Rachel's Floetry

  • Prompt: Ephemeral

    Life, ephemeral. Grief, perpetual. How deep her knees burrow into soil. A thumb of tallow, a gasping candle, swallowed by gusts of ramming winds. From the gravel, handless arms rise, and tremble. Endless sorrow, its cries guttural. Those left after death face pain, insurmountable. Art by FallanDark You can find this poem, and the rest…

    Rachel • RachieVee

  • 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…

    Rachel • RachieVee

  • 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.…

    Rachel • RachieVee

  • 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…

    Rachel • RachieVee

  • 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…

    Rachel • RachieVee

  • Brink of War

    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…

    Rachel • RachieVee

  • 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…

    Rachel • RachieVee

  • 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…

    Rachel • RachieVee

  • 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…

    Rachel • RachieVee

  • 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…

    Rachel • RachieVee