Why There is Hunger in the World

In the beginning, people reached to the sky above and took what they needed to eat. The sky tasted like ripe papaya, moist cinnamon cake, spicy tacos. Every one ate well.

One day some taller people got together and thought, “We can trick the others and make ourselves powerful.” They picked food from the sky and presented it in a pretty square box. “It’s so convenient!” the tall people said. “Our food will make you more beautiful not having to work so hard reaching for the sky! Get your food from us! The price? Give us whatever you have!”

The shorter people brought them their possessions. They forgot about the sky and to look up. Now they only looked down at their hands and the exchange for food and possessions. Eventually their possessions ran out and they grew hungry. The tall people kept their secret. To this day, world hunger remains.

EVEN SAMURAIS WRITE POETRY

Published in The Squawkback June 2014

My 6-and-a-half-year-old son wanted to be a policeman for Halloween. But the monster-sized Halloween costume outlet store that I took him to was out of policeman costumes except for one that was missing the hat yet still cost twenty-five bucks. His second choice was the U.S. Army soldier fatigues. I thought back to the 5:30 p.m. newscasts about Iraq in which my son said his favorite part was the fallen heroes. Young faces and life stories in thirty-seconds. The face of death this fall as we notice how so many old movie stars are dying this time of year, and how much faster the yellow and red leaves are raining down upon us and the cooling earth as we pick out masks to laugh at death and gut the pumpkin into our own disguise. The fruits of summer off the withering vine to ease the tension of the decline, of our own death, inevitable.

I was aghast about the uniform, considering that after his business went bankrupt last year, my son’s father committed suicide by shooting himself in the heart in front of a fireman. But I remembered America’s wars and I didn’t want to dampen my son’s self-esteem with my disapproval lest he become depressed as a teenager and become homicidal rather than military.

He picked out a gun. He picked the Uzzi police gun. The salesman commented that he didn’t know police used Uzzis and I said, I didn’t know that the Army used Tommy guns like the packaging illustrated. Then the saleslady at the checkout accidentally dropped the Uzzi on the floor and broke its rat-a-tat-tat sound that would’ve made me insane eventually and thrown it across the room at some point, breaking it to stop the noise. Like my Aunt Ruthie did with my cousin Suzy’s pull-string Tom and Jerry doll that was given to me as a broken hand-me-down when I was a child visiting family in St. Louis one summer. Turns out it was the last Uzzi, so the saleslady gave it to us for free and we bought the Tommy gun too.

At home my son watches the Tom and Jerry’s best chase scenes DVD that his father’s brother gave him and he laughs and laughs at teeth being smashed out of Tom like keys on a piano. Later he imitates Jerry who had dropped light bulbs that smashed like bombs on the kitchen floor and scared Tom to death. I worry, then reflect that the Bhagavad Gita was written for the warrior class, and samurais wrote poetry. I love poetry. I also love to stab Caesar in the silent safety of backstage. The tension released. Darkness assuaged. My drama complete as I surrender and exhale, shrinking toward the tomb.

During the school day, my little boy lays his army costume out on the floor of his bedroom, feet facing the doorway. Like a soldier was melted by X-ray eyes. Only the shape of the cloth pants and shirt topped with the plastic meshed helmet reminds me a boy was once there. At night, my little boy wears the costume to sleep, and I lie beside him. Like the mother on the AOL news today who died of a broken heart after her son was killed in Iraq. I wonder if it’s me. I wonder if it’s me.

Prescribed Burns

One day the pesero door hits me in the head, the toilet overflows and all I consume is Diet Coke and nicotine. The next I’m helping you pick out new wallpaper for your downstair’s bathroom, 

wondering what pesticide to apply to your lawn. 
So easy. Too right

For inside me the thief and beggar give way to the lover who flees for her life, with eyes closed and $5 in quarters in her fist she proceeds alone through airport security. The woman who stands at the bar with arms folded in front of her chest, head soaked in lime juice and Corona.

How do I explain that to her the murk of Mexico City air tastes better than Rocky Mountain spring water. That condemned brick buildings with bird cages in the windows are more beautiful than gray wood boxes that strangle the prairie. I heard that some good stories still exist in your world. With the buffalo gone the Mountain Clover no longer nests and rangers must prescribe burns to return the Prairie National Grasslands to its right height to encourage the birds’ return.

I wait somewhere in a picture frame,

haunting old cigar rooms with bad dope.

I am but the wisdom teeth in my jewelry box,

old pain you ought to forget.

Let me die like old Aztec gods

flint rubble forever suffocating in humid hand-scratched tombs.

Forget me beneath Eiffel towards and old lovers without scent.

Forgive me for schizophrenic ancestors, shortness of breath

rough elbows and lost maps.

Love me as one day whistling at a grand slam,

bright-eyed under a Memorial Day sun.

Take me as medicine, some venom, some honey

and one winter morning the burn of my cigarette ash will land on your tongue 
and I will return.

Work of Art

I am constantly an artwork, gazing, moving, living through landscapes painted with the blood of every mother's womb. Scenes with echoes of meadows hover nearby. Waiting doe catch the scent of approaching stags and wonder, is there any end to this mystery of who makes sunflowers gyrate their heads with the sun and whistling steam engines turn wheels of time framed within bones and flesh that provide a pitcher to pour the world as me, imagined fresh each day, as flowers in a vase, displayed in front of an open window, ensconced by the splendor of creation, born for all to delight their eyes upon

the Earth.

More Story Poetica

Hibiscus, St. Croix, USVI 2013
Mixed Media Collage
 by Sydney Solis

Estudio Sol - Foto Arte

More Story Poetica 
by
Sydney Solis

POEM

by Sydney Solis

POEM: came while writing you.

The cat works her claws into the $700 chair.
I'm mad, but I don't feel like getting up to swat her off
and preserve the $700 chair, pretty as it may be.

WORN AWAY

by Sydney Solis

As a child, Tracy played with three little dolls so much that their eyes were rubbed away.
Her three-year-old daughter finds them in the closet.
"Ooooooh, Mommy., that's Spooky. They don't have any eyes."

PERFORMANCE ART

by Sydney Solis

True story in the newspaper. A woman tried to pay at the check-out in Target with a million dollar bill. She tried to pay for $2,000 worth of stuff with $2.62 on a gift card. The clerk wouldn't take it, so she handed him the million. Cops arrested her.
My sister, when she heard the story, insisted that maybe the woman was just misunderstood. Perhaps it was just performance art. Six other women came in, paid with million dollar bills, but went unnoticed.
Can you break a million?
It should go further, she said.
To be a glamour girl stick-up artist. Red lipstick, platinum blonde wig, black stiletto heels, red skirt buxom bounce. On bank video surveillance, she's crossing in front of the camera in Yuma, Chicago, Tampa, San Francisco, Buffalo, all at the same time. There's a Hollywood glamour girl robbing a bank at gunpoint. She's all over the country. Five different cameras juxtaposed on the newscast. Five blonde wigs, five skirts in motion diagonally in the lobby and across your screen. In the sight of millions across the country watching it over and over and over again. They've realize they've seen her before, but nobody knows who she is.

DYING LIGHT

by Sydney Solis

I am dying
Make no mistake
The change in voice
The deepening of shadows
Speak, silent voice. For now I weep and attend to you
You stroke the top of the head
Wet, puffy eyes looking up
Attention
on the deep where whales moan around
navels and this is where the world beings
In the misty play of my picture to see ahead
Play, creator
Play me while I'm fresh
No longer
Goodbye temptress, you wild daughter you, you enjoyed and I am glad
Now bring your body back to me
So that we can paint the sky and water the canals
Roll in the hay and grow roses at night
Oh, poet of body
of pleasure, of pain
How do I part you?
The urgency of time
The wall begins to dim
The clock now lost, the game is near end
Until my final exhale.

YEARNING

by Sydney Solis

Yearning
Heavy stone my heart
Floating in darkness
Dreams unremembered
Haunting from below
Fragments, broken pictures
Movement without footsteps
Or voices

And still I wait
And still I wait.

ADDICTS

by Sydney Solis

Addicts
they say
can't deal with their reality
Well, nothing
not even the old skull ashtray
can deter my bitter sorrow
and retreat to red Marlboro
Smoke to rock my lungs
Something to hold me
In the desperate desolation of my soul
Alone


Winter 2003

FIRE BONES

by Sydney Solis

I am nothing but bones and a fire on a stick inside my spine.
Will the fire burn?
The computer break down?
My brother told me when buying a stereo, the fewer moving parts, the less breakdowns
Will bones and a car collide?
Like a freight train
that I always hear.

Como el ferrocarril que siempre me oigo.

SHROUDED LOVE

by Sydney Solis

You picked me
because I was the beautiful rose
gracious, red,
tender-skinned,
slender-stemmed
daintily clothed
by silken fragrant petals.

My petals were sealed then,
hiding me like the bulb in winter.

Alas, when I emerge,
only then will you find me.
When you woo me home and display me in your vase,
the concealing petals will fall like tears,
unmasking my deepest self you never saw amid the dozens of others I was competing with in the garden.

And when my bloom has failed
and can no longer be worn near your heart,
I will trust it was not I you loved,
but my blossoms made of earth.



1985

THE PREVIOUS TENANT

Down below the snowy window, a homeless man sleeps atop the garbage bin.
The manager walked me down the dark hall, hacking- $210 a month, includes utilities.
As her keys jangle in the lock she says, "The last guy who lived here nearly burned the place down.
I came in here and he was face down on the couch, butt naked in high heels, dinner on the stove."

The hum of the city, outside, below.
the previous tenant left the shower curtain,
a collage of black-and-white movie stills,
Claudette Colbert, Greta Garbo, Clark Gable.
I liked it. It still smelled like plastic.

She said the carpets would be cleaned,
but after I moved in, still,
weeks later
they smelled wet of chemical cleaner and something else that was of a different atomic structure.

In the bathroom,
I open the 40s medicine cabinet thick with white paint.
The roaches scatter so fast out of the corner of my eyes when I flick on the light,
as if they were surprised and blushed at expecting someone else,
before they shyly dart back into the corners.

One  cockroach carcass remained inside the medicine cabinet.
I left it there.
A sandy, red, dry roach.
I looked at it every day,
as I brush my teeth,
the same as I looked out the window and saw the homeless man
every day,
as I tried to get to know my previous tenant outside,
down below.


Spring 2004

READING AT TEPOTZLAN

Reading at Tepotzlán

by Sydney Solis

The tarot card reader was from Argentina.
Aged 40ish. Didn't speak much English.
A pack of Camel straights on the table 

next to a blue candle.

Streaks of grey like stray, single broom stalks
sprang from long black hair.
Beautiful face with a hard life,
she is the white calla lily painted 

on the blue talavera pitcher,

pouring deepness down the throat,

breathing in burning sandalwood.

The center of the universe, her eyes, 

everything watering down into black ink.

We sat at the table.

She sat to my right.

She drew The World card.

Este viaje, es como un sueño de tu vida.

Yes, she's right.

Coming to live in Mexico was everything to me.

Her finger tap, tap, tapped the card.

Veas esta tarjeta?

See this card?

Esta mujer,

Me, the nude Venus floating in the middle of a bough of green. 

Eres tu. It's me.

Y este anillo alrededor de ella. This ring around her. 

Es tu madre.  It's your mother.

I think of my violent mother back home in Colorado.

Tienes que huir de la madre. You have to get out of the mother. 

Este hombre. This man. She tapped the card’s  left-hand corner

where a picture of man’s head floated

I think of Frank, who pursued me down here.

Es muy parecido a tu madre. He is a lot like your mother.

Tienes que irte,  huir. You have to go, get out.

Es algo muy difícil de hacer. It's a very difficult thing to do.

Pero tienes que irte. But you have to get out.

I didn’t say anything else.

With a few minutes left of the reading I asked. 

When will I be successful?
She just stared at me.

You will be successful when you get a paintbrush, can hold it with your vagina and you can paint your own name with it.

That's what she said. 

Copyright 2015 All Rights Reserved

FROM HER CHAIR

by Sydney Solis

Bent fingers
worn toes
like claws
a steel pin to hold them straight
false teeth, barking, coughing, spitting
in your chair
a million town magazines lay at your feet
slip and break a hip
your death would mean his freedom
and yours from the black filth beneath the refrigerator
a 21-year-old house
never has seen a sponge
at its feet
the black that is in your bones
in your feet
in your words
that hit
like
nicotine
on brain cells
that cut oxygen
and life
from the living
and me

1985

THE WANTING

by Sydney Solis

No man's arm around his girl at the cinema
only backward caps, faded denim and mastication
to shotgun blasts, slaps and sirens

no silent prayer or hymns to childhood
reflection on apple pie, but rather top dreams of lovers behind TV doors
un-touching, graceless and like snow in the back seat

unbelievably quiet, white and fluttering
a tear, like those in a dog's eye
wet with no purpose but adoration for

empty homes made from mail order catalogs
home improvements, organized gardens and coffee cups
wait for the day he will come home and touch

his girl in the nylon nightgown,
who holds flower pots with oven mitts
and sweeps a broom over scattered lasagna recipes
clipped from Wednesday's food section

BLUE CANDLE

by Sydney Solis

The blue candle reminds me
to remember the airy dream of today
and in my body's slumber rewrite it as a poem
a gift to the earth goddess and the sky god
mother and father
myself
my tears
howling for the sun and the moon
to taste starducst, remember explosions and say,
I was there
I was there

HEAVEN AND EARTH

by Sydney Solis

We are planets aligned
scattering heavenly typed scripts
rushed to us by angels
down
down to skin and bones
motion on asphalt
grieving, weeping, wondering
waiting for night,
for dawn
for death

AUTUMN WIND

The wind hurries along fallen leaves
calling home their bodies, dry curled and tired,
scuttling them to the corners of tree roots and pockets of earth
to dissolve back to the deep
heart of nature
sleep in darkness
and dream of spring buds and rain.



November 2003