For me the best poetry is written about important moments. I am not talking about graduation or prom or wedding days, I am talking about moments that are important to me personally. The ones that are important to me are the ones that are deeply personal, that bring back the strongest sense of emotions and memories. I like to talk about my family. The second two poems are about my grandfather, a man that was both beautiful and terrible. A lifelong alcoholic and cigarette smoker he was a man prone to violent mood swings. (Please note my childhood memory poem) Yet when I knew him we was old, and gentle. He was endlessly patient with me – teaching me chess and marbles, he waited as I learned to change a tire and change my oil. I wanted to capture a moment with him, one that is warm and beautiful – one that captures the man I knew and I wanted to contrast that to my last memories of him –dying and weak. I could have talked about the tubes, and machines, and maybe I will in a different poem, but what stuck out was how his beautiful, deep voice, changed into something ugly and scary. The next one was written in the prose poem form. It is pretty self explanatory, but I wanted to convey the loss of love that happened between my parents without being too explicit about it. The final poem, Yes. Yes. Yes. was based on the poem God Says Yes to Me by Kaylin Haught. This poem is not about something deep or personal. It is not about something that is deeply emotional. I liked the original and I felt like being irreverent and a little blasphemous.



Yes. Yes. Yes.
-Thanks to Kaylin Haught

I asked Madonna if it’s okay to be strong
and she said yes
So I asked if it was alright to be bold
And she said yep
I asked her if I can act like a virgin
Even though I’m not
And she said darling
In her British accent
She said darling
I do.
You can too.
Thank god I said,
And is it okay if I don’t match my socks
Or wash my dishes for days
Or if I’m selfish
Or if I finish the entire box of cookies
Or…
Baby, she interrupts me
(she does that sometimes)
Baby (she thinks its okay because she is Madonna and she is some sort of international super pop star who revolutionized the music, video and entertainment industry forever… whatever)
What I am telling you is
Yes. Yes. Yes.






Checkmate

He picked up the ivory rook
Gently holding it between his large,
Calloused fingers

Worn rough from heating homes,
Soldering guns
and ratchet handles

He moved the pieces deftly
And with one swift move he toppled my careful defense
Laying waste to my kingdom

I would lay on our old wooden floor
Listening to his voice
Warm like fresh laundry

It is hard to imagine that voice
That voice that wrapped around me
Destroyed by throat cancer

Gruff
Barely audible
Destroyed in one swift move

Checkmate.





“You Hold my Whole World in your Hands”

My mother wore the same necklace every day, a thin, gold chain from which hung a small glass globe. It took a week’s worth of overtime but my father finally bought it. He carefully wrapped the tiny bauble in a cotton handkerchief and put it in a simple black box. With it he wrote a note, “you hold my whole world in your hands.” As a child I thought that it must have been magic, the embodiment of my father’s love. When I cried my mother would nestle my against her collar bone and I would gently finger the simple chain. Whenever my mother was worried, or scared she would run the tiny globe between her fingers until the paint began to fade beneath her apprehensive fingertips. She would stand at the kitchen window rubbing at ten, eleven, midnight, one, two , three in the morning. She would wait and rub until my father fell in, singing loudly, smelling like Christmas trees. As the years went by I noticed that she didn’t wear it as often. First she took it off for a couple of days. Then she would only wear it on anniversaries or birthdays. Finally she never wore it, and my whole word would sit in a velvet covered coffin, collecting dusts.

I stole it once in seventh grade. I had a big presentation and I wanted to look nice. Somewhere between the bus stop and home the thin clasp broke and my world crashed to the ground. I didn’t notice until I got home, my mother never noticed.