August 2018
Progress takes a break:

This new America, anxious and discontent feels unhinged and unmoored.
Where is the old mythmaking spirit, the new frontiers and new heroes to guide our spirits?

We need our old selves back: bold, strong, resolute to fight the good fight wherever justice and equality became trampled or trapped by greed and mercenary ethics.

Just

In the end, no country can sustain you
no friend can lend you enough money
so you can feel like somebody who has made it.

In the end, you only have your story, raw
and shameful in its nakedness and flaws
due to birth size, color, contacts, simple provenance.

You did not wish you had friends in high places
invitations to balls
dress designers fighting for you to wear their work,
only that your work was just that simple to show off to
those who thought you didn't quite say words right, for their taste and
their compass, at that time, when the compass was stuck in
one place and you could hardly know where North or True North was
or had been, a year before, or right then and there in that office.

It comes down to you and me, as sometimes we call each each other US
as in us friends, us mates, us of this neighborhood, us women, us immigrants
us transplants, us upstarts, us all speaking with the feeble voice of slaves
who have the audacity to raise their voices
to speak all the words they know
and shout out: JUST. JUST BE JUST!

Beyond the Pacific

Beyond this berm
an unknown universe
sputtering
toward comprehension
bordering on romance.

The finite cycle of life
and all its cousin corollaries
stretch on a single wave.

At my Funeral

At your funeral, my husband said as we drove to the doctor, I'll share
your writings with everyone. If they show up at your funeral, they have known you. I plan on saying a few words then, but will encourage them to read your stories slowly and often if they wish to hear your thoughts.


My thoughts in my words? Words are invented. We'll celebrate our fiftieth next July. You know me from my deeds. You know more of me than anyone else.

Back to Basics

Dear readers
Thanks for the attention, the feedback, the camaraderie you have shared with me so generously. I have decided to go back to writing longhand, in notebooks that will remain private and familiar. Thank you for your encouraging words.
They were salve to my wounds.
Rosaria

post script: i'm doing fine, after a year of writing with paper and pen, after a long year of medical traumas and political shit keeping me up nights. I do hope to return to blogging with a new energy. Soon.

A straight talk about fear

You don't have to have faced death to know
the paralyzing slow motion
of  minutes
becoming
hours
face- ripping- drowning
of senses
slipping into an ocean of nothingness.

Just read it in the faces of the survivors.

When I stop talking...

Hands, without
knowledge of
night and day
and seasons too, elevate and
drum each tune
and each sequence of discourse
without any consciousness.
They tell
an immediate truth
woven in the language of survival.

Unlike eyes that hide behind shades
maintaining the illusion that  everything is fine, that
this or other diseases
will be conquered,
hands pull the curtains down
as we sit side by side and pretend
will see each other, again, soon.