"Taxi Music" by Naya Valdellon

[lonelybusiness.livejournal.com]

Taxi Music
--Naya Valdellon


It’s become a habit, this backseat
sinking, a refrain on cue like swiping out
late. Outside, the highway plays
its nightly chords, other ways to wheel

you home. Taxi rides are grace notes
on clocked weekdays, luxuries you pocket
at overtime’s end. Save that sometimes,
your ears pay an unexpected price:

Mellow Touch past midnight, its jingle
older than these streets. You are the minstrel
all over again, plucking at memory’s
strings. A dashboard tiger, hardly sinister,

bobs its head to some alto’s crooning.
No hi-hos from the windshield’s dwarvish
seven, audience to the driver’s off-key
mumbling. On-air strumming turns

streetlights, shanties—even the whole city
and moon notated on a sheet of sky—
into instruments, percussive to your
melodious pain. How suburban, the way

sadness is rerouted, recycled like sighs
from chests to airwaves, pitched
as lullabyes for wakeful clichés tuned in
to this station tonight. Too taxing,

to remember who it is you’re missing.
A woman belts out someone else’s ache
and somewhere, a girl in a house
you just passed, cries herself to sleep

to this same song. No one is beyond
sappiness. Tomorrow, you will work
despite your bass heart’s drumming.
Upholstery muffles your solo humming.

(no subject)

[projectmatt.livejournal.com]

Does anyone remember a poem posted here (a long time ago) with the image of a woman screaming beneath/behind a waterfall, or something like that?  Was surely by a woman.  Wish I could remember.  Thanks in advance.

Matt

My Sister, Who Died Young, Takes Up the Task - Jon Pineda

[aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com]

My Sister, Who Died Young, Takes Up the Task
by Jon Pineda

A basket of apples brown in our kitchen,
their warm scent is the scent of ripening,

and my sister, entering the room quietly,
takes a seat at the table, takes up the task

of peeling slowly away the blemished skins,
even half-rotten ones are salvaged carefully.

She makes sure to carve out the mealy flesh.
For this, I am grateful. I explain, this elegy

would love to save everything. She smiles at me,
and before long, the empty bowl she uses fills,

domed with thin slices she brushes into
the mouth of a steaming pot on the stove.

What can I do? I ask finally. Nothing,
she says, let me finish this one thing alone.