Weary from adversity, she slumbers. Her hunger — pure agony. They hunt her. Mortal darling. A mistake. The claim on his skin — cribrate. Her sole comfort, a stake from her lover.
You can find this poem, and the rest for this contest on WattPad: https://www.wattpad.com/story/306715590-moon-gate
Ice chips. I gasp from a night’s fog. Ghosts came home with me from the 9th floor. Ice chips. None of the nurses said anything to me whenever I entered the employee only pantry with a styrofoam cup to get ice chips. Unstrapping the bi-pap mask feels like apologizing for plunging my mother’s head into water. If we’re lucky, I can slip a third ice chip into her mouth before I re-strap what must feel like a bear trap of air wrapped around her head. She points out the window. She flicks invisible shackles off her legs before trying to swing them over the side of the bed. I ask her where she’s going every time, knowing that she can’t answer until finally I ask: “Do you want to go home? Is that where you’re trying to go?” She nods yes — delirious. I clutch my heart, clutch her hand and, tell her, “Yes, you can go home if you want. Don’t worry about me and daddy. We will meet you there.” Every hour I flinch now. Ice chips. Bed up. Bed down. Mama there’s nothing behind the curtains what are you pointing at oh my God. Whatever ghosts were at her bedside followed me, and jolt me awake as my leaden body moves to get ice chips. Except I’m already home. Without her.
I wrote this is in December 2018 when my mother was rushed to the ER, and she spent one night admitted on a regular hospital floor until her ICU admission the following morning. Only one person was allowed to stay with her. No one else volunteered. I wasn’t going to leave her alone.
I didn’t sleep that night. Was not at all prepared physically or mentally. Every time I was about to drift off, I jolted awake for one reason or another.
Oxygen deprivation makes you hallucinate. So does sleep deprivation.
It was traumatic. No one else, but my therapist, know the details of that night. I had nightmares about it after where I’d wake up in my own bed, and swear I was still in the hospital, already halfway up to get my mom some ice, or fix her blankets, or move her bed, or keep her from trying to leave the bed, or or or or…
I know it’d hurt her to know how much pain this memory caused me. And at the same time, I would do it all over again. When faced with the hard stuff, you see just how much effort people are willing to put in. In the months leading up to her passing, I did the hard stuff when no one else was willing.
Why? Because I was an asthmatic, hard of hearing, anemic, colic, preemie, and my mother took care of me all her life. Surgeries. Hospital admissions. Doctor’s appointments. Chicken pox – twice! Cracked my skull open once. Ear infections so bad, I would literally scream like someone was stabbing knives in my ears. I remember her breaking nights to slip the nebulizer mask over my face or to give me some nasty medicine. Even after I was an adult, and lived on my own, sometimes if I had a doctor’s appointment, she’d go with me just because. And when she got cancer, I tried to return the favor. My efforts definitely pale in comparison compared to the years she put into me, but I still did it because I loved my mama.
And while the pain has… become more of a scar that aches really bad on some days. A limb I was forced to live without, but life has never the same. I don’t regret being there for her. I’d do it again.
WattPad Link: https://www.wattpad.com/1240795162-a-votive-that-has-un-mothered-ice-chips
Munted remains of a mossy moon gate. Tangled in marigolds, it marinates. Nighttime’s zenith, it yawns wide. Lures our children. Echoes lies. At first light, its maw shuts. A golden grave.
Trying my hand at limericks.
You can find this poem, and the rest for this contest on WattPad: https://www.wattpad.com/story/306715590-moon-gate
Between sanity and grief, a fine line.
We had burned the warlock’s lover alive.
His incantations ruled the elements —
with words so ancient, smooth, and venomous —
he summoned winds with fiery eloquence.
Destruction is our fated punishment.
You can find this poem, and the rest for this contest on WattPad: https://www.wattpad.com/story/306715590-moon-gate
A witch's carcass, crimson orchids seethe. A rotten hamlet, hidden majicks bleed. To hearken natives is your bounden need. A piton's target, the reckless receive.
I’m playing with iambic pentameter. Not sure if I did it right. I haven’t written a new poem in a long time, and was actually starting to wonder if I can still call myself a poet. When I discovered this contest, I thought it’d be a good way to get back into it. Cross your fingers for me.
An entry to WattPad’s poetry contest titled “Verification.” The only rules are to write based on their daily prompts, and poems can only be 4-8 lines long.
You can find this poem, and the rest for this contest on WattPad: https://www.wattpad.com/story/306715590-moon-gate
There is no sound
more deafening
than the silence of your name
never being spoken.
There is no space heavier,
more suffocating — full, and yet,
so hollow, and
empty,
than your absence
in this world.
My nightmares awake are long.
My sleeping dreams of you
are brief.
Nothing gives me less purpose,
less drive to get out of bed,
than knowing you might be
behind my eyes.
I only have to go there, and
hope that I run into you.
Imagine an ocean,
never combed by the moon.
Imagine a wind
that never breaths.
Imagine birds,
grounded and mute.
Imagine veiny trees,
desperately reaching, and naked,
all year long —
forever.
Imagine that the black behind your eyes
is more beautiful
than a night’s starry skies.
– Rachel R. Vasquez, 2018?
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Another grief poem pulled from an old notebook. Despite how inactive my blog is, I have a lot of notebooks full of stuff. I don’t often get to the part where it goes from my notebooks, to a digital form. (sigh)
I die
over and over.
I used to think I wanted to.
I used to flirt with death using the same razors
mama used to shave calluses from her
hard working heels
but now I know better
when walking feels like
dry heaving my broken insides
when it feels like vomiting
the pieces of me
of her
that have loosened in me
since she left
pieces trying to force themselves out of my body
but I hang onto them
no matter how sharp
and I die
from doing this.
I die when I remember her face
turn blue
I die when I can feel how soft her hand was in mine
in my mind and
I realize
I can never feel it again.
I die.
– Rachel R. Vasquez, June 2018
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
I wrote this around 4 months after my mama died. Grief feels very surreal in the beginning. Our culture truly does not give grievers enough time before they have to throw themselves back into the daily grind.
I went back to work about a week and a half after her passing. I remember walking in the streets, physically straining to hold myself back from what felt like dry heaving. I can’t describe it. It wasn’t necessarily about being nauseous all the time. It was like, being a water balloon ready to burst and with any poke, gentle or otherwise, the balloon will splatter into a mess. I felt like I was literally hanging on by a hair, trying to keep myself from literally collapsing in the streets in pure agony.
Sometimes it did feel like “Fuck, I’m going to throw up,” because the horror of loss and witnessing death feels that way. Sometimes it was more like an unfathomable sorrow and pain that I could barely contain within myself in silence.
It’s like being punched in the gut multiple times. There’s only so many times you can let yourself get punched without ever making a sound. Sometimes the pain is so great, the only relief is to make a sound – to cry, to scream, to release.
There were many times I couldn’t hold it back, and I had to pull myself into a restroom stall or even face a wall in the subway to just break down. Let some of the tsunami out just enough so that I could return to appearing “normal” and walk that fine line between sanity and the insanity that is grief.
There were mornings I didn’t make it to work, and the mornings I did, it felt like a drunken haze, an alternate reality I was being forced to live in. How do people laugh? Go to work? Keep going about their lives when this life is missing from this earth? When this life has been snuffed? How does no one notice when the sun is blotted from the sky?
I wrote this back then. It’s been a year and 4 months since she passed now. While it’s no longer a physical strain on a daily basis to hold back my grief, it still comes in waves. Ever since, I’ve been following only a single line of advice. Take it one day at a time.
With news of escalating tensions with Iran, and Russia already being a worry for me, combined with my own personal life stressors – my anxiety is off the chain tonight. I haven’t been this anxious, or in what I like to refer to as “OMG I’m gonna die” mode, in a long time. So in an effort to feel better somehow, I thought to myself, if I never achieve all the things I wanted to achieve in life, you know, because of possibilities like war, what will I have left behind?
It was then that I decided to share a very vivid dream I had, days before I went to visit my mother in the hospital, and it truly hit me that she was going to die. This was three or four months before the fact, but until this day, I haven’t forgotten that dream.
I’ve decided that, if for some reason I don’t get to live out my life until I’m a sassy, salsa bopping, viejita, this was the story I wanted to share.
In the dream, I was in the city. It was Manhattan probably, and I was standing in the middle of the street during the day.
Just like an apocalyptic movie, the skyscrapers are collapsing around me, the ground beneath my feet, is cracking to inevitably swallow people and everyone is running for their lives. For me, the moment is in slow motion. I know there’s no point in running because there is nowhere safe to go.
A few feet ahead of me, both of my parents are holding onto each other and looking at me.
I glance at the buildings and know that I only have seconds to act before we all die. Surprisingly, my first thought isn’t that I’m scared, or that I don’t want to die. I don’t despair over the multitude of unanswered questions regarding the Christian faith I abandoned in my late teens and what that means now that this is the end.
Instead, I only have one thought. To get to my parents in time.
So I ran to them. And when I reached them, I grabbed both of their hands in mine. While breaking down in tears and trying to keep my eyes on them, probably even try to smile at them one last time, I only tell them this:
“I love you. Thank you for giving me life.”
I woke up after that.
I’ve always thought this dream was metaphorical – a bad omen of things to come. I don’t normally remember my dreams or nightmares, unless they really strike a cord. If I remember them, I feel like they must have a purpose.
At the time, I thought, well, my parents are my world and I am theirs. So seeing as I was in the process of losing one when I had this dream, this dream could’ve been a metaphor for how that felt to me.
Today, in my anxious state and the state of our country, this same dream could have a different meaning.
I feel like it shows how much I love my parents. I was their “miracle” baby, a premie born at seven months who was sickly ever since. Asthmatic, hearing loss, anemia – while I became stronger health wise as an adult, they always prayed and worried about me. While it’s just my father now, I’m sure he still does it just the same.
And despite that I have so many things on my mind now, with my anxiety shooting through the roof, remembering this dream gives me perspective.
In the end, nothing else really matters, except family and those we love.
I just want to be with my family. My heart has never been the same since I lost my mama, and I ache with worry that someday, my father will go meet her. I know it’s inevitable we all leave this life, whether it’s through aging, a freak accident, or God forbid, war. I don’t know what tomorrow will bring, or if I’ll ever get to do all the things I wanted to do.
But for tonight, I’m going to hold onto that dream. I’m going to remember that, when I thought that life was over, how grateful I was to have been given life. How blessed, as ironic as that word feels coming from me, I felt to have the parents that I did. How fortunate I was to be loved and to have parents to love in return.
The life I leave behind may not be the legacy I intended; Maybe due to my own procrastination, or events beyond my control. However, regardless of what remains when I’m no longer of this world, know that I was a girl, who’s parents were her heart and home. A girl – who hopes that someday when her time comes, she can have them both again, and be together.
– Rachel R. Vasquez, June 2019
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The picture on this post is of me as a little girl, holding onto my mama and my daddy. Holding on always…
Once again, trigger warning for grief related stories below. May is not only the month of mother’s day, but it’s the month of my mother’s birthday. Needless to say, May hits me hard. This is the second time around since her passing.
Warning – the first few “very short stories” I wrote in April may be triggering. I’m still grieving the loss of my mama. I write in an effort to comfort the ever present void in my life due to her absence.
Rachel's Floetry 