Good Manners Can Be Fun

The admonishment at age 6 was this:

Pull your lower lip in, or an elephant

will come along and step on it.

My grandmother of the always clean,
passing the felt-bottomed collection plate, allowed no pout.

Sadness was for others with less, without silverware to eat.

No picking at the peas or potatoes. My lip and lump

in my throat forbidden, hidden. Stick figures

populating a children’s book. Spine affixed with

silver adhesive tape, a stringy makeshift mend, once belonging

to my father, her most obedient son (Just swallow that ball of

irritable. Good Manners Can Be Fun) I defaced the aging pages,

scribbling my crooked name sloppily in pencil, and then rooted

for the tiny pachyderm in a blue star-less room

Nose-trunk growing like Pinocchio caught in what he wanted

to believe. That he was a real boy. That these elongated faces

make visible sense when we are lonely and no one is listening.

When the forest is full of wonderful screeching monkeys and rhinoceros.

Thick skin and thin.

But, let it be known: I am going to track mud in.

I will pierce this lip with snake bite ties
and trumpet ferociously, without apology.

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