Tag: resilience
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Transcription
soundtrack and images transform into words. I wanted to capture how memory and imagination build a foundation—bright doors, roofs wide as sky—out of fragments of fear and joy. The theme is resilience: the act of immersing nightmares in dreams until something sacred emerges.
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January Dream, 1987
January Dream, 1987 emerged from a dream visitation that blurred grief with peace. My mother, who had died decades earlier, returned in the dream not to ascend, but to sign love into my palm—wordless, tactile, and precise. The poem resists sentimentality and myth, honoring ambiguity and consequence. It’s an American sonnet that turns on ethical…
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Sunset Visit
“Sunset Visit” emerged during a twilight walk through a cemetery near my childhood home. I was struck not by grief, but by the contrast between the quiet of the dead and the noisy solitude each visitor carried—thoughts, regrets, memories. The poem began as a study in light and stone, but deepened into a meditation on…
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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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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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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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Ode to an Empty Lot
The empty lot of the abandoned car dealershipis overrun with dandelions, thistles, and sticker weeds. On the right is a Baptist church standing sternly against the invasive plants. The ministry’s gardener sprays Roundup on the weaker creepers while his assistant uses a torch on the deeply rooted ones. On the left is a BBQ specializing…
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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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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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The Moon in Cancer
Exhausted, endured,my veins touch the moon’s hope—this faded celebration that keeps clinging to possibilities beyond—amongst these pallid faces,silent companions,the burdened looking down this sterile room,pale walls,who surrender to sleep so easily,unheedful of this moon childlistening to only the comforting whisphersjust ahead.
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Only Thistles Will Do
1 I eat thistles to do away with my hunger for green life,capturing in pixel pricks what my prying eyes can not evade.The forest offers no inheritance,every branch has its best name 2I wish to learn and know the work songs of smaller, silent things,blend not into the shrubs but rocks,the mutes of this dry…