He speaks to us in parables

I leave the shower curtain on the living room floor and the little boy who does and does not resemble us takes it up, exclaiming, the periodic table! with the remains of his little boy voice.

Later, after forgetting and days of heavy gravity, I lift the curtain and pierce each hole again, arms growing heavy-diagonally, the way trees grow.

Admire the way they have been ordered each in their brightly colored boxes. Iron, gold, carbon, oxygen, and the exotic ones we seem to have conjured to fill up the empty places.

  • There whether we see or not.
  • Unchanged by our indifference.
  • Three or more dimensional even if we only see them flat.
  • Elements and symbols for when full words seem to be not enough

He speaks to us in parables.

How to clean a toilet

When I tell you I found the old mushroom-colored sweatshirt which saw us through thick and thin you will know I am talking about the way the Romans used to have it done, long pole, wad of cloth, vinegar soaked as we raise it to the real hero, his naked pain, the way he eschews ordinary safety for a stretched-to-the-limits agony

I take the brush, add the cleanser, wipe it all down with an uneasy litany

Drab for color

Old for young

Plain for beautiful

Forgotten for remembered

He says

Me for you

Death for life

Life, everlasting.

Tara Lynn Badamo

Whether you cast back all the way to their respective birth announcements or race forward to their untimely deaths, my two friends share bits of biography, outsiders in a world full of the ambivalent. So it surprises me that it took so long to realize the next step in my own apparitional grief was to see them together at the table I told you about before…

In the unassuming kitchen of God

Singing-

someone is in the kitchen with Dinah, someone is in thekitchen I kno-ooow!

“Tara” for “Dinah” and capitalize the “Someone” and you get the picture-

He talks beauty and parable

All tears wiped away.

The Littlest Dreamer

In this story- Court blocks undocumented teen’s abortion — for now – USA TODAY

https://apple.news/AJ4v7MZ8xTJ2RsHwFlEJpHQ

a young woman who is in this country illegally wants the US to provide the means to kill her own child, who would be an American citizen the moment he or she was born.

Semantic subterfuge aside, right now the only people fighting to save the life of this smallest (and voiceless) dreamer are Trump and his administration.

If Trump prevails, one more amazing American gets a chance for freedom, and if not?

Devastating.

Harvey

on the door of the high school my daughters do not attend the poster has been affixed Harvey…Jimmy Stewart-6-foot-rabbit-Harvey

Not hurricane Harvey

Not Hollywood crap Harvey

Flooding of one kind or another 

Reminds-me-of-all-our-befores-and-afters-Harvey

All the quiet people who always knew but not only said nothing but also, let’s face it-

Went along.

Going along will make a girl get mighty quiet

Or something.

Something close to a literal hell.

Calvarium 10

I once read about a woman who believed she could dissipate 

…the clouds with her mind

but after much thought I have decided I do not want them to go

I see all their stories

As though God Himself were

Finger painting sand art

Casually insinuating angel wings here or the mirror reflection of the map of China in fluffy white

Clouds like babies come and go

Maybe they too grow up 

Go to college, stop needing us anymore as we gaze up at them snow-globed in blue sky beneath inky infinite wonder, fields of burning stars, 

Called all by name.

When words fail

Poetry or prose.  

For the last three weeks I have had hives. Still have hives.  I have sifted words in and out of how this feels and each time all words have come up short.  They do not stop the itch. Like quack doctors, snake oil salesmen, or phone-a-gypsy psychics they play at reading my palms then leave me with no…

Balm

No remedy

No salve for my slowly metamorphic 

reptilian skin.

So I threaten them with silence or just undoing their fragile orthographic pieces unbending bes and esses into straight black lines

Because from geometry we know

Lines go on forever (in either direction)

Moving away from the itchy round helpless

Woman who once loved them

Out to the ends of time and light

To the place where God 

hears our wordless

Supplications.