"Each hurt swallowed is a stone." Rita Dove
By the end of last year
I had vomited up all the
stones
and piled them on the garden wall.
Except one.
personal identity
Rim Rider
I ride the rim on Rosie,
writing stories in my mind.
The neighbor’s husky howls.
Rosie listens, watches,
moves away from the canyon rim.
I write of long lost lovers,
names forgotten,
smiling brown faces,
drifting through my dreams.
I ride the rim on Rosie,
writing stories in my mind.
The bobcat climbs the canyon wall.
Rosie’s ears move,
her body tenses.
I write of childhood memories,
places loved and lost,
of family joys and sorrows,
Mom’s singing while she worked,
Dad’s napping on the blue linoleum floor.
I ride the rim on Rosie,
writing stories in my mind.
Isabella runs past, bunny hunting, barking.
Rosie wants to run, to race, is held.
I write of fragrant fields of saffron,
endless Thai seas of blue and green,
of lands I’ve loved , the Navaho Nation, the Llano Estacado.
I ride the rim on Rosie,
writing stories in my mind.
Grandmother
We sit on the wooden swing suspended by silver chains
hanging from the bungalow front porch ceiling.
She, elderly beyond her years, grey hair piled atop her head,
thin and wrinkled.
She stays with us sometimes when Aunt Julia goes off
on one of her adventures.
Cattle graze across the road in front of the house.
It is summer.
A bull mounts a cow.
Suddenly, out of the silence, Grandmother speaks,
“Men and bulls are just alike;
they are only interested in one thing.
A bunch of good for nothings!”
Her voice is vitriolic.
And I, a child, maybe twelve, innocent and ignorant,
sit there shocked,
amazed,
embarrassed,
astonished
to hear my grandmother talk that way.
Now, nearly fifty years later,
I wonder about her life,
what in it caused this secret bitterness
she spilled just once on that idyllic summer day.
I look at her wedding photo.
She has a steady, unsmiling, pretty face,
marrying a handsome man twenty two years her senior.
Were they happy, sad, or probably a bit of both?
I remember what my mother, her youngest daughter, told me
snippets here and there.
A hard life, endless guests
never a break from gardening, cooking, canning, cleaning.
I look at other photos of my grandmother
taken before I was born,
older, nearly as wide as she is tall, never smiling.
I remember her in an old lady’s flowery, lavender dress,
thin from years of undulate fever.
I remember her feeding me bread, butter, and sugar sandwiches,
Easter egg hunts at her house,
and later, at another house, walking with her to the corner store.
I never remember her smiling.
Meeting on the Internet
Who are you?
Are you
who you
say you are?
Is your profile
a lie to
attract the gullible
or your heart’s
outpourings,
your soul
open
for all
to see?
Will you tell me
truths or
lies copied
off a website
designed for predators
cleverly disguised?
Will we dream of
touching,
mouth to mouth
passion,
bodies hungry
or perhaps
a relapse
into despair,
malaise?
Will we grow
to love
happiness
or to cynicism,
disillusionment,
a lie?
Hot Pink Toenails
The day I met Tom my toenails were hot pink.
A big mistake!
He called me the lady with the hot pink toenails.
I am not a hot pink person.
They should have been red or orange.
I am an orange person
mixed with lots of red.
It took me two weeks of looking
at those hot pink toenails
to paint them red.
Am I happier now?
Not really
but I know
it is the real me,
my own toes when I look down.
When she painted them pink
the woman said,
“Old ladies want red toenails.”
Will I be able to look at my red toenails
even though I like them and
not think “old lady”?
Will I have to find a new color?
Probably.
Maybe orange marmelade or cinnamon spice or burnt sienna.
These toenails are painted Cajun Shrimp.
Women
Women: wondrous, wild,
daughters of the moon,
mysterious, magnificent, molten,
fierce secret keepers,
possessors of the universal key.
Lahib Jaddo painted this; it hangs in my house. This poem was inspired by the poet, Lucille Clifton, who is the featured poet this week in my poetry class.
July 27 – Summer
July 27 – Summer.This was published yesterday by the Story Circle Network on One Woman’s Day.
The Land in Love with Guns
In the United States firearms kill approximately 15,000 individuals per year. In Britain, Australia, and Canada, the average is 350 per year. Spain’s rate is even lower. In Germany, it is less than 800. A young person here dies about every 4 ½ hours, shot dead. The US murder rate is 19.5, nearly 20 times higher that the next 22 richest countries. In the 23 richest countries combined, 80 percent of all gun related deaths are in the US; 87 percent of children killed are shot by guns here. In the last 45 years, bullets killed more than one million people in the US.
Gun sales are big money. More than a dozen hand guns are sold per minute. One survey indicates that one out of every four US homes possess a gun; another survey says 39 percent. However, most guns are owned by only a small proportion of the population, gun “collectors” who own an average of seven weapons per person. Guns are cheap here and bullets even cheaper, about 50 cents each. The Mexican government contends that our cheap guns help fuel the dreadful violence there which then overflows to here.
In spite of all this, the US murder rate is the lowest in more than 45 years. The NRA claims more guns equal less violent crime. The NRA contends that the lower crime rate is the result of less strict gun laws and more people owning guns. Nevertheless, mass murder occurs on a regular basis. We mourn, we lament, but nothing changes.
Eventually, another mass murder occurs and the cycle repeats itself. Why? Who or what is responsible? What can be done? Will more restrictive gun laws help or hinder? Debates continue; opposing views and answers abound, but the cycle continues. Will it ever change?
I wrote the above after the last mass murder event. Nothing changed. Now the conversation appears more strident, more active. Apparently, the mass killing of children is more heinous, more scary than the mass murder of adults even if the adults are young. The NRA advocates armed guards at schools. How will that prevent mass killings at movie theaters, at malls, at churches, on the street, e.g. the three murders this week in Pennsylvania?
Australia was another country in love with guns, but after a mass killing there, they changed their collective mind. They enacted strict gun control laws for assault weapons and ammunition. Could that work here? I think not. This is a country in love with guns because the right to own a gun symbolizes what is perceived as individual rights. This is a country where personal liberty remains far more important than community safety and social justice. Until that changes, mass murders will continue.
Costa Rica: 4, Flora
For a person who loves flowers (and I do), Costa Rica exemplifies a lush, green heaven. This intense green makes the flowers show up more than they would in a duller landscape. Whether in the high mountains near Monteverde or down in the coastal lowland jungles, flowers abound. So many flowers everywhere made me want to photograph them all, but there are too many; I photographed a few.
My friend, Anabel McMillen, the professional photographer, just about went nuts there were so many spectacular things to photograph. Last count I think she hit over 1000 photographs.
While wild flowers grow everywhere, the people also take great pride in both their personal and public gardens. Even at the simplest country house, flowers and other plants could be found growing in profusion. Almost all towns, like La Fortuna in the photo above and the one below near Arenal Volcano, create a public square with a church and gardens.
Hydrangeas like this one above grow along the roads everywhere near Monteverde.
Not only are the flowers frequently much larger than the same flowers grown here, but in the lowlands, in particular, many of the trees seem huge. Costa Rica also cultivates flowers for export. Net covered fields of ferns grow all over the steep mountain slopes.
In the highlands near Monteverde more than one hundred species of plants can be found growing on the surface of one tree as shown in the photos below.
Twice we stopped at a place called El Jardin, once on the way to Monteverde and another on the way back to San Jose from the Pacific Coast town of Jaco. In addition to their beautifully landscaped outdoor gardens, they possessed a small greenhouse filled with butterflies and a sculpture water fountain in an indigenous style seen throughout the country.
As I looked at the following bouquet where we ate lunch near the Sarapiqui River on the Caribbean side, I touched it because I remained unsure as to whether it could be real. It was.
PURA VIDA!!
DEATH
I was afraid of revealing me, the essence of me. Who even, indeed, was I? My mother told me, when I started dating, to hide the essence of me, boys wouldn’t like it. Too smart; too aggressive; too full of myself; too intense; too serious; too burning inside strong; too adventuresome; too nasty a temper; too full of desire to feel, taste, see, learn; too much in love with a world of possibility. I took her advice, married a genius scientist, safe, timid, disadventurous. He liked me because I could shoot a bird off a wire hundreds of feet away. I time, we all died, him, me, the bird.
This piece was a finalist in a flash memoir contest.
