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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…
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The Roads Our Hearts Know
We know all the avenues, and all the roads. I can walk to Mrytle, Wyckoff, or Knickerbocker with my eyes closed. And I do. More than you can imagine. The way to the post office, the supermarket, the cuchifrito. Street fairs, and flea markets. All across Brooklyn and Queens. Times Square, 34th Street, and Broadway.…
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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…
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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…
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#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.…
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#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…
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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…
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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…
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Room 10-24
There was a woman I didn’t recognize, the same color as the walls, stacked like a house of sticks frail enough to knock over with a touch, waiting for her daughter. And I, looking for my mother popped my head into each room desperately. In the room I passed this woman I didn’t recognize was…
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Rachel's Floetry 