The women in a family

I.
In softest cream cashmere, silk draping
wrists of verbena, vanilla, rose.
Bronze chargers under china, layers
of scent: rosemary roasting turkey, bread
baking. Today is a joyful day.
The embroidered table runner
and the periphery of memory: this girl
cupping the phone as she whispers
to the tinny voice of a dispatcher
or that girl watching her mother breathe
into the crumpled brown paper bag.

Can you sum the pain: the hot weight
of bully slaps across the face
to the side of the head
or hands on vacated bodies, wine-dank breath
Can you sum these lives and portion it
like slices of pie
served to mothers are daughters
nursed, are sisters are cousins
lifting the forks to their lips.
To call it strength but what is it
but to daily wake, walk, eat of it.
There is no Greek chorus here.

II.
Lips licked, decadent meal done
Cousins and daughters languid
on couch cushions. Couches
across therapists’ offices
a dozen fair haired young women
their constellations of disorder
closeness and cold retreat.
Row, row, row your boat
these dozen cousins singing in a round.
This leaning tower has stood
over six hundred years on its soft ground
its flawed foundation has withstood
four earthquakes.

The water will recede

The house was being carried downstream, I saw her
face in the window, stilled in grimace. I steeled myself
to face her dying and I stood. But fell
at each particular of death:
Bridges torn apart, downtown submerged in water then rubble
A drowned body that sinks then rises to the surface
torso floating higher than head and limbs.

Our flooded house is half-standing, a jagged bit of wall
buckled beams, like a roadside animal’s skeleton
clinging to a few patches of carcass.
My dead garden where a stray dog shit in my flowerbeds.
They tell me it never was: the wax-leaved magnolia tree and its burst
blossoms in my backyard. They say it was always an empty spot of lawn,
that it is impossible to trace Orion even though the stars remain.

I walk through the mud and step on the shit, I shed and lose
that softest skin and with this self who has lost—
On soaked, leveled ground, I rise with the songbirds.
I am beyond gutting and my rage distills.
I wash the always full sink of dishes, food still caked on
feel the crushed garlic on my fingers, spreading it over root
vegetables for roasting, steam from the pot of soup, its promise.
My children take this food I have made.
My children who herald decency and the real flesh of others.

Placing these dishes before my children

My children eat hamburgers.
Light brown wisps cover my infant’s soft skull
eyes: greenish, skin: pink. Then pale pale
like his father but the baby’s
pale skin won’t burn as mine doesn’t.
We’re of two countries. The first:
Islands sparkling in the sun, and bloody gnashing
of a colony. Then here where no one
in its old memory has a face
like mine, my family’s lines not tender-fed
in its soil.

But how to eat of the land where I was born
its trauma and revolution
the buoyancy, the making do
the Art of it.
Grit and pieties
that are old, ancestral

I want my children to feel this country
in their fight and the pits of their stomachs—
to know my great grandfather led guerilla fighters
in the jungle

Are they strangers to what is in their blood?

We’re restless but for this clockwork of tables
set by a hundred titas—the aunties—
Lumpia in tidy rows and glistening stews
the tangy adobo, grilled fish, bones still in
recall an afternoon eating by the sea.
Take and eat
each bite of rice and fish, soaked
in soy sauce mixed with garlic, vinegar
a bit of calamansi, perfection.
There are no banana leaves at this table
but it summons to dinnertime
in the barangay.
Dusk fallen, street vendors barbecue pork
mothers cook in the kitchens, windows
open, steaming food and
relief that another bone weary day
of work is through
under the too heavy tropical air.

Funeral homes and new fluencies

I am an encyclopedia of organ failure, prognosis, orifices.
Having walked miles in pea-green and peach tiled hospital corridors
to the low budget movie sets of funeral homes—reception ballroom
leads to chapel, living room, a counter for cremation orders.
My love is now actuarial and I count the wakes.
Bereaved father who forgot to clip the back seam of his new suit jacket,
someone pointing out  who first sold the boy heroin,
and mythology of a grandpa on both the Eastern and Western fronts,
or my father’s dead body less than a decade older than my body now.
I am too tired to do an accounting of the ways I failed them, various,
too tired to remember about Plato and immortality of the soul.
I’ve never touched food at a funeral home reception. All I want to eat
is to smoke a cigarette with my nineteen-year old body
that didn’t even know it had lungs because they didn’t hurt.

Monica Perez-Nelson is a Filipina-American poet who is working on her first collection.  She returned to writing after a long dormancy and is also a mother of two and a health policy lawyer who specializes in data and AI issues.  She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband, sons, and dog, Tulip.  She jots poetry notes on scraps of paper while at her kids’ soccer games, swim meets, and practices. 

Image: Jessartcam, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

For Therapy, I Mix Metaphors

From a frozen wedge of machine-split pine,
tossed on this settling fire, one frayed, martyred
fiber curls back and away like a wire, then
flares, a flame racing the length of a fuse.

Imagine this an innermost strand, a barely-dirt
two-track off Frost’s road less traveled, a thin,
trembling thread of desire, the uncharted blue vein
of a tundral highway. Or in some dread cloister

it dreams, and a sillier spirit suddenly moves—
like four fresh fingers over flamenco frets,
like dumb elegance uttering Old Florentine,
never meaning one of its crooning words.

It might dance—Tejano, Zydeco, any twenty
Liebeslieder Waltzes, any juking jumble
of a barrel-house blues—wherever arose
an arousing tune, the thrum of a Kenyan’s
drumming, the merest notion of Motown soul.

I do know: there must be this lost but lively cord,
an original nerve, perhaps abandoned, or jammed
as if into an airless cavity of an old house,
where it waits, to spark, to catch, its insulated
nest invaded by the stray tip of a driven nail.

It craves some risky remodeling, that annoying
era of air compressor, plaster grit, dumpster,
and the exuberant exhalation of ancient dust.

Another Time, This Same Moon

Another time, this same moon,
which free-hands its flat arc across
a fathomless slate of nighttime sky,

supplied so much duplicitous reason
that the warmest stretch ever of
endless kissing seemed also to signal

an endless love. Have others believed
in such infinite moments? Maybe the fire
and the jazz and the lips touching

just right? The palm of conversation
folding in whatever tender confidence
came to mind? No way, back then,

could that peaceful walk at dusk—
the slow sun tingeing stray clouds pink
over a tiny inland lake—have led

to the sorry war to come, the saddest
set of regrets that still colors
my occasional wandering. How could

once watching waves etching a shore
have also meant the meanest goodbye
would eventually roll its own way in?

How could catching together
the brilliance of high light glancing
among bright white slopes have groomed

a final run so treacherous, so doomed? How
did such intimacy simply disappear
by the end of my life’s finest week?

Do you remember yours—remember
right now—this loveliness before rejection
recklessly re-bursts your re-built heart?

D. R. James, retired from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, lives with his psychotherapist wife in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. His latest of ten collections is Mobius Trip (Dos Madres Press). https://www.amazon.com/author/drjamesauthorpage

Image: Gerda Arendt, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Captives

Life and time have held us captives— turned
The moon an imposter in the affairs of the night.

The justice-chirping canaries of yesterday have buried
Their preaching flute of freedom songs under heap of clay.

Now our dread-riddled minds during these stony days
And perilous nights, itch and pine for a barrage of healing songs.

But for the sake of fish for their potbellies— they have
Turned bridges into giant walls, sutured mighty roads

Of yesterday to a spider’s web. Wordsmiths like all inhabitants,
Dread to unveil within the verses of their poems— the blazing

Resentments buzzing in the crevices of their hearts for the
Captains steering the ship of this land, for graves here reek like

All other catacombs of the world, yet, with tons of promising
Dreams. They will, brethren, definitely come knocking on the

Door of your minds tonight, asking with the bellow
Of an angry Egyptian bull after this rebellious bard,

When they surface like a full moon, keep me in clouds
— unnamed, save another star from premature fall.

Note: Italicicized passage from rom Akeem Lasisi’s “Ori Agbe”.

On Clarity, Fear, Perfidy, & the Illusion of Hope

With this, I do not seek to appear
draped in flowing flawlessness before all eyes,
I am also a pin underneath some people’s feet.

I only want the little whisperings
of my antique mind to be expressed
this time around without the interference
of guilt and the encroachment of the bilious past.

Hope [want] or the illusion of it
sustains impoverished lungs…
so I still breathe only for hope
or the illusion of it.

This poet wants the nests of all his verses
rooted on the boughs of a tree called eternity,
so he consecrated these verses like seraphims
by blessing them with agile wings to brave all storms.

O! heavens grant me the freedom
of unbridled thoughts, make me
a master of my desires,
make a slave for your holy course
out of me.

I dread the company of bones draped in varieties of skin tones,
I dread anything walking on two legs, anything
with a head pockmarked with two eyes white as boiled eggs,
anything with a mouth sculpted just almost underneath those eyes,
if not for the sovereignhood exercised by two crouching noses…
I dread anything & anything
that’s capable of love & patience.

For I know in the heart of my mind,
that in their callused hands,
nothing is safe: not love, not patience…
& everything is a weapon: even love,
even loyalty.

On this my brief sojourn here—earth —so far…
I have seen terrible things: a lover
—sadly my lover— weaponizing
her lover’s ivory dreams against him,
when she was simply done with him
and needed to dispose him
like a loaded trash can.

On Staggering Faith and Vague Miracles

Sometimes in the absence of seasoned innate joyful songs, we return with a staggering faith
 to rooms teeming with the ghosts of our embalmed fears hoping to find them already evolved    
into tiny little joys.

Sometimes, ridden with disbelief, we repel like pagans scorning holiness: the soothing thoughts      
of unconsciously unearthing some grains of delight embedded underneath the foot of our blistered
deeds after having sought absolute remission, & whenever an angel perches on the arch of our
aching souls urging us to leap at an ecstatic pace into freedom, we muffle his prompting voice
with the blanket of disbelief.

Sometimes, miracles come to us draped in garments of disbelief. Sometimes all miracle wants         
to make of us is a vessel equipped with an atom of faith, damned with a will to dare, to stump            
at the staunch core of disbelief, hoping to stumble upon life in death.

Sometimes, the world closes all her windows on you, and like a naughty boy on probation you start
feeling trapped in the well of aloneness brimming with darkness, with the fierce faces of your fears. Sometimes, like you, fellow travelers, I do not know what to make out of the silky fabric of existence
and on days like that I often bequeath myself again like an estate to untainted love.

Abdulmueed Balogun Adewale is a black poet from Ibadan, Nigeria. A Pushcart prize and BOTN Nominee. He was longlisted for the 2021 Ebarcce Prize, shortlisted for the 2024 Gerald Kraak Prize, finalist 2021 Wingless Dreamers Book of Black Poetry Contest, won the 2021 Annual Kreative Diadem Poetry Contest & the 2024 Dr. Samuel Folorunsho Ibiyemi Poetry Prize. His poems have been published in: The Westchester Review, Soundings East Magazine, Poetry Lab Shanghai, Hawaii Pacific Review, ROOM, The Oakland Arts Review, Moonstone Arts Centre, Applause Literary Journal, Red Cedar Review and elsewhere. He tweets from: @AbdmueedA

Image: Arch-Angel Raphael the Artist, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons