-
Will you always love me?
Will you always love me? With cliff edges at my fingertips, tigers at my heels, and thunder in my chest? When ghosts cling to my back while I flavor dinner with my weeping? When I come home hissing like a glass-breaker? When I’m sighing, sinking into sofa cushions, and I have no strength to pull…
-
Mama’s Favorite Flavor is Grape
Mama’s favorite beans when cooking are black beans. Jade Seneca, the Chinese place a block up, and around the corner, she orders chicken and broccoli. When someone’s sick, we order chicken and rice soup. Sometimes she makes Lipton with a packet of Sazon and sofrito, a cube or two. Breakfast on the go is a…
-
Ice Chips
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…
-
I Die
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…
-
#VSS365 May 2019
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. Grief is like walking on a tightrope. #ephemeral sways between balance & vertigo.…
-
#VSS365 April 2019
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. I look at photos of her smiling. When the doctor told mama she only…
-
What missing mama is like
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…
-
Mama’s Heaven
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…
-
Agony
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…
-
Candles
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…
-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
Rachel's Floetry 