Ode to Some Yellow Flowers
by Pablo Neruda

Remembering Barbara Harlene
July 6, 1939 – September 5, 2009
I love you, Mom

Rolling its blues against another blue,
the sea, and against the sky
some yellow flowers.

October is on its way.

And although
the sea may well be important, with its unfolding
myths, its purpose and its risings,
when the gold of a single
yellow plant
explodes
in the sand
your eyes
are bound
to the soil.
They flee the wide sea and its heavings.

We are dust and to dust return.
In the end we’re
neither air, nor fire, nor water,
just
dirt,
neither more nor less, just dirt,
and maybe
some yellow flowers.

Hypothetical
by Christine Fellows & John K. Samson

Say you wake up one morning without a language.
Taken away. Stolen by a monster from a childhood
fever for some small slight. You didn’t eat your peas.
You find a pen, begin to draw a day of watching
shadows wander towards the door, of smelling the garbage
and touching the furniture, pressing your face to the radiator, walking
with eyes open, eyes closed, living without naming. Unnamed.

Say you wake up one morning without time.
That stoner’s lament, “Dude, it’s just a construct”
You didn’t anticipate that there would be nothing
to say. No “Busy,” and a sympathetic sigh to reply
to the “How are you’s that line everyday with possibility.
Crowds of helpless mutes stand beside their wrecked
cars at intersections, traffic lights pulse black.

Say you wake up one morning without a body.
You miss your hands like a dead friend.
You play their favourite songs, mourn all their potential,
what they held. Make a Missing poster for your heart
with a description and a photo and your phone number.
Find your ribcage full of topsoil in a garden down the street.
Transplanted yellow flowers peeking out.

Say you wake up one morning without the world.
The world leaves you for another, never returns your calls,
passes you on the street like a stranger. All you can
do is eat potato chips, cry, drink warm vodka from
a jam jar, and watch t.v. The National Geographic specials are
especially cruel. Secrets of the Amazon. Plains of the Serengeti.
And tearing up topographical maps doesn’t make you feel better.

Say you wake up one morning, or be honest,
afternoon, without your constant fear for what you have.
The season is a verb, and a window is open.
The telephone rings to the traffic and birds. The clock
is broken, blinking, you stretch beneath a single white sheet,
and the world looks like it’s about to say something,
but then just shrugs.

With That Moon Language
by Shams-ud-din Muhammad Hafiz

Admit something:

Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me.”

Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise
someone would call the cops.

Still, though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect.

Why not become the one who lives with a
full moon in each eye that is
always saying,

with that sweet moon language,
what every other eye in
this world is
dying to
hear?

Autobiography in Five Short Chapters
by Portia Nelson

Chapter 1: I walk down the street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I fall in. I am lost—I am helpless. It isn’t my fault. It takes forever to find a way out.

Chapter 2: I walk down the street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I pretend I don’t see it. I fall in again. I can’t believe I am in the same place, but it isn’t my fault. It still takes a long time to get out.

Chapter 3: I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I see it there. I still fall in . . . . it’s a habit. My eyes open. I know where I am. It is my fault. I get out immediately.

Chapter 4: I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I walk around it.

Chapter 5: I walk down another street.

Khyron Patrick, last month

My beautiful boy, eldest son and heir to the throne, my warrior with a poet’s heart, long and tall and newly fifteen (I want to hyperventilate just typing that); I plan to write a letter documenting the past (crazy, crazy) year of his life, punctuated by goofy pictures of fleeting moments captured on pixel, but the picture discs are all packed up and I am currently crazy with the move. I can’t even get a super current photograph this morning, because the birthday boy himself is still asleep just now and by the time he gets up there will be doings; friends and cake and video games (his wish for this birthday, two big screen TVs in the living room hooked up to two Xbox 360s) and presents and I’ll find myself back out in the garage and out of the way, pricing items for tomorrow’s garage sale.

Khyron Patrick, 6th birthday party

So the sentimental outpourings of my heart when I think of this nearly-man who is my son will have to wait a bit. But I do, at least, have a poem to share. It’s going to make me cry, too, because that’s just how I am about these things.

Sentimental Moment or Why Did the Baguette Cross the Road?
by Robert Hershon

Don’t fill up on bread
I say absent-mindedly
The servings here are huge

My son, whose hair may be
receding a bit, says
Did you really just
say that to me?

What he doesn’t know
is that when we’re walking
together, when we get
to the curb
I sometimes start to reach
for his hand

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Flare up like flame
and make big shadows.
Let everything happen to you:
beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is
final.

~ Rumi

I’m afraid of my mother’s ghost; zombies chase me through my dreams.

I made a throwaway remark, a joke through text message to a friend who gets these things. Told her that I could almost be tempted to believe in an afterlife, since spending a month in bed after my mother’s death, plagued by illness. Flu, bronchitis, laryngitis, and the first strong day back on my feet I was cleaning up vomit in the bathroom from someone else’s sudden guerrilla strike of stomach virus.

At that point, all you can do is laugh. All you can do is look at the ludicrousness of it all.

The joke was that this is exactly how I might expect the spirit of my mother to choose to help me through the darker days of her loss. No benevolent ghostie in flowing white, my mother. No reassurances from beyond her grave. I’m not saying she would curse me or haunt me. This is about love, not revenge, always was. She would consider stirring up a little chaos, panic and disorder in my life exactly the thing to distract me from my pain. (Never one for processing, mother. If the only way forward is through, she’ll refuse to go at all.)

So, I said, this could almost make me believe that she carries on out there somewhere in the Great Beyond Our Understanding. This is the closest thing to a sign I could believe. If I believed in ghosts. If I believed in After.

I made the joke and then that thought – the possibility of my mother’s spirit carrying on – sank into my bones. I went back to bed and shook the day away. It’s the scariest thought I’ve ever had.

So the days pass. I am light and dark that won’t blend together no matter how long I stir. I write email, I plan websites and grand writing projects, I interact. I’m about the business of living on, of discovering who I am without a mother. And at night I dream of zombies.

My mother’s ghost drops down
from the ceiling
as I sleep.
She crawls in through my mouth, curls
inside my chest, purrs
contentment.
Kneading her paws
against my heart, claws
sinking in and out,
reshaping it into something
she doesn’t have to love.
She makes herself at home.

She yawns stretching, she
twines around my lungs and
squeezes hard in breathstealing
embrace.
‘It’s just that I love you so much,’
she whispers as I choke.
I would cry out
but my vocal chords are gone.
Dissolved
absorbed
usurped, she
speaks to me now in my own voice.
Tells me that she’ll never
(Ever.)
leave me again.
- Kelly Buchholz, October 2009

photos courtesy of the National Media Museum

I, Too, Sing America
by Langston Hughes

I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.

Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed -
I, too, am America.

Things I learned this Thanksgiving:

The Preparation:
- Sometimes just admitting to yourself that you don’t like a beloved family holiday frees you up to enjoy it more.
- God Bless Gordon Ramsay and his cheating adulterous heart, but all those months of lusting after him and his chef’s whites made me start to think that this cooking thing might be kind of fun. On the odd occasion.
- And if Gordon Ramsay can cheat on his wife, I can cheat on him by turning to Rachael Ray for my holiday cooking needs.
- Rachael Ray knows stuff about cooking.
- I can cook. (When I wanna.)

The Execution:
- Four hours sleep leaves a person with no excess energy to use for stress and worry, and leaves one less inclined to get sucked in to family drama.
- Sleepless and loopy is the best way to cook Thanksgiving dinner.
- Maybe insomnia is part of the body’s defense mechanism.

The Aftermath:
- When, despite your best efforts and the fact that you are by far the most grown up and reliable of all of her children which is why you got stuck cooking, your mother still insists on treating you like you’re fresh off he kids’ table, hanging out with the kids is the best thing to do.
- Kids are more fun anyway.

In Summation:
My future best-selling self help book, sure to cause a sensation across the nation, will be called “How to Not Give a Fuck So That Life Becomes a Pleasant Surprise.”

This year I’ll bring the turkey
Like last year
and the one before
I am chosen
not for genius or
culinary vision but
because I show up. Always.

This year we are late with the turkey
My sister says
she knew we would be
She laughs and says she knows me
She thinks she knows me
because she knows
all the lyrics to Duran Duran
and sings along.

My sister knows me better than Mama.
Mama never looks up from her mirror now.
She stares, transfixed by her own face.

We warm the turkey,
make the gravy,
and lay everything out
on the table and
wait and watch it
grow cold
while my sister makes the apple salad.
- Kelly Buchholz, Nov 2008