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.