Beyond the Door quarantine, week 2 Kitty Costello
Someone has been knocking on the door so
long that her knuckles are raw with rapping. We have shut her out
with her stringy black hair and her earthen coat.
We have banished her to an imaginary underworld, dressed her up for a party with Persephone, somewhere else, long ago, in some other season, in some exotic land where no one real ever lived
or died.
We have banished her with wine,
with trips to the mall.
We have banished her with grand plans for our grand lives parading into
utopian perfection.
We have banished her
with full-fat or gluten-free choice,
with organic or toxified style,
with Xbox and Zoom and CGI.
Her patience wears thin and cannot be refused. She could always walk through walls, leap 6-foot gaps. She could always
rear her head and bare her teeth,
faithful across all the ages
we thought were so backward, so
unsafe, so yesterday, arriving
here, now.
The doorknob is delusion.
Control is not at hand.
Who knows where the control room is or how to even start looking ?
Step one: feel your next breath.
Step two: relax your fist.
We have banished her
with funeral homes reeking of lilies.
We have kept her beyond our door.
She knows where to find us.
No Time to Rest Jason Szydlik
Here in Golden Gate Park
Flowers always bloom —
In summer fogs and winters dark.
January’s not stark
Or stunted with gloom
Here in Golden Gate Park.
Blasts of color mark
What were once shifting dunes
In summer fogs and winters dark.
But spring never bursts apart,
And fall’s brown never looms
Here in Golden Gate Park.
The gardeners always work,
With plants to tend and groom
In summer fogs and winters dark.
Yet most every day hints of murk
And whiffs of coming doom —
Here in Golden Gate Park —
In summer fogs and winters dark.
You and I Are Soldiers Rocio Ramirez
my brother Herbie said to me
As we survived our childhoods
Thunder of storms
Lightning of shock and pain
Winter of heavy rains
Our mother’s death and the sound of falling rain, forever etched in our sister Luísa’s memory
In a child’s playroom,
Herbie joyfully rode a dappled rocking horse,
while I placed amber citrines,
pearls gleaming from earrings,
our mother purchased at a thrift shop
into
white seashells
Translucent light of paste gems
My child’s eyes momentarily saw as real
I remember Herbie and I Christmas shopping at J.C. Penney Herbie thoughtfully buying an elegant bottle of Chanel 19, for our mother Ines
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Pulse points
scented with poignant perfume
Herbie and I missing our yellow school bus,
on purpose
Herbie and I happily walking back,
into our yellow clapboard house,
to stay home with our mother
On a rare occasion when she stayed home from work
On a rainy morning,
our mother drowned on a flooded road,
while driving her blue Honda Civic to work
Our mother planted flowers, for us to remember her In the spring, tiny tangerine roses, bloomed to my delight Delicate pink roses bloomed for Luisa
I remember Herbie
walking across a field,
carrying our mother’s tall yellow sunflowers
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