A POEM A DAY

I'm just happy to be here.

Category: Uncategorized

April 5, 2020

3/30: A poem, with light at the end of the tunnel

Sitting down to write always feels like

giving my memory the keys to the house.

As if, somewhere the real me ends,

And the narrator’s monologue begins.

A voice takes over, calls out from the dark.

A shape takes form, casts a shadow on the page.

A line takes time, craves a place to breakdown.

How I get from here to there is a gateway

only language can open. Afterall, language

is memory, is past tense, as in, the door to yesterday

unlocked. Ring the bell and walk in.

This is the tell, not show. I know

the words to this song. It’s a strange chorus,

but the one I know. Sitting down to write,

I don’t need a map. A path is found in every poem.

I suppose it’s why I let the mind wander like it does.

Dig myself a tunnel. Find light at the end.

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April 3, 2020

2/30: A THOUSAND LITTLE JOYS

“I hope you found little joys to celebrate today,
and more than enough reason to smile.”

– A birthday text sent to me from Ayokunle Falomo,

Every smile has an origin story.
And mine begins with the unexpected gift
of knowing I’ll never be alone.
What a relief,
saying goodbye to the old emptiness,
forgetting what was lost,
holding what stayed,
abandoning grief like a rival
not fast enough to catch
the speed of my joy,
scattering across the April air
like a thousand little black birds.
This gift opens itself up every time
I look up at the sky of my life,
and count how many ways I am loved,
stunned at the simple song of being,
lost in a thousand shining suns.
Light trickles through the space
between my crooked teeth,
staining my bones like glass.

So I’m doing this new thing,
on days other than my birthday,
whenever I need a pick me up,
I open my mouth,
and I fill up the bedroom,
or the kitchen,
or the street,
with a thousand little joys,
with the names of every moment
I ever gave my smile to.

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April 2, 2020

1/30: REASONS TO LIVE

With every effort of my body,
I tried excusing myself from the universe of giving a shit
Thought empathy was something you could exile
a tiny revolution,
so I walked out on my better angels
Stopped writing poems for god knows how long
Reasons to live were everywhere but I missed every invitation
Said tomorrow like a proud martyr
and walked back into my shadow.

And then, one day—
The myth lifted. I found the cure to this virus.
It’s called, I don’t need a reason to ask for forgiveness.
And I don’t have to explain why.
Don’t need to be a witness to my own suffering.
When the past passes me by, I don’t ask it to stay.
I found my purpose in life a long time ago:
To talk.

Survival is nothing like you expect.
I walk my voice into a memory and
A song becomes a time machine.
I go back to who I was
when all I wanted was
to become who I am right now.
Don’t ask me to explain.
I’m too busy
falling in love every day
in a thousand different ways
with the woman who found the soft edges
of my pain, the woman who sparks a smile
through the dark.

I learned, just by picking up the phone,
I can turn my mother’s voice to neon joy
when I call to say I miss her.
I keep getting more and more good news.
My grandma texts me and tells me to say a prayer
over the front door and back door
with olive oil, to bless the body and the house
and god becomes a recipe
I didn’t know I had the ingredients to

I open up the windows to let the breeze in
and laughter from the neighborhood mijos and mijas
spins the wind-chimes on my front porch
until nothing hurts ever again.
The sun sets in front of me when a
cardinal crosses the railroad tracks,
a scarlet red descent into the thick brush,
like a flame that disappears from birthday breath,
carrying a wish I’m not supposed to share just yet.
I wonder, what spirit came to visit me? I cannot say.
All I know is, I missed the universe of my own voice.

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May 1, 2018

30/30: I EXIST NOT TO BE BROKEN

I make a promise to myself, and like a law, I exist not to be broken.
Though I know breaking. Whatever the reason you have for going
where you are going, I think it’s best you leave an hour before sunset.
Time the drive home with the sun’s low descent towards the horizon.
Keep going into the sky. Take the long way home like an oath to remember
how far you have come. I’m running out of time. I’m trying to show myself
the meaning behind all my tiny moments. I’m in love with the miracle of detail.
With the way I tell a story. With the way a story begins with a voice and a purpose. Keep going if you can. I’m here at the end, and I’m miles and miles past worthless.

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April 17, 2018

15/30: fruit cup empanadas

Sometimes I feel like the opposite of a witness. With my own eyes, I have nothing to report. I gather memories from my grandmother’s garden. I’m holding her life in my hands and I am held captive. I am a helpless spectator. I piece the details of her life together like a bouquet unafraid of decay. Opposite of omnipresent, I rake the leaves into a pile and picture her mind the same way I picture a tree changing colors.I don’t know the consequence of missing information. I regret to inform you, I still can’t say where my ancestors came from. Show me a map, and I’d laugh at the lines defining borders but never me. If my blood has a story, then nobody ever told me the beginning. But listening to stories over the stove, I discover the fire is alive in my grandma’s eyes. Her voice a wood stove. Her love a warm home. Waiting to eat, I’m fed a story from her childhood, about fruit cup empanadas, and my grandma recites every ingredient of her memory. The recipe of the past is bound to repeat.

 

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April 11, 2018

10/30: GRASSHOPPERS IN THE SKY

Me? I got me 4 brothers. Corey, Brent, Jesse, Kyler. Blood-bound. I love these men with all my heart, always have, ever since the start. How lucky of me, to be both big and little brother. I used to be a bother. I used to be a small king. I used to be a pawn. I used to be a boy who knew joy was simple like falling asleep on Brent’s shoulders in the backseat of the car cause Corey always got the front. Jesse asleep on mine. Eventually Kyler on his. This is the song I recall. Sometimes the words change. Like I’m never forgetting what I’m not. Always searching for who I’ve been. You know I can count the poems where I throw the word loneliness around like a stone but truth is, I ain’t never been alone. Not truly. I was raised by boys whose names I knew only as roots, as proof of who I am or was or could be. My bruised and busted lip is a trip down memory lane. I lie awake thinking of my brothers somewhere away from me. Their faces are my history. Their names a story only I can tell. One hug from them and all my pain is resolved. I got me 4 brothers. All of us the same but all of us different. Like clouds in the sky. I know we belong together though we may precipitate with different precision. All my mother’s sons. Blood-bound. Can we pretend the light that shines in the sky is each of my brother’s reaching out to me? Our father calls us grasshoppers and I become a creature of habit, hiding in the low-grass of the past. Did you know grasshoppers can only jump forward? Never backward. Never backward. Never backward. Never backward. Never backward.

What I’m trying to tell you is: I’m blood-bound to these men like the soil our grandfathers worked in, and every day I miss them.

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April 5, 2018

4/30: JESSI OPENS HER MOUTH

Jessi opens her mouth and language becomes a kite she is learning to fly
Language is in the wind and she holds a string in the sky
but all her words are untethered, sound orbits meaning
while meaning meanders along without a voice to
call out its name. She is still learning to speak, and I am still learning
to listen.

It is impossible to translate a sound with no name
But every day, her mouth is a chorus,
full of refrains
stains
growing tooth-pains.

Jessi opens her mouth all the time and when she does,
She speaks the language of refried beans
She speaks the same language a tortilla does
A voice hand-made by the recipe in our blood
She Speaks the same language as caldo
A calming flood of flavor that holds our hearts in its hands
Jessi belongs to a legacy of language only she can claim

The women in my family all have voices that command,
voices that understand, voices that float in the sky, water
the soil, light the fire, and carry the prayer, voices that exist
to say I am here, I am here, I am here.

Jessi opens her mouth and all the birds draw near
Every flower in my grandmother’s green house sneaks out
and the garden shouts out a song only Jessi can sing
My brother, Jessi’s father, watches his baby girl sleep
in silence. Her body rises like a slow tide, waiting
to crash against the shore of any world brave enough
to silence her.

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April 4, 2018

3/30: I’M HERE, I’M HERE, I’M HERE

I get lost listening to the rain arrive outside my window. Sunlight falls through a tree touching me and I abandon my shadow self. I pass by my reflection at intersections and praise the soil in my blood. I am a seed after the storm. Born in the heat, my heart is a sweating beast. I step outside and cannot hide. I remember every time I laid beneath the Oak trees and prayed in the shade. What I know now is, the weight of my body is proof I’m heavy enough to be tethered, that I won’t disappear. I’ve swam in the river and did not drown. I forgive the fog every time it hogs the sunset. I like to think I’m changing like the flowers in my grandmother’s greenhouse. Oh beautiful conspiracy of mud, always working like the weather. Sometimes the stillness overthrows me. Some days, I open my heart with no plans of closing.

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April 4, 2018

2/30: EVERYONE’S IN LOVE WITH ME

What I wanted was
a reason
not to be alone

We’ve all been lonely
and surrounded
Isolated but invited
Caught up inside the idea
of our eternal hurt
rummaging
through past rejections
like record collections we keep
for the company of our misery.

I’m not sure I’ve mastered survival
but hand to my mama’s bible,
I can’t stop smiling.

When I dream, sometimes
everyone’s in love with me
As if by design

What I want most days is to agree without analysis
To pretend
the world isn’t on a mission
to break my heart
What I want most days is for
love to be enough

And it is.

How, each morning, strings of light slice
and move through the trees to get to me,
I cannot say—
But when I awake, the woman next to me
is in love with me

As if by design.

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May 1, 2017

30/30: “MY HEART, I STILL BELIEVE IN GOD.”

After Shannon Leigh

Wave of sorrow,
Do not drown me now:

I see the island
Still ahead somehow.

– From “Island” by Langston Hughes

My landlocked tongue tucks each destructive emotion
into unopened oceans where hope shipwrecked and did not return.
I have learned to stay afloat by letting the water wash away
most waves of sorrow but some waves are names
reaching for safe harbor like my lips are a lighthouse
but when the crest falls, all I do is flood inside.

Sorrow, you have made me a vessel but can I choose
what I carry?
I’m done committing to the horizon when I am hiding.
I see the island, still ahead somehow.
Not every choice is sink or swim, sink or swim, sink or swim.

Underneath this sorrow and underneath this pain is another wave
The water is so clear I see my face in the sky like another moon
Like another moon, I move the terrible tide on cue,
trying to hide my life beneath blue dreams of silence.
I drop my heart and pick it up like an anchor.
Wave of sorrow, let me follow the wind like a sail
with stories to tell.
I have no lifeboat and no flare.
My lung capacity is a catastrophe.
I hide my tongue from the tide when I know I shouldn’t.
What I choose to carry isn’t supposed to float.
For me, arriving is the same as surviving.
I came into this world, but only after water broke.
All my life I’ve carried an unopened ocean
Tasting the salt of my wounds,
I surrender to the seascape around me.
Nobody’s ever found me in the depths of my defeat.

I’ll deny this ‘til the death of me
but even when I’m sinking
I still believe in anchors.

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