him first—aisle five, cereals— where the honeyed light fall softly on him— and her. The way he cradles Cheerioson the cart’s edge—firm in his handsso if they slip, they fallinto the safety of the cart,into the touch of his little girl-—lets her knowhe once belonged to…
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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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You
You Sometimes in my dreams I touch the body of another woman— not my mother, or my wife, not anyone I’ve known or seen. She’s a woman of first times and seasons natural and unnatural, who tells me ghost stories filled with un-lived truths that arise not from soil and sky, stories seen in a…
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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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There Are Places Where Children Dwell
There are places children dwell— no letters to Santa, no cookies or milk on Christmas Eve— just feathers on windowsills, pretending they’re posts from mom.There are places where children dwell who hum the first sung lullaby from their mother’s doting throat instead of prayers that ask for sleep and their souls to keep.Places where children…
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Inside the Places that Light Can Not Reach
Inside the Places that Light Can Not ReachTrenches carve silence in the ocean’s deepest foldswhere pressure crushes and light dies before arrival—beneath ice pressed tight by a thousand years,where silence sleeps in frost older than stars—limestone cathedrals rising from the littoral hush,where even echoes have forgotten the sun—Deep in the brain’s hippocampal fold, where memory…
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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…
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Where She Left It
Where She Left ItOn the side of the highway, abandoned where the wild grass ends, a child’s shoe— blue, with a slight heel, broken on the left side, rhinestone anklet torn from its support— the victim of a wobbly learning step, its twin nowhere near.I circled it in reverence, looking for some sort of forensic…
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Branch Psalm
Branch PsalmBranch PsalmThe dead branch inscribes wild reminders to the wind.How many nights since it first blossomed did it revel in leaf brushing against leaves, know the fall of years,feel the rain drip away, nourishing the earth, staining this continent with its open, quiet astonishment?It felt the sapwood itch itself into new rings, lose its…
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Vessels
VesselsThe pots remembered emptiness,remembered the ache of hunger,how they were born to forestall famine,to be filled and filled again,to feed mother, father, the children.not this silent, stew-less simmer.When the kitchen faucet dripped out of rhythm,the backsplash tile sprinkled dustonto the dirty water,onto the tarnished coreof the lonely pans sitting stagnant in the sink,they almost felt…
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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…
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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…
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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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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…
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Searching for Florecitas at the Supermercado
Searching for Florecitas at the SupermercadoWe walk, my brother and I, as the cool breath of night yields to the slow, sticky press of morning. Condado’s half-lit streets shimmer under retreating shadows, sidewalks smoothed by wealth, indifferent to our steps. Beach condos glow in the thinning dark, their balconies high as forgetting. Somewhere in this…
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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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Landline
I dialed the landline to my childhood home, let it ring into the past— again and again and againI knew my parents wouldn’t answer. They’re both dead. Still, the ringing soothed— each unanswered tonea promise that someone, anyone, might answer. After ten rings, a recorded message came on.The voice was full of girly twang and…
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My Jesus Hour in a Taco Bell
I feel at home at Taco Bell, as the cuisine echoes the worst of my mom’s cooking: cheese that tastes like beans, beans that taste like rice, rice that tastes like flour.It’s where I go when I am missing someone, usually near their Jesus’ hour, between the last sip of a lunch hour Pepsi and…
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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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Rogue Brother
My brother is an angler devoted to the stream that pools around long boots, making the slow cast that gently whips and ripples the surface with a reel that knows the proper weight of the scales below.Gone are the days when he fished Crandon Pier while sitting on an overturned paint bucket with a cheap…
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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…
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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…
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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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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…
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Evening Traffic
In my late hunger I listen to the swirl of night traffic, until it dies around the curb— recedes into remembrance,to that melting space inside— the sound matching the tempo of my lowest need,getting lost in the evening’s reflection—ice memories melting to water,everything moving to my traffic flow—to the single track of my inside voice.
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Gratification in time’s diminutions
Time’s diminishments adds its own beautyin gratitude for moments that are not ours:the child tiptoes into the mother’s bedroomand silently witnesses her comb her hair,later listens to her snore, transferring to them the transient lyrics of the song of life- the lines that survive the well of nights,the rose thorns to bloom in their mouthsuntil…
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Our Secret City
I wander through this secret citymapped in the words we only know,and we can only define.I am the citizen of you and you of me. Everyone we know drives bye,their cars filled with everything we ownflying out the window.The next vanishes into the mistbeyond the curb of what we once were.Or, is it, will be?Where…
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Ghosts in the Light
She remembers when the light was filled with silent ghosts. They would flicker in and out in the cigarette smoke of the theater, each frame an ashy wisp, a burnt offering.The story spooling out in the air was a familiar one.The sentiment caught in her heart and made her cry. Years later, she went back,after…
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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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Wash
The white light of my bathroom reaches down through the steam,breaks yellow through the shower door.I scrub my skin, try to scratch loose all the sour, stinging memories inside,hope the grime would disappear in the porous mat under my feet.The steam flows like a host of ghosts into the vent fan- leaves behindonly the face…
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Living the Half Life
The drought has made July linger. The air smells of sewer booty, sweetgum, sassafras, fescue, concrete and asphalt. On this long summer day when the light and heat decide to linger— parents let their children play well into the night on the community’s green. Their laughter and the croaking of frogs in the rention pond,…
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The Cleansing Cycle
i like to cling to the grimethe small grit of my father’s ashesunderneath my fingernails, the part of him that refused to fall to the rocks in the scatteringmy mother’s scented oil in her hair,her burning fat seasoning in the skilletstinging my nostrils and eyes leaving me seeing smelling less than my faultering earshis ash…
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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…
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On Reading of the Demolition of the Once Good Hospital of My Birth
I think He made this hospital beautiful this place of dying, birthing, healing and enduring—How It opened up like a prayermonumental and pleasinga place to tend God and body—How He wanted those returning from sleep not to know the smell of cotton but the feel of traveling into a kiss—How He made it to repeat…
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Cardboard
Given enough cardboard and tape I could make my own childhood house.At least until winter. Then, it allflattened, became one big sledthat raced down the brown foothills,so out of control, fast, faster still,until a Plymouth door handle left a permanent time scar on my forehead- one, two, three little rivers forging into each other.Now, that…
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Father, Sin and Holy Ghost
I squatter in the catacombs of remembrance. grinding my bones with pumice and chalk for a fine bone dust to clean the vellum bindings of my soul’s revisions. The scars glitter the ground. All the others with almost identical names, are around me, enough alike to make me doubt the date I was born. Something…
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the spaces she left behind
they turned brown before you arrived by the time you came on them swiped the dust off turned the pages they were crumbling you never looked at the rest surrendering them to silence you could lie down again now there was nothing between you now the rain was beginning outside or was it just the …
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Beautiful Flashes of Life
Grandma Clara knew this day would come,so she put on her favorite blue & white dress.She had been waiting for this, for a long time.Clara switched the television channel to the one her grandkids watched all the time.She pulled up her wheelchair, stowed it neatly in the corner. Clara didn’t want her son/grandkids, stumbling over…
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An Old Poet
The old poet walks downs the streets of his dying city.The ancient tenements, stories upon stories of them,rise up before him. He thinks he may have inhabited them. He remembers- he built them but never inhabited them. He looks closer and the bricks are in the shape of his mothers teeth-square and right and just;the…
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The Water Calls Us Down
The water call us down.She names us and we call her ours. Down we goand we sleep.Awakenedwe remember- that blue pool-the one with no bottom.
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Soft Body Memories of Our Grief
We exist in unkeepable bodies and in the bending over we decompose for we are are but the memory of grief that soft bodies leave when they die.
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The Sea Grape Remembers
It has been five years since I visited you my old Sea Grape friend, standing proud and wizened in the front yard, unbothered by all the construction behind. Everything is smaller and crowded than I once lived it, except for you— still the right size for a wild girl to climb, providing enough shade for…