I discovered the #VSS365 hash tag on Twitter recently, and I’ve started to participate in it. It’s been a lot of fun. I’d like to keep track of them from now on, on a monthly basis. Since I’ve only just started, here are the few I wrote for January. Enjoy.
The train tracks used to
speak to me.
As susurration –
a withdrawing tide at my ankles,
a lariat around my leaden heart.
A disguised lullaby,
like an offer from bathtub water of
murmured matrimony.
– Rachel R. Vasquez, September 2017
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While I still struggle with depression and anxiety on and off in my life, there was a time that it was so deep, the train tracks tempted me daily. Clearly, I never gave in. However, it’s something powerful enough, that I wanted to write about it. If you have thoughts of suicide, please seek help. Please know someone out there loves you.
Madison and 43rd at one,
I’ve left a window’s flock of owls
to peer at my empty desk.
Bowls of bloody plumes and wood whites
lead me past two gargoyles
with brooch bellies and toothless grins,
boasting of equitable trust
in spite of their u’s carved as v’s.
I’m lured under acorn lamps hanging from grape stems,
perhaps to feed the steel brachiosaurus’ with
pendants in their mouths.
They appear to be asleep at this time of day
or wary
of Mercury, Hercules and Minerva
loitering above the tourists.
Nirosta eagles,
terraced crown guards,
perch above both,
but I’ve safely made it past.
In spite of the hard cuffed men who
dodge the bearded man on the floor,
with frayed jeans, a baseball cap, and converses –
hobo or hipster?
– Rachel R. Vasquez, September 2017
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A poem I wrote during lunch break when I worked near Grand Central and the Chrysler building. Frank O’Hara has always been an inspiration of mine. I have his “Lunch Poems” book.
It’s having to YouTube how to peel yautia.
It’s having to Google translate Spanish.
It’s all the little girls holding their mother’s hands on the street.
It’s all the elderly women and their middle aged clones sitting between shopping bags on the train.
It’s buying flowers every 20th because the petals feel like the tops of her tender hands.
It’s not knowing who to put in my emergency contacts now.
It’s not having someone to ask if these shoes match with this shirt.
It’s realizing my life was on training wheels the whole time I thought I was adulting.
It’s realizing that “You are my sunshine” is the saddest song ever created.
It’s having to keep family drama to myself.
It’s not knowing whether to bundle up unless I actually look up the weather.
It’s sleeping all the time because dreams are the only way to see her.
It’s chronologically organizing and filing day every card she’s ever given to me.
It’s caring for an oversized pair of pajamas the way a museum conservator does artifacts.
It’s not having a partner the night before Thanksgiving who knows how to tuck in the turkey wings.
It’s buying nothing with her name, for Christmas, mother’s day, or her birthday – ever again.
It’s being truly homesick, because home is where the heart is and my mom, was my heart.
It’s crying at the live action trailer of Dumbo, because damn those bastards who take his mommy. Heaven forbid Disney decides to reboot Bambi next.
It’s her number in my favorites, that I refuse to delete, because she is still my favorite person to talk to.
It’s never being able to talk to my favorite person again and when the cold turkey becomes unbearable, it’s stalking her Facebook feed, memorizing text message threads and writing her in messenger despite that it’s the same as writing to myself.
It’s writing her into a Christmas card for my dad because I’ll be damned if I have to refer to my parents as anything other than a pair – two halves of a whole.
It’s having a dream where she isn’t really gone, and it was all a trick, because she is here – in the flesh, and I’ve never known true happiness until that moment.
It’s waking up at one in the morning and realizing she died all over again, and real life, is the nightmare.
It’s knowing my life will always be “the before” and “the after”.
And most of all, it’s knowing I will never bask in the unconditional, effortless love, that is my mother’s.
– Rachel R. Vasquez, January 2019
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I don’t think many people realize, until they’ve lost someone so integrated into their lives, what having that person gone is like. It affects so many things, it’s this gaping hole in your life, that you are forced to live with. To learn to live with.
Some things have “work arounds”, like youtubing a video about something I could’ve asked my mom about. The 2 years before she passed, she taught me how to make pasteles from scratch and we made them together for the holidays. This past holiday, I stood in the supermarket feeling completely bewildered, because I didn’t know the difference between yautia – white or yellow – and malanga. I think if I didn’t have the internet on my phone to help, I wouldn’t have tried making pasteles without her again.
For other things, like the urge to call her, it doesn’t go away. It’s almost been a year and even today, without thinking, I thought, “I should call my mom,” and then to realize, “Oh wait. Yeah…”
Running errands have become quieter for me. Either she kept me company or I called her on the phone to catch up. I like to talk to people when I cook dinner, and she was one of the people I called most. Now there are times I cook in silence, and my husband asks me, why aren’t I talking to anyone? Because sometimes calling someone different makes it feel a bit better, other times, nothing can replace talking to her so I choose to talk to no one at all. There, in the emptiness of a phone call and conversation that could’ve have been – had it not been for cancer.
It sucks. Still trying to find ways to cope. Writing is one way. Taking it day by day.
I hope mama’s heaven is
The Spring
trees with cotton candy tufts
pink because
what other color would love be?
bundles of pom poms
like they were dipped into clouds
yellow suns sprout among
the green thickets beneath her bare feet
leaves like canopies,
like baby angels
holding a million tiny umbrellas to shelter
her from a drizzle
heart shaped greens, they wave
like toddler hellos
like butterflies fluttering along
cloister walls
I hope mama’s heaven is
The Spring
so with every flower I see
there’s mama
smiling back at me
– Rachel R. Vasquez, May 2018
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I wrote this the weekend before mama’s birthday on May 8th. Her first birthday without her. I saw a movie with the in-laws the Sunday before and as we were driving home, I couldn’t help, but be in awe of all the flowers in the trees – it was beautiful. I started writing this – hoping that wherever my mama is, that it was a place full of flowers. I bring flowers home every 20th, she passed on Feb. 20th, and for me, the flowers connect us. Her name is Rosalina, Rosa, like the flower. She loved flowers, and by keeping flowers close to me, I hope that in some way, she’s just as close.
Oh God! Oh agony!
Throb that has been cast on me!
Oh silent searing
in my soul!
This violent breaking
of my home!
My womb, my mother
from where I was born.
My roof, my shelter
from this life’s storms.
Hacked off from me
like limb from body.
Hands gone from me,
like wind not breathing.
Meandering, I’m grounded
to this earth.
Wandering unfounded,
still I search.
Her laughter, her being,
my ears bleed with strain,
to hear her tell me
she loves me again.
But an empty cold hearth
I receive.
Her safety and warmth,
I feel only in dreams.
– Rachel R. Vasquez, April 2018
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
2 months later and still hurts like no other. It’s hard to put this kind of despair into words, but I tried to any way.
My mother never liked candles.
Twice they were responsible
for a childhood blaze.
Now, like a candle,
her life wanes.
Her lips form soundless shapes
on January 9th,
“Happy Birthday.”
She smiles bright and sleepily
even when she’s held me to
her swelling belly
after I cried to “You are my sunshine,” on the guitar.
She mouths, “I love you, “
as if she’s drifting.
Sailing on the lip of a parting boat
and I am her shore.
The ocean between us grows by the hour.
Her glow extinguishes
with every breath,
her soul relinquished,
lying dazed, unfocused, silent –
she becomes far.
Her body rancid,
we count the days,
her wick dims placid.
A piece of my heart,
a piece of her goes.
I pray God carries her
afloat like music notes,
as she slowly sets like a sun,
into a gentle wisp of smoke.
Tallow lessened into rest
until her time has run.
Ended to infinite slumber,
from ember to ashes,
a votive that has un-mothered.
– Rachel R. Vasquez, February 2018
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
I wrote this in February within the weeks my mother was becoming less like herself. By then she was in a nursing home, intubated via tracheotomy, and Pleurx catheters in her lungs and stomach. Although she survived a bout of pneumonia in December and January appeared hopeful, as February rolled in, I noticed she was sleeping more, becoming less focused, and forgetting things you told her minutes before. The cancer was progressing fast. A church friend of hers sat with me and said it reminded her of her father, who, like a candle, dimmed each day until he wasn’t there anymore. I wrote this praying that if I could not keep her, that God at least take her peacefully, without pain.
