Woman in the Rocks

The rock lumped behind her head, flesh piled in rounded river stones, water rippling at the pebbles of her toes. Once upon a time, they asked her if she would still go sunbathing with that belly. If not now, when? Many floods later, body piled by the boulders, grandchildren floating in the blue. The answer is still the right one.

Valkyries Cycling

Sweat rising, early sun, braids hang from helmets, they dive down the rutted road on studded wheels, spokes cracking. I hear their song and sing it inside me: Fear strikes us all, when it slaps you, don’t curl forward. Lean…

Poetry found in Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami

I remember drawing things
like this: a whole world of dandelions
where we are safe from the hard things
and if calamity

creeps up, we simply lift off,
thin, soft layers fluttering
above countless
winking lights. These dots,
feeble lights, we are all
bobbing in the evening breeze and
can start again wherever
breath blows us.

This is a found poem, a collage of sorts. My way of studying an author’s prose closely. This month at the Vagabond English Book Club we are reading Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami. …

A Vagabond Voice Writing and Living Prompt

What is your polyglot dream?
To be held in arms that reach
across the globe, whispered
on lips and tongues at once
own and
other? To know one more
language. Or all,
why not, what is a dream if not
impossible.

What is your polyglot dream?
Does it drift on mother’s melody, lilt,
lullaby and lost accents
from a place now left
to memory. Words snatched
and uttered at family gatherings,
or suspended
midair on summer nights
the words flutter and zip, perhaps
bite, sting, ever more painful,
the languages
of childhood.

Does…

A Vagabond Voices writing and living prompt.

Do not
forget that you are
body, stable state and liquid
sifting, solid fleeting
light and shadow, footprint
on mud and mud
on sole, you set out: a step, then
the other and nothing is
as you left it. I wonder,
when you stepped out,
if you forgot
to exist, forgot
everything except the in-out
breath on trembling blades
of spring and the rhythm of strides
over land. Did you remember?
You are also
flesh.

I believe in creative seasons and, to me, this is the season of the body.

Every year, I like to come around a kind of circle that starts with a deep winter of…

This drink is simple:
ingredients and acts. Climb
the trees in dust that cycles
from soil, to air, to skin.
Salt and earth — not a pinch,
but a coating, finely sifted.
Dangle, reach for
the pale fruits, that hang
on branches bending under
your bare feet. Mind
the thorns. Grab the globes,
larger than your child’s
grasp, hand them down.
Don’t taste
now. The fruit is bitter.
The old woman, strict, smiles
rarely but surely when your
dusty black feet
return to graze the earth,
and you smudge
the threshold and swing
on the linoleum of life
in the kitchen. This…

What is your flavor past
and present? The crush
of summer berry juices ecaping
reality? Or sweet granular dissolving ever
into something sour? Perhaps crusted,
and seared. Or sifted
as the flour over an old woman’s skin.
Or the simple, perfume of your parents’
coffee they way they drank it
back in the old world, when you
were a small and hungry and the world
smelled of something new bursting
from the oven.

My invitation to you: find a recipe from your past, a memory, a feeling…

Mix, shake, stir,
create
and bring us your dish
or drink, or poem…collage,
musings, ramblings.

Your life and memory has flavors
only you know.

The Book Behind the Prompt.

Yes, there is…

I’m searching for wild Chervil. Not its look-alike. Mortelle, they tell me, this sister. The grass tickles your feet. It looks soft and slightly translucent but it has a scratchy quality. Pulling you to it. Pulling you to earth.

I’m keeping myself in the real world, mud, and molehills shifting underfoot. I remember the village doctor’s words. He’s always searching for translations.

“You know, the one,” he searches somewhere beyond his clouded glasses, can’t find it, can never find the right version, “Socrates, the one they gave Socrates.”

Yes, I know the one. Or I’m learning to discern her in…

Village de pêcheurs, désert
épineux, le bois précieux
chauffe tout juste
la marmite perchée
sur trois pierres,
le riz parfumé.
La femme
qui veut bien faire
doit noircir le repas
sur les bords de fer
afin d’infuser cette boisson
amère du soir,
afin de dormir, le ventre plein.

Le bruit du vent,
le toit en tôle ondule comme l’océan
qui menace de tout avaler:
toi, ta pirogue,
la fumée du matin, les couleurs à l’aube.

Quand tes pieds s’envolent
et perdent la caresse du sable,
quand tu pars en quête de requins,
je bois l’air marin, je sirote mon souffle…