My Birthday is Around the Corner
I feel fine bones of my spine
shoulder blade to coccyx.
I worry about proper
placement, create a perfect
snake curve with my body
in the bed. Forty brings so
much loss, freedom of
nakedness, flexibility
of cartilage, clarity
of seasons of the mind
each season merges into another
then I have just one season
one obsessive thought
that he finds youthfulness
under the crocheted blanket.
New Words for Poems
The break of dawn
I slip out of bed
face the oak mirror,
it speaks to me
a language I’ve only
heard my mother speak.
I trace the shadow
creases of my eyelids,
the poems fold in between.
“I’m getting old,” she tells me,
and now I hear the voice
of many women living
without husbands,
black mascara,
shades of red for lips,
anti-aging face creams
have their own line
in our poems.
Gift of Love
Inside silk yellow cloth bag
a rose quartz stone
gesture of love to
remind my mother
loves me. I bought it.
But love in a bag
I carry to the monastery
suffocates gemstone.
My heart knows a deeper
truth. I open
the bag let some air in,
place the stone on my
wooden desk, remember
my mother loves me when
eyes tear up at sunrise
at the old monastery.