Cranberry sauce provides an improper dressing for the modern turkey
 

One day post Thanksgiving my mother delivers a eulogy
for collapsed structures.

The balcony splinters, turns away
from the bedroom, approaches the formal

living room below, while my father, inside, waits
for his arteries to narrow.

The study of hearts only instructs
so much. How to mend

a pumping mass, preserve
what will not keep.

My mother wraps, unwraps
leftovers, addresses each dish with a dose

of plastic sheathing. Days ago, a miniature balloon
inside my father bellowed. And I arrived

at the understanding that we wouldn’t be taking this balloon
ride together, or one with hot air, a basket

attached for human voyage. What constricts, dilates.

What empties, fills.

—First published in The Sierra Nevada College Review

We Were Doing Rounds
 

I entered the CCU two paces behind
your suited legs, your classic loafers
squeaked, reminded me of the elephant

stories you'd tell before bed.
And I wouldn't think on death,
but noticed that smell I was glad

to leave.  If it had a name,
you wouldn't let me say it.
The old people looked similar,

their faces drooped like hush
puppies.  You told me who was Mrs.
Harrison and she squeezed my hand,

said you saved her
heart, again.  The man
behind the curtain

brought us chips
at Christmas, a tin
filled with salted crisps.

In the EKG lab, you valued
peaks.  Someone's beat charted
in ink, an arc toward normalcy.

I wanted to draw these people
hearts, but they always turned
out the same.

Flat as valentines.
The one on your desk falls
apart, a ventricle at a time.

You placed it in my hands,
twisted the chambers open, 
two cold lobes dropped.

—First published in Other Voices Poetry in a slightly different rendering             

The Cardiologist Speaks
 

I traded mango trees for the ripeness
of D.C. in Spring.

Retrained my voice
to lose my Malayalam accent,

retrained myself to be the medical
model.  Allopathic.  The sole trace

of India, my skin.  On Connecticut
Avenue, I shared a flat with an extended family

of cockroaches, the never-ending
tale of the tenant in 14-A who swallowed

one, how he awoke to the sound
of crunching—his jaw operating solo.
 

In the hospital, it was worse.  36-hour
shifts and the tea never strong enough

—no one knew to boil the water twice—
I had to bring my own loose leaf

delivered from a friend of a friend of a family
member from Kerala.  Here everyone drank

coffee, the kind that makes you shake
the kind that could be dangerous when conducting

medical procedures.  For years, I was monitored.
Rules, regulations fastened to me like the ECG

pads I adhered to my patients’ chests.  I learned
how to palpate the pulse of the hospital staff,

to translate what I knew from what was missing
in their eyes to why I would order another test, when

to follow code.  They would not believe me if I told them
what I found, so much longing misread for failure.

—First published in Pontoon 10 (Floating Bridge Press WA State poets anthology)
 

As In Dutch, As In You
 

It takes twenty-eight years plus three hundred and fifty five days to learn enough
about your family, understand the great uncle beyond his hair, always swooped
in half-figure eight, those trademark eyes glacial even in black and white.

Before your mother unwound with disease, her father's ashes released
who would discuss the War, detail every eldest son whose name
was Hank.  Un-photographed years posit in your mother's shoulders,

her brother's upper hunch, the everything that was never
discussed at dinner, why butterflies are messengers remembered
from torture chambers, their inscription the lesson for your grandfather's

brothers who made their bodies slight as insect for escape.
And how the women, the wives vanished, their children
packed for the country, their worry ushered like kerchief

underneath sleeve or daring between breasts.  No wonder
your grandfather trusted a sharp blade, the first push from bank,
the cinnamon whirl from windmill on the opposite side of the lake.

Now, by the waters too warm to freeze, your mother speaks
and speaks, unbinds the skein behind her father's collection
of antique skates—here a host of reasons to keep the family

sealed in a bed of ice.


—First published in Diagram
 

In America, Auntie remembers Janneke

while passing a toy store with stuffed snakes, felt tongues

and plastic eyes—nothing like where Janneke prays.


Here, children worship animals from factories.

Bodies similar in smell, touch.  No difference

between monkey, tiger or the lime-green crocodile.


Inhaling, Janneke wends her way to Temple,

her faith spread between the golden

and rat snakes, placed firmly in each viper's

ability to puncture and spew.


—Children in New Jersey have no need for stillness

their reptiles remain frozen in descent.—


Exhaling, Janneke calms her thought, body

does not fear the open window, does not fear

the snake lying before the altar.


Still Auntie hastens, leaves American children tempting

creatures to fall, Janneke to a world of prayer among poison.

—First published in Vox Populi (Seattle Poetry Festival 2007 anthology)

Revealing The Inner Barnyard

He tells you he reminds himself of a horse, how his birth
               year was the year of the horse.  He sucks

on his teeth and the rosebud from the bottom of his tea
               is leeched white.  There is Arkansas on his breath,

the night when every girl revealed herself
                at the Delta, bras unleashed fifty

pale stars glowing below moonlight. Boys
                 reeling them in, raising them

on shoulders to play chicken, topless
                No one considered the next

morning, as it was already morning, chasers
                burning tongue, in more ways

than one.  How he, the Deacon's son, knew
                 no word for shame, but calculated

at least thirteen ways to pin
                   what they did that night.

 I am a horse, he says and his eyes
                 are dark as mare, his mane reckless.

You refrain from offering European
                   History, the high-school room

with the rope lazing over the erase board,
                      the teacher recounting tales

of Catherine the Great—her love
                       of horses, sex uniting.
 

—First published in Barn Owl Review

Pretending A Secret Admirer
                                          for Jeanne
 
  And love be written on running water
  not on the surface of calm lakes.—L.F.

 
                 At this moment
  someone is slipping
  the fourth through seventh
             stanzas of a Ferlinghetti

  into the post
  which will arrive two
              days shy of Valentines
  no signature only the slightly

            familiar lowercase
            l's that lope
  from fellow script
  words like

                                sluice and you

                  might move more
                                lightly from post
                  box to Honda

                                 might wink at the old man
                          who scowls at bare

                          legs forgetting to remember

                                  for half an hour
                          you have only one
                            friend in Oregon

                        
                              who sends you pieces of poem
                                              seamless as shore
                                          glass and you

                                    will go down
                       to running water
                       salt your hands

                                with sea   wait
                       for this thing that is not writ
                 by stillness
 

— Published in Rain Dog

Now

The garland of nootka rosebuds you slung
over the wine bottle isn't with me.

Nor is the last bouquet
you made from wild mountain

flowers.  You left it in the freezer.
Do you know what happens

to flowers when you preserve
them beyond their will to keep?

They brown with wilt;
unremoved pollens

form a mustard poultice.  Their leaves
limp, forget what it means

to be whorled or alternating
or dichotomic.  Tiger lily collapses

under bear's claw.  Gentian
and standard red paintbrush develop

thin rivers of ice
between their weakened bodies.

Now, when I hike those trails
I admire vanilla leaf

swaying, trillium fading
in its own casing.  You too, I cross

over like bracken and sedges.
The chocolate lilies,

mottled avalanche scamps,
I leave to steep and rocky inclines.

—First published in The Human Growth Experiment  (Water Line Press anthology)



  Because nature abhors a vacuum,

  Benjamin secures his machine in the linen
  closet, wedges it into the corner, permits it due dormancy
  among the cedar chips.  He has no wife, now, to discuss philosophy
  with, to pronounce the true meaning of phrases such as this: nature abhors a vacuum.

                                                                                                                               He winks
  at each mirror he passes, something about good luck, how he always knew that
  to produce a storm of trousers, a tower of books will please the gods.
  On his desk (newly installed in the hall for that full look) remain his blueprints

  the renovation of EagleVilla, where he and the wife
  were to retire at basement prices, his commitment
  to the facility, being what it was, to induce
 
  the purging of space, spill over,
  conquer.  Laurels for every fence, and for every fence
  laurels.  The wife thought it redundant,

  he would add, repetitive.  And finding him
  void, filled her garden
  help’s pockets with her hands still banded

  with ring, fled to a state with skies like eggs
  ready to crack, sun spreading its yolk across
  their shell-colored bodies, now separating.

—Previously featured in SirenLit


Reading My Mother's Words On The Path  To My Cabin

"And then the chimney
came down and the house
             was thrown into the trash."

There is no introduction,
this card speaks
             like an overturned Bible.

And I know I am missing
something, so I slow
              down, churn the passage

like cream.  Let memory
uncoil her flaxen
             tresses until I see

the house built fresh
from ginger cookies,

             a chimney caving

weeks after Christmas.
And still, my brother's
             sums of the right

triangle, the roof
that failed us
             in everything but theory—

lie flat on the notepad
by Mother's phone.
               But the house

it stood like any ranch
in January, a horizontal
              catching snow

to stucco until time
(that little bastard)
             could not wait

any longer, slid himself
from below, his birth
              the quick choke. 

 

—Previously  featured in SirenLit


   Harlot
  
   Wisteria contain yourself, your legs are far
   too feral—spawning by day, rising to twelve
   new shoots by morning.

   The apple tree spied you
   making a pass at the pear
   who has done nothing
   but boast about her figure.

   Oh, my
   green, my curves.

   Remember your thirst, Wisteria, what first
   sent you scaling—how you bet the English
   Ivy you'd fetch the sun, a wheel of light to throw.

   But your tongues are always
   in the way, dripping
   and who will trust a tongue
   whose purple is her iris

   whose iris is her fall
   whose kiss could paint
   portraits in the dark.

   With your many eyes, Wisteria, swallow
   what bears.  Your trellis fills.
   Your garden betrays you as you betray.
   Feast, Wisteria, on the light you've stolen.

—First published in Pebble Lake Review

   My Painter Friend Tells Me
   Your lady is now in parts unknown

He speaks of the woman on the hill, always
draped in murky layers, an umbrella
perched perpetually above her tilted head.

She is in the grave
yard, of course, but not among the deep
caverns of earth—her feet atop them, her body

an emblem. The living. She is poise without
face. Forever a woman with no pupils to dilate,
no lips nor cheek bones to decorate

(if she were the kind to decorate). And she will
have slopes ten shades of green in five
different directions

perhaps a Mary Poppins
hat upon her head, and underneath her skirt
the wildly striped garments

that you, dear buyer, will never see.

—First published in Cranky Literary Journal


It was Virginia, home to Smithfield

and there were so many choices
of pig. Hickory smoked sausage, ham-
hock, pork chop, and of course everybody’s
favorite Sunday serve-me-up
bacon. Our family believed in only one
kind of cooked pig and that was the kind
that came in strips, clung to each other well
like pigs, like pigs before
the slaughter but everyone knows this
was after and look at how they still
clung, adhered strip-to-strip
as though this might make them
whole again and oh, how nice of them
for planning to form such a natural
package. And it was

sometime post first grade, maybe second
when he arrived. A boy diving toward me
in the deep. It was summer as it always
is summer or near summer in Virginia
Beach and we had returned with our laminated
cards declaring our membership to the neighborhood
pool. I swam until my skin resembled the fruit
in my mother’s cupboard and then
swam some more, but in between there was he
and we approached the conversation
of bacon as children might approach carob
in search of chocolate and he told
me bacon was pig and all the other
ways of meat, how it turns up
on your plate grazing beside a field
of peas except it isn’t grazing
because it’s dead, because it’s dead
it’s meat and didn’t you know
and don’t you like to eat this.
And I did like to eat

this meat and I didn’t know all the ways
it was dead but could imagine
all the ways it lived and now
was dead, living in my belly.

—First published in Poetry Southeast

   Kneeling to Ganges

Already past the hundred mark, the temperature
is set to rise. The funeral pyre arranged, awaits

the oldest nephew for the original fire
rite. And they say it will not smell.

The final passing: flesh to flame, hair to wind,
bones to ground. Sandalwood, a crackle below

Uncle. No one will cover an eye to the Gods.
Auntie, not cloaked in her wedding sari, not jeweled

or scented for Sati. See how Nephew circles dear
Uncle, taps his crown with a staff-like switch, invites

his spirit to flee. Soon they will dip temples
of prayer, saffron flowers into the Ganges, worship

the Great Mother with illumination.

—First published in Silk Road

 

An Exploration After 6,000 mg Of Amoxicillin

After she ate what felt like everything
she took to the taste of color.

                            And apologized only to the Sun
for not having noticed sooner how edible
his yawns.

Even the neighbor's crayons disappeared
three by three, returning—
little nubs with lip shine, sometime after midnight.

There were rumors.

                              Someone had vamped Van Gogh—
unrolled his starry night, like billboard scroll
sending bicycles soaring, the road steering itself.

And she went on.

Her sampler, a sip from what once was
church, now mosque.  A tulip field, spilt
stamen, pistil.

                              And when she was finished,
her body, thick with theft, her tongue cut
on canvas, a train station

needle (reused)—all color bled together
and she no longer hungry, belched canals
and she no longer thirsty, wept.

—First published in Pontoon 10 (Floating Bridge Press WA State poets anthology)