The City of Shame and Joy

 Draft from 2015, FINALLY deep edited. 5/8/2026 (c)  

For Art T

1.

I waited six thousand miles

and twenty-four years for your birth

to some other mother.

 

With every one of my five miscarriages

my womb emptied

unformed and inert pieces of you.

 

I seek to enfold you

in rich endometrium mulch—

 

delay the final push

as you wrench free—

silence

where there should be screaming.

 

There will never be a natural birth

between us.

 

2.

Drowning americanos in the coffee shop

you spoke about your childhood in Yerevan—

haunted by a century-old genocide.

 

You were lyrical about Inanna

and pre-Hellenistic goddesses—

heady describing

Communism’s collapse—

 

insurrection is your pornography.

 

You were twenty-four years younger.

So much knowledge,

you even corrected my English.

 

 

3.

Abruptly

you kissed me.

 

Our nose posts clinked together

like a flamenco dancer’s castanets,

a precise, complicated rhythm

one had to live to know.

 

I inhaled your exhale, lavishly,

slow as savoring champagne, your exhale—

the only air worth breathing.

 

And for a moment, I thought,

maybe I can do this again.

 

4.

When you found me

I was storing fat

like an American black bear

preparing for hibernation,

 

an aging mammalian alchemist

no longer cultivating milk.

 

Little remained

of the desires rising

behind stalagmites—

this want so sudden, unexpected—

it felt violent.

 

I am too old for colostrum,

milk gone thin—

I am a fraud of a mother.

 

With you, what else could I be?

 

5.

You traversed continents

and wherever you tarried

mothers surfaced—

mini-mothers, mothers-to-be,

monotremes, marsupials,

wounded women

hooked by the chance

to nurture,

to be in your narrative.

 

I am not the only mother

to tongue-trace

your indecipherable map of ink—

to touch the steel-filled,

the empty piercings

scattered like initiation wounds

from a tribe existing only

in your imagination—

 

I am not the only mother to think

I could thread them all

with fish wire

and tether you to my skin

 

connecting us

in a resplendent amalgam of pain.

 

I was never the only mother

to molest and exalt you.

 

6.

I tell you—

You are the gist of all my memories.

Every recollection holds you—.

we are two incoherent stories

that merge into a whole.

 

I tell you—

I was in the shadows at your birth

I watched your naivety break.

It was not my place, not my skill set,

not my doing or undoing

to move you from fugue to joy.

 

Yet I am but a ghost

of your mother

crossing through.

 

 

The Hermit

 5/9/26 (c)

I step away.

 

My city apartment becomes

a mountain retreat in dead winter—

Gaia’s womb

 

where I gestate

listening beneath

the surrounding chatter.

 

9 of Wands

 5/9/26 (c) 

The moment before I cross the finish line

I remember

brushing off the dirt,

rubbing my knees, crying,

then standing.

 

My friend had leg bone cancer—

for a decade now

has limped, a cane for balance.

 

Another, wheelchair bound,

removes prosthetic legs

at the bar for comfort.

 

A single misstep can set me back two years.

 

Still—

we keep standing.

9 of Swords

 5/4/26 (c)

Nightmares

in the devil’s hours—

 

every mistake,

including my birth,

all the miscarriages—

 

my body agreeing with my mother—

9 of Pentacles

 5/3/2026 (c)

I did not think I’d live this long,

to see my shadow and self

fully aligned—

both anxious,

still speaking harshly—

in agreement.

 

I am rich with time

not angling god to give me more.

 

Behind me are dead monsters—

Minotaurs, idealized boyfriends,

sadistic bosses.

 

I did not think

it would feel this luxurious.

Cruelty

 from the mid 2000's & incomplete.  4/2026 (c)

Cruelty attended my birth

and when Mama said she didn’t want me

Cruelty claimed me.

 

Cruelty even attended my grade school—

knuckle-sandwiches to the gut,

a little terror on the playground.

 

Cruelty was worse at home.

 

Cruelty loved me

more than the others.

I got the belt—

my brother got the buckle.

 

Cruelty’s love was fickle.

Cruelty drowned my cat.

When my cousin molested me,

Cruelty wished

he’d thought of it first.

 

I married Cruelty to keep him close.

He pawned my jewelry,

ran up my credit cards.

He couldn’t stand my success.

There was nothing about me

Cruelty didn’t criticize.

 

Sometimes I grow tired.

But whenever I leave—

he’s still there.

Knowing

 Another 1990s poem finally finished. 4/2026 (c)

What do I know about angels,

Cherubim, Seraphim—

Incubus, Succubus—

an assemblage imagined

to praise or accuse?

 

If man is in a forest and an angel falls

how is it we pretend to hear it?

 

I don’t know about Russia

beyond its shifting sprawl on a globe

juting into the Chukchi Sea.

 

I have nothing I can say about Marc Chagall—

 

beyond comments about color—

his visceral use of red,

I misinterpret the floating brides,

mules on roof tops, rabbis—

which may symbolize wisdom or intolerance.

 

I was never one to cherish my roots.

 

Why do I feel required

to understand everything—

and understand nothing?

 

I cannot remember the last time

I used the word medulla oblongata,

 

and when in pain—

am uncertain it originated

in intestine, muscles, bones.

 

I know myself so little.

I know my lovers even less.

 

Sometimes I can calculate

what will make them smile—

a surface spark.

 

Beyond that,

 

knowing is fiction.