Category Archives: Poems

So, Langston, what do I do
with a dream deferred?
Do I soak it in
a jar of formaldehyde,
bottle it up, repress it?
Should I sip its ooze,
hack its weathered bones
into dim lemon beads?
Wear it to honor lonely elephants
and the ghosts of Mardi Gras?
Or, should I allow it to fester
beneath an emaciated gray sky–
And then run?

2005

Notes:

This piece was inspired by a news story I read shortly before I returned to New Orleans. It’s so sad: Lonely elephants, edgy apes shaken by post-Katrina life at zoo

Thanks for letting me borrow your words, Langston. (As if you had any say!)

If anything, I am more aware of each heartbeat;
erratic pumping like the crush of acorns
beneath bare feet–breathe in, bleed out–
Yes, it hurts.

When it snows, I become the lady in red,
dragging my lace shawl. It is no longer fun
when the cold burns my hands–when nothing
singes as it should

and wounds
cannot be cauterized.

08/30/11

Notes:

This poem is a sequel (of sorts) to Nightmare.

Sometimes I feel like the voice of reason, standing on a street corner
in one hundred and eleven degree fire weather:

“Floodwaters don’t come
because of Mardi Gras or gay marriage.
There is no deity in the sky, anger white-hot
and scalding. There is only the sun, distant and warm,
its beams slinking through ozone, rooting brown roses
to our forearms and faces.

Stop looking for locusts; any warning you perceive
is the earth’s murmuring: ‘I am not God or Pele.
I will not throw you into the crater and watch you
burn. I am the voice in your head, humming in key
with downed power lines: Something is wrong.
Who is to blame? I am not to blame.

I have done nothing.‘”

08/28/11

“Ugly girl, what right do you have
to want a boy?”

I’ve heard these words before.
I should settle for any boy
who will have me; it matters not
what I like, for ugly girls

are tarnished pennies
in this age of plastic.

(I’d seem beautiful, if I let you in–
if you wanted in.)

08/04/11

I hear the hum of hallucinated neon
in the hospital; the caw of crows
in my vampire-ear.

Sympathy: the static rub
on my bare shoulder; the warm hands;
the cluck of tongues
that do not speak my language.

The oak tree in Florida–tall, strange,
gray-black against thunderheads.
The time-traveling bird-voice
in my ear, in the tree: “Watch out
for what has happened!”

I heard more than I saw–even the hum of neon
seemed more clear
to my gray-black eyes.

It has been fifteen years.

The banshee in the next bed could not take me;
somehow, I lost my mind
and lived.

07/25/11

In a past life, I might have been Nancy, but I fear
I am Sylvia.

We ghosts string together
cries for help–a jasmine tiara,
early-white and heavy,
never moon-innocent, as daisies.

Look at us; no, don’t.

What can I do
to catch your attention?
I fear the oven; I know
how she felt–the heat and hiss of gas;
the lull of faraway waves.

I worry about the cat. I open
and close the oven door,
but she is not trapped.

I am.

07/25/11

Aquatic Nocturne
Sylvia Plath

deep in liquid
turquoise slivers
of dilute light

quiver in thin streaks
of bright tinfoil
on mobile jet:

pale flounder
waver by
tilting silver:

in the shallows
agile minnows
flicker gilt:

grapeblue mussels
dilate lithe and
pliant valves:

dull lunar globes
of bulbous jellyfish
glow milkgreen:

eels twirl
in wily spirals
on elusive tails:

adroit lobsters
amble darkly olive
on shrewd claws:

down where sound
comes blunt and wan
like the bronze tone
of a sunken gong.

In shooting the boogieman,
nightmare becomes phantom–
celebratory smoke from fireworks,
swirling toward the sky–
and yet, the gray phoenix
will climb from its cave
and burrow heart-caverns,
forcing us to hunt
its next host.

What infects us is transmitted
via the evening news,
but if we close our hearts to it,
we will develop
an immunity.

05/02/11

Notes:

Perhaps I am too much of an anti-war/anti-violence idealist, but I believe that, if we no longer acknowledge or retaliate against terrorism, it will cease to exist. Simply put, if we continue to feed our fear, won’t terrorism always have power over us?

I hear your heartbeat
in the crack of signal fire,
where it all seems different
somehow.

Remember when
you let me listen?

I thought I heard a yearning
instead of a thump.

04/17/11