Saturday, July 21, 2018

A Poem for Air Conditioning

I luxuriate 

in the frigid morning

under warm covers and 

blissful remnants of fading dreams.

No future

No past

Just this glorious moment:

The simple love I felt 

As a child

Returns:

A mother's care

A father's safety

A brother's company:

"I am a flower blooming in the desert--a ray of light in the wasteland."

The sheet rubs against my shins, confining

yet setting me free;

There is nothing else.

***

A memory of absent paradise:

In summer, my family slept downstairs.

We could afford only one air conditioner. It perched 

in the window of our living room, 

transfiguring downstairs into heaven

while the bedrooms above baked and suffocated.

Mother and father took the couches

Under cathedral windows

While we dragged our tiny, plastic

mattresses from upstairs and sprawled out

under the soft rumble 

that emerged from round vents, 

like engines of a starship

conveying us to a new world.


I had no fear of the dark.

Sneak Peak at My Answers for the Local Author Fair Panel

On Thursday, November 5, I will be one of four authors participating in the Local Authors Fair Panel through Woodneath Library Center, Kansa...