Rachel's Floetry

  • 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

  • Imagine

    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…

    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