Earth Day 2017- “Mother”

Mother,

she talks to us
in change and
weakens me with
passing days.

Our memories that
fade, fade, fade
are sweetened
by their rarity.

Faced with seasons gone
and new to come,
they’re harsher now
on skin that runs
like rivers bent
and twisted on
a canvas once blank,
I am poised before the easel of youth,
poised before the brushstroke of
her most confident displays.

It is now that I am reminded
of my youth.
Now that I say goodbye to my mother
and her backwoods, where summers
spent hiding from the sun,
that peaked from behind the spaces between leaves,
left marks on my childhood,
the good kind
that leave smiles
not scars, I am reminded
of her ineffable face.

I have forgotten the harshest storms
of my life.
I have brokered the unwanted memories
in return for the ones
that make your
heart explode.
It is on top of you
I have carved out
a piece of myself
in the marble slab
of time.

 

My Place

Take my feet and
turn them into
cars, if you will.
My legs go ahead
and make into
parents.
Make my genitals
a joystick, and
the rest is up to you,
my friend.
Scratch your Magnum
opus onto my chest.
Or splice my mind,
side-by-side,
with yours.
What makes me
me, you cannot
touch. Plus,
you already have my
genitals.

I imagine myself on
the river bank of
a place that only
exists in my mind.
The wind here breathes
deep, and blows out
its woes in dusks and sunsets that
smear themselves across the sky in an orgy
of dark orange and purple paintstrokes.
The only sound out here is
the ancient silence of exhaling.
At the end of the horizon
the river trails off, toward the sun,
and splits the dark pastel
forest in two opposing sides.

Here it feels like
the world could end.

I’d cry tears that navigated around my grin
to fall from my face
and join the rushing river that emptied
into the setting sun on the horizon.

There it feels like
the world already did.

 

Patricia’s Winds

How can I not
root for that bird?

They say the storm
will be the biggest
the world has ever seen.
And when she moves across
the sky
she’ll still only get 70% (percent)
news coverage
compared to her male storm
counterpart.

How is Mexico to fair?
Against the world’s (first?)
feminist fury. Against
“I dont fit your patriarchal
Saffir-Simpson rating system.”

She isnt on her
period, see?
She isn’t saving up sick days
for maternity leave.
Her name is Patricia,
and she started as twisting,
heated moisture.

Why do her winds
have to be wild and violent?
She spreads out across the sea,
with wisping clouds resembling
grey hair.

Why can’t her stirrings of the ocean
be art?
We see the rythmic emptiness
of dark water slap
an evacuated beach.
A scene of anxious apocalypse
where the berm provides
the perfect place,
for you and me to watch the way
the waves wade from the horizon
to our parked car in the sand.

If she could speak
Patricia might ask,
“Why am I angry?”
I’d reply,
“Because they think you’re a lady, a woman,
and hell hath no fury
like a woman’s scorn.”
“But I am no lady, I am a storm,”
she’d say.

Patricia left
to hit the coast.
Grey hair-like billows
flowing behind herself like a cape.
And this bird I’ve been watching,
working against her artful gusts, and struggling
to get anywhere but the one spot it’s stuck in.
How could I not
root for that bird?