Aliki barnstone poetry reading

If I wake early when the water is motionless, the sun still soft, the surface almost perfectly a mirror, my neighbors asleep, not out for their morning walk,. If my daughter could be protected in the understory, the way old growth oaks and sycamores bend over redbuds and dogwoods flowering resplendent in spring rain. If I could stop myself giving her a handful of pebbles, instructing her, one for each headstone, stone on stone.

Your great-great-grandfather this, your great-great-grandmother that. Do this, not that. If a tattoo you spit on their graves. Your skin lucent with youth cannot disguise these insistent letters and symbols. Maybe something glimmers.

Aliki barnstone poetry reading: She is the author

You wander a maze of tasks in your planner, inscribed the Book of Ordinary Life, putter around, and keep the houseplants green while time ruptures incrementally, Bardo. You wait for hot water— something delivered, something liminal—. For twenty seconds, you flirt with the myth.