If Life was a Nora Ephron Movie This Would be a Dramedy
On a weeknight, Belinda Carlisle’s Heaven is a Place on Earth played on an episode of The Handmaid’s Tale. I heard it in the backward pulse of my own sitcom body. Shuddered at the variables of loss on the screen. It wasn’t shock, rather an expected response like opening one’s self to someone. Like moving mountains inside the way Sally pretends to excavate her glory in exhibition for Harry. “I’ll have what she’s having” but I cannot carry the weight of melody on my back and still offer my frame. Our bodies once as rivers, their posture not broken but full. How wasteful to misunderstand we could sing with our voices being heard.
A Memorial
The crows sang they drank all they could of their kitchen prayer
I spent a week at my sister’s home after her newborn arrived. I had already witnessed the aftermath of a body in creating the sum of its new parts, held my two older nephews as babies when they were vibrant. They became solar systems. It happens so fast, how we discover the many renditions of oxygen and shrink from the alphabet to numbers; transforming our phoenix skin into a creek of showers.
It’s beautiful though-
the way we learn
to sit upright.
Gravity is Ruthless
Preserve your lines-
daddy long legs are not a
spirit form.
“Walk like Mrs. Onassis”, my great aunt used to say, as she would imitate the figure with straight shoulders and poised, smiling face.
We Don’t Speak Of
desire as an
un
/
opened
verb on the prick of becoming
a dozen highways
passed through the four legs of this
exhaustion.
I want to tear away its collar,
wear it as a skirt uninhibited on the weekend of my limbs.
Old Tradition
first taste,
don’t battle
the
disjointed
space.
blues touch
myself
A found poem- Source: Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones. pg 119
American lipstick
is your unlit mouth-
a prop,
a Hell’s Angel,
a nightgown
around your
world.
Try.
A found poem- Source: Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones. pg. 151
