Poems
At 86 Dad wants a new silver Mercury with heated seats. Mom wants whatever Dad wants. We’re on the phone, and I’m scrubbing the kitchen floor with my headset on, scratching at the black sap marks that stick and spread before finally letting go. We’re all tired of talking. So I don’t ask them about moving closer to their kids; I don’t mention the nurse they fired; I don’t say I think they’re making a mistake. I breathe hard and tackle a tough wad of sap. They tell me how cold it is in Las Vegas in the winter; how the mountains turn purple in their rise toward the sky. I don’t ask them if they’re eating. I keep myself from mentioning their many medications. They want me to love them; they want me to leave them alone. They want to fumble along the walls of their stucco house until one falls down, cheek to the cool tile of the floor, bones so heavy, joints stiff, life blood thick and unwilling. I hope the other one will lie down too, pull an afghan over them, the one with squares her mother made. I hope in the accumulating heat of the desert they will gasp into each other’s arms and give themselves away. I hope they can do it without breaking. I hope they can do it in the clean sweet heat of the day, an open mouthed entry, the last ripe fruits of breath released. —from Rattle #28, Winter 2007 Rattle Poetry Prize Honorable Mention © Devika Brandt This poem may not be reproduced without the author's permission.
What my Parents Want
A wasp might stow away inside your shoe to sting you. A thousand ants might circle your chair. Do you know I would scatter them, press ice to your wound? Are we both waiting for a strong enough rain to bring this paper house down? The distant palm tree looking small as an insect can’t conceal you, there are your legs crossed at the knee and the smoke you blow through the rails. Even tucked behind aluminum siding or someone’s mantilla in the back row at church, I’d recognize you. Hear that? The bird who trilled each front porch sunset makes its lonesome call. I’d answer, tell it we’re still listening, but I, too, try to stay invisible. To feel the striped lines of shade under that tree. Who will we be once we reach its shelter? Old daughter and older old man. Remember our station wagon travels, the time I left my doll somewhere along the road? I’ve always believed you thought my upset silly. So much later I learned you drove back, 50 miles, stopping every place we’d stopped before, asking, asking. Still, we find ourselves unable to toss the layers—torn photographs and postcards, the distance that fractures us, the endless places we find to hide. © Devika Brandt This poem may not be reproduced without the author's permission.
For my Father
Biopsy Results
I hadn’t been in his office before, and they didn’t instruct me to take off my clothes, put on a gown, just to wait in that room where the desk sat below a large window, framing the sweeping arms of a willow that dangled, verdant, like bracelets released from their clasp. I had heard his voice on the phone the morning I’d left a message when the lump on my neck slid to my throat, threatened to keep me from swallowing. He called back. Said no food or drink. Surgery at six. What have you eaten? And I had to tell him I hadn’t shopped recently, had scrounged cupboards for breakfast. Tofu, I said. And graham crackers. He repeated it as a question, his voice up high like a note for a soprano. Ok, he said, don’t eat anymore. So I saw him at six with his mask on, both of us in hospital garb; he was standing, I was lying down. But in his office we both sat in chairs and I watched his mouth open, teeth show, lips cover them, the way mouths move on television sometimes when the words don’t match, and when my tears fell they surprised me, they merely dropped, it wasn’t crying, just my body in its own response as he reached a hand out with a tissue. I heard his words fall around me like a clatter of dishes, the one glass plate that sinks from your hand, takes a nosedive, and though you lunge forward it still hits the floor, shatters, and for a second leaves you staring before you grab the broom and sweep it up. © Devika Brandt This poem may not be reproduced without the author's permission.
If a Bear
after Stephen Dunn If a bear sniffed you as you lay in your tent under darkness of no moon, and if it didn’t wake you but only entered your sleep-life as a camouflaged shape, might you wander differently? Would your limbs carry essence of mud and stream, flat stones under your feet, stillness? Would scent of apples ripening in the orchard at Hamilton Barn, the meaty pungence of the dumpster send your legs roaming? And if, in that same night, you passed groupings of creatures wrapped two by two in feathers and canvas, some smelling of peppermint and some of sex, would you draw in closer, your tongue making wet sounds against your teeth? And would you be tempted to flip one rolled tidbit, bite through the feathered covering, lick off the scent from its slick and furless skin? How would you satisfy your hungers? © Devika Brandt This poem may not be reproduced without the author's permission.
Self Portrait
Some days I think my eyes don’t belong to me, my sockets leaning heavy on crepey lids, the lids hunched to cover the tops of my irises and then they are my mother’s eyes, not the shuttered ones in the photo of the two of us where she stares but no one’s looking out—if her eyes are a window, it’s one she’s turned away from, just the back of her gray head visible. No, it’s before that, when I noticed her, maybe for the first time, without wishing her different, saw how she wanted a daughter, I wanted a mother, more like ourselves. And now, our faces. The parentheses and gathers, ridges and wisps, dark circles, even the indentations that arc from tear ducts to the sides of our noses, as if we’d each wept until the drops carved a path, made themselves a bed just like any body of water, like hers where I once swam, blood always thicker, where I kicked and she winced and our entanglement began. © Devika Brandt This poem may not be reproduced without the author's permission.
Housekeeping
Sap on the kitchen floor, steel wool, vinegar. I’m scraping when fire’s fast train wrecks the sky so I pack a bag of clothes, some cash, eyeglasses, 100 thousand acres burned can’t move quick enough can’t breathe rolling bundles of smoke turn sky a dying marigold then curl under doorjambs. My brother stuck, highway closed, why didn’t I buy a ladder? High winds, dry grass, ashes, ashes ashes— © Devika Brandt This poem may not be reproduced without the author's permission.
Oh Give Me The Orange Groves of Southern California
On all the road trips to visit Grandma Pearl and Jonesie, Pop and Lydia at their filling station, and Lucille, who wore only Dodger blue, all my parents could talk about from Ontario to Santa Ana, Laguna Beach to Oceanside, was the orange groves, so many of them gone already, the ones in Pasadena Dad ran through as a boy, speeding from his grandpa’s house through the grove then home, his grandpa who, when the market crashed, tossed himself heartily off, and there was my dad, rich boy turned pauper, needing a leg up from hardfisted hands, but Dad remembers only the groves stretching miles, the ones that used to be right there and right there where the Texaco stands and the Dairy Queen, but Look! Mom would say, look at this grove, still here, just like it was, right, George? and he’d roll down the window to sniff and say, Yes, just as it was, that scent wafting into the car like the elixir it is, heady aroma of white blossom and orange fruit, tang of juice and rind, a sweetness that softened all of us as if we were a wax family in a wax car on a hot day in a year that would melt away like the short stub of a candle so that even now when I smell orange blossoms, I see all of them, the trees that weren’t there and the trees that were, their glossy green leaves, the scent that filled the agitated front seat and the restless turf wars in back, united us all in our one common allegiance to that delicate, hypnotic, coral-colored perfume, indivisible, inhaling what lasted only a moment, but for that moment, we breathed what seemed like joy. © Devika Brandt This poem may not be reproduced without the author's permission.