Therapeutic Massage

Her hands run down the hourglass of my back. Tracing the flare where burrowed absentee tension coagulates. Washboard. Bath water, Blackboard burdened with layers of letters and calculations never entirely erased.

We share answers to questions only asked by strangers who after four visits will never see one another again. She strikes a lighter, sucking oxygen from small glass cups that I cannot see, and attaches them to my back hovering above my bruised ribcage. Fascia ripples, letting down like a lithely inhabited village where our grandmothers still live, agile in their afterlives.

Her black hair is pulled back from her face. I really only know her voice now from a warm table in a narrow room where, face down on my stomach, my neck relinquishes to the kneading. The name she gives to the tight spring under my right arm just at the webbing of shoulder blade and first rib is wholly new to me. Swans, her therapeutic lyric. I try to swallow the minute fountain that pools in my mouth, slack jawed, breath expelling after too many years.

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Grit and Sunlight

What springs up: insistence in this persistent mother of mine (still breathing) Even busy ashes from a rescued urn float up reconstituted as morning dew She unfolds her tendril arms from shadow (shaking just five days ago as if in temporary surrender) (that moment when I am less certain of her longevity) this woman ever present (anyone’s mother) aging when even the most spindly clover of her fragile skin captures the sunrise light like anticipation’s shower blood underneath all humming bird or spores from her heart and in her mouth inhale (frightened) breath exhale grit inhale (certain) breath exhale grit

Open Mic, Cafe Babar

I remember arriving, not the prettiest but appealing to certain bards in the back room, entering through the Castro Valley corner door, walking the postage stamp sized Cinzano bar curated by a man from Detroit who named his establishment after a certain French elephant in a children’s book I arrive with budding consciousness around politically correct solidarity for disheveled neighbors, entering the cigarette lit night rising to tin siding ceiling to floor thumping insistence Bruce and Joie and David and Laura and John, their ash and sweat accumulating as I waited patiently for my place on the crumpled sign-up sheet Today, three decades later, I sit in a Santa Fe gallery named simply Here, and a poet reads to us of roadrunners and a bear and a continuation of the call for preservation of our environment There is an otherworldly hum outside the window of leaded glass The owner sidles up behind me and pushes the frame down to contain what we came to hear I have applied lipstick

A Matter of Travel

Solstice, 2019, for Tracy 1. And cross borders we do often without leaving our houses. Our bodies dream of gardens. Our hands flutter as feeling exits as we press hard against the solid entry door. I type the names of cities. My search reveals rivers, airfares, temperatures in July. 2. Seeking sleep, I am transported through music piped into tiny earbuds. While on an island my father has two seizures in the night. His ten children fly to one another with cautionary fright, typing. Time zones vary from each cell phone exclamation. Two sisters, you and I, raise questions that barely touch down for others but I witness you. 3. By morning we’re assured was merely fainting, and I reconsider change of plans. No emergency to rush to his quiet side. I walk no farther instead to this table for eggs, an English muffin. Arrive inside my individual conclusions. Concern that happiness, once again, is quickly stymied.

As Mourning Doves Persist

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