Peppermint Twist

Second grade, we lived on Cindy Street, cul-de-sac where I rehearsed my confusing life with the usual quilt of friends, freckled, all white, and carrying board games like clubhouse passwords from front yard to back. Risk and Chutes and Ladders. Cootie catchers. We sucked honeysuckle sap like rare elixir from the bush at the bottom of the street where the school bus stopped for us weekday mornings.

There too at the end of our street was with a pond, muddy with pollywogs mimicking our own growth on squat legs. If you turned right at that corner and kept going there was an coveted destination two blocks farther, a house where three playmates mirrored my own sibling trinity of two girls and a boy and the most exotic mother in the entire neighborhood. This woman with yellow hair was bewitching, had a husband of her own, of course, but she bought holiday gifts for a select share of kids in her periphery, presents that surely unsettled our own mothers. Tiny, heart palpitating bunny rabbits at Easter, for example, that grew into large ones that we had to keep caged in the garage feeding them wilted, disgusting smelling lettuce that would've otherwise been discarded.

This goddess of a mother who we all secretly wanted as our own also taught us to dance, the day's most lascivious dance, the Peppermint Twist...

Comments

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 fr...

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 ...

Protozoa

When we spoke on the phone there were dominant background sounds, crickets here that rhymed with the smoke alarm that went off in your living room and you couldn’t remember the code to shut it down and last night a moment of rain and I lay in bed unsure if I should go outside to set the orange bucket aside from the downpour to maintain the safe house there for the unidentified protozoa, my husband called them, naiant in the unlikely habitat - what I believe tadpoles beside a yard where I have never seen frogs but perhaps it is the sludge cry that I seek the sticky tar paper that lines my lungs and heart cavity weeping impending displacements, my father who may never button up his favorite green shirt again with philodendron etched on fabric nor walk out to the lanai at the back of his house with his third wife and we either joke or pretend we will take him to the beach when we ...

As Mourning Doves Persist

Search This Blog