Tag: society

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Fine Spirits & Wine

This is not my story.

It belongs to the man in front of me in line at the spirit shop, stealing liquor.

 

Old hands with a handle of rum shimmied into a cloth tote touting

Small Business Saturday.

Sir — firstly, it’s Sunday, and you’re not helping business.

 

But as they yelled you out the door, casket of amber glass torn from your grasp,

I understood how you came to be —

stealing

liquor

at 1pm

in Center City

Philadelphia.

 

I’ve been scared myself,

but the stress of time and anxiety of facing God every single day

has hit you so much harder than I. And eye to eye,

I see how the diamond-shaped bottle top looked attractive on the shelf.

 

In removing it to drink you could have used it to cork your achy joints,

plug your malignant growth, stopper your untreated pain.

 

I understand.

 

You could have massaged the liquid down your throat

to fill the empty feeling.

 

You deserve better than your circumstances, Sir.

And while I stood silent as you left,

now I’ll pray for you.

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Turned

Before my hips shift and shoulder cuts through the humid air I take one more look at him; swollen eyes falling on rolls of oiled, doughy flesh.

Creases of arm and taught warm belly lay grotesque in the sun, fattened by warmth and by womb.

No bigger than a breadbox, no figment of a dream, he lays swirled in leaves and needles and light beams.

Angelic.

Fragile, and hardy, and tarnished; made in the Image, indeed.

My eyes widen,

A shadow rises like water in the wind and the ghost of a bird settles into a landing on his shoulder.

The tiny dark head fuzz with kisses next to the old, stiff bird is too much for me. The trees stand stoic and my knees sway.

The ghost of the bird stays silent, ready.

My baby lays still with disease-ridden skin and feverish eyes. He will not last the night.

But nor would I if I held him tight. Villages are razed by one, birthright damned, and to the soil returned.

It was a horrific fight. My knees give way to the right, and in the desperate gait of women trained never to run I weave through the trees.

The forest spits me out, and shame consumes me.

The boys are still waiting. They bring me back to the square and lift my palms in the air.

I am hailed a savior, a matron, a bringer of peace. I sank to the ground and still they hold me, like meat.

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I Womanhood

The scene.

 

Two women stand on the sidewalk sharing a chocolate cream puff,

Spines bent to me, ravenously protecting their feast.

 

Yellow oozes from their teeth,

Pastry rips softer than cotton, and

Sighs like the breaths of lovers escape their swallows.

A sign touting

Creative Office Environments for Inspired Minds

Hangs behind their heads.

 

I am sitting in a trendy hotdog eatery, people watching.

I do not plan on eating dinner

Or if I eat, I do not plan on eating mine.

 

How brave they are, I think, the women.

All women, really, but these in particular

With their tightly held treat.

 

If confidence is a rolling sea,

Womanhood is defined by pallor and green cheeks.

Your worst days spent slumped

Against the pillory of a toilet seat empty but heaving,

Your best days spent standing in a white dress

On the bow of a sailing ship, gorgeous and starving.

 

The story.

 

Feasting on street corners defies these teachings and

Pallor turns to Pallas. Femininity suddenly means hungry

And women lift the torch to carry inspired minds.

 

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Thank You For The Sundays

Something they don’t tell you is that there’s a magic garden

in every courtyard in Philadelphia.

Gardens made of glass, and tears, and gunfight.

 

And through it all, as the sun sets,

roses creep out of window-barred pots and slither to the streets –

every atom in the city chasing that faint ocean air.

 

The city of symmetry, city of two rivers – entre fontaines,

je t’aime from here to there and back again,

the Atlantic rolls between us.

 

In the meantime, I’m eating up spoonfuls of Sundays

I’m all too willing to give.

 

And in this time I’ve hidden myself in every corner of the city,

every bustle in the suburbs, here I am,

sarcastically.

 

Found in yarn stores in South Philly,

fingers running through the strands

despite the weight of cheesesteak in my hand.

 

Resting the holy hollow of my body in a Temple cot in summer;

ring around my toe and vision hazed

in vodka-sparkled saturation.

 

On my knees in a bathroom or two in West Philadelphia

setting tiles in the floor of a soon-to-be home

so a single mother can breath a little easier for a little while.

 

And out here on the Main Line,

wrapped in white sheets, a pen in my mouth,

listening to that goddamned bell toll,

 

Waiting for the gift of Sunday exploration

in the holy city of gardens and love.

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FEAR

Mothers watch with weary, wary, tired eyes

from doorways and corners on every continent of this godforsaken world.

 

Stepping on cracks did, in fact, break their backs

but they bite their withered tongues and train their skin to shield the pain.

 

They watch their children

and the men they’ve become,

 

and they see girls weathering their withering tongues:

training them to speak in rhymes and riddles

and to speak no ill,

 

and they see girls growing thick their skins

ridding them of the ghosts of hairy hands

and men hunting them for the thrill.

 

The daughters get buried alive

in guilt and unheard rage and the weight of blood-ripped skin.

 

This pain wears and wars their tired eyes,

and as mothers of unwanted kin they cloak their eyes in shadow,

backs breaking from within.

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As Long As It Takes

I measure time through methods more intimate than

seconds, years, or days.

 

You learn to, don’t you, when time zones lead to tears?

When the anxiety of separation manifests for years?

 

Time has only shown me that our meager, human

methods of dividing up a day in ticks and tocks

leaves so much time unaccounted for.

Time is more than regularity;

it should be shown as valleys and peaks

with the echo of eternity:

“As Long As It Takes,”

echoing eternally between them.

 

Time will take

As Long As It Takes

and rigid divisions are a shitty constraint

on a concept that is one- and ever-flowing.

 

So let me preach:

Measure time in tubes of toothpaste

and moments in metres and miles ahead.

Measure hours in hot water cooling,

and days in books not yet read.

Measure years in love and decades in passion

and life in what’s been produced from the thoughts in your head.

 

Take it from the girl who lives six hours behind her boyfriend,

five hours behind her best friend,

two hours ahead of her home address: home to the house she’s never lived in,

and three hours ahead of the first house she was ever brought home to,

under a rainbow one day in late October;

 

time is a patchwork of moments.

 

And those moments will take As Long As They Take.

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We Built This City

We built this grizzled crust of a city
Off of traveller’s checks
And grandfather’s tears.

We broke our own mirrors
In order to call the misfortune
We brought upon our people
Cultural heritage.

We revere the hypocrites
And trod upon the fertile soil of the soul.
What use is poetry in a world of technology?

We built this city out of the corpses of the enemy
Just to be able to truly call it ours.
And we have made homes for ourselves
Between the scrapyards and front-yard junk
Of our ancestors.

Forgive me, father, for I have sinned
Is a synonym for cowardice,
And now morale is wearing thin.
We built a obsolescent city;
It was always meant to cave in.

We built this city on the cusp of something great,
But we dirtied the river of expression,
And as of late encouraged oppression.

We built this city to be broken;
How could we have expected success
From a hyper-caffeinated people
Who toppled the columns of Justice, Prosperity, and Sleep.

We built this city from the charred remains of the last one,
So know that out of tomorrow’s ashes, it will rise again.