Tiny Chameleon!

Tiny Versions of Bigger Things!!

no green thumbs here, we can only grow cactus lulz

Mommy has started her collection again.

Last year she brought home a mini cactus

from the family fair.

A stubby succulent,

smooth and translucent green flesh

covered with useless spikes,

better suited for a filter feeder,

like a frightened benthic anthozoa,

than for protection.

She placed it in a tiny raku pot

of charred black with fat iridescent brush streaks

on the sink's window sill

so during the day her cactus can look out

into the neighbors' yard

(as we do)

and so she can look at her nub of a plant

at night as she washes dishes.

When I was little,

our walkway from the toolshed to the front door

was crowded with soft wooden troughs

filled with the darkest, richest soil

jacked up with miracle grow.

It felt so primally good to burrow my index finger

deep like an earthworm

into the cool clean dirt

and hide in these nursery nests

white and yellow daisies, button and bell flowers,

Chinese lanturns,

fushia, lavender, and white sweet peas,

cornflowers, sunflowers, and rainbows of cosmos;

two in each hole.

The pictures on those $2 packets seduced us

with promises of life and color

on our dry, wooden walkway.

Not many plants survived the relentless sun.

The brave sprouts that pushed their way to the surface

were zapped by the electromagnetic spectrum radiation,

perishing quickly in fireballs.

The family fair cactus in its wabi sabi pot

has grown past adolescence.

Lean and tall and no longer knobbish,

it resembled a stretched out blob of play-doh,

or a small dildo,

and grew copious bunches of pubes.

Past middle age,

it is now an old fart,

covered in fine white hair like an old man's beard.

The wispy hairs wrap around its dildo-chin,

encircling itself in protection against the world it has seen,

this past year.

Family fair cactus has friends now,

around eight of them.

With property at the window sill in high demand,

there has been talk of construction,

maybe an upper level.

The new residents are small and clean,

sporting miniature spicules

sticking out from shiny juicy skins.

Three of them sit in tiny glazed pots

that stand on three tiny lumpy, stumpy legs.

The others sit in supermarket brown plastic planters

and on wide white dishes

sprinkled with river pebbles.

There is also half an orchid plant.

Last week on Mother's Day,

we went to my grandma's house

for a quite lunch,

mayonnaise chicken and bad takeout Chinese food.

After the dessert dishes were cleared,

Mommy took out her present to Dama:

A tray of three cool ceramic planters.

Dama, Mommy, and I planted the seeds.

"She likes to take care of things,"

"and watch them grow"

which is true.

Before Baga died,

Dama's backyard was filled

with a tiny lemon tree, pikake,

a bush that grew tiny red flowers

with four heart-shaped petals in fat bunches,

three mango and plumeria trees,

mock orange hedges,

and puffy lavender-flowering plants

that crept between her green onions.

Now her yard is paved with gravel.

Dama has fallen a couple of times

on the protruding rock stepping stones.

Mean strawberries stained her elbows and knees.

Yesterday I visited Dama.

Her mini sunflowers and asters have sprouted,

their tender little buds arcing towards

the heavy glass doors which filters their sun.

I turned the pots 180'

and saw into my mind, a garden of color.

If the last blue cornflowers do not wake up

from their Target-induced hibernation,

that is fine because they have already flowered for me

in all of the tiny wells of hope I created and tended to

as a child.

hey I was looking for this!

Accolade of the Animals

All those he never ate
appeared to Bernard Shaw
single file in his funeral
procession as he lay abed
with a cracked infected bone
from falling off his bicycle.
They stretched from Hampton Court
downstream to Piccadilly
against George Bernard's pillow
paying homage to the flesh
of man unfleshed by carnage.

Just shy of a hundred years
of pullets, laying hens
no longer laying, ducks, turkeys,
pigs and piglets, old milk cows,
anemic vealers, grain-fed steer,
the annual Easter lambkin,
the All Hallows' mutton,
ring-necked pheasant, deer,
bags of hare unsnared,
rosy trout and turgid carp
tail-walking like a sketch by Tenniel.

What a cortege it was:
the smell of hay in his nose,
the pungencies of the barn,
the courtyard cobbles slicked
with wet. How we omnivores
suffer by comparison
in the jail of our desires
salivating at the smell of char
who will not live on fruits
and greens and grains alone
so long a life, so sprightly, so cocksure.

-Maxine Kumin

new moleskin!!! :3

how resilient,

this cello we weep over;

movement in sine waves

the rain made rainbows,

streaky wet on the windshield,

an arc of bird poo