Tag: memory

premeditated mourning

On By ©️K.T. 2025In cancer, Death, dreaming, dreams, dying, Hospice, Life and Death, Poem, poetryLeave a comment

i am in premeditative mourning

desperate to get it
over and done with
before she’s dead

i choke on the dream scene, the prognosis and the grand scheme / ever-present in my throat /
and weep
then, a memory of us wedges in
i cry a smile, and smile a cry

i think
this, is all, too much
i can’t do this.

she is the one doing it
with her dignity, her calm, her reserve, she’s had too much practice, she’s well-traveled on this terrain

these consecutive life sentences, handed out

i am in retroactive outrage
over these injured bodies, injured, not failing,
precision is imperative /
i am in proactive rage
against these failing systems within this failed system in this injured, not failing, closed system /
precision is imperative

does anyone else want to know
the cause/s of death/s
these expendable, collateral clusters — of families, neighborhoods, workers, of an implausible deniability
one after another at four, five or six decades — dead

did he bring home the syndrome
in silica tucked in the creases
of his work clothes
of his brow,
he built the skyline! the Hancock even
my god, did he carry it in his semen

or was it the apartment on wabansia?
on karlov? on keystone?
all zoned mixed-use residential-commercial-industrial — industrial!
when they all walked from home
to work at the factory down the block,
on the next block, or across the alley
a metal plater
a powder coater
a dry-cleaner
tool and die

i don’t want these precognitions anymore!
let me dream her as a grandmother
with her grandchildren, all, all pristine!

i know the outcome
of walking forward in waking fantasy, in empty, unheard prayer, instead of trusting the retrograde revelations of my sleep

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Hydrangea nostalgia

On By ©️K.T. 2025In flora, from the inner city to outer rural, july, Lajuana Lampkins, nostalgia, PoemLeave a comment
revised for the fourth of july, 2025
voluminous, meandering hydrangea shrub
july 2023

This Hydrangea nostalgia bush was grown from a 2017 autumn cutting from its parent which is, or was, located in the front yard of my brick 2-flat in the northwest side neighborhood of Portage Park in Chicago. One of a half-dozen or so white hydrangeas planted by me in the late 90s, I had nurtured and obsessed over them for nearly 23 years — this one is now the lone survivor in my care at my rural home in Michigan.

lilac cuttings,
rooting hormone solution,
and growing medium,
September 23, 2017
(not even one of these most precious lilac cuttings rooted and survived)
a box of hope.
autumn hydrangea & lilac cuttings,
not ideal for propagation,
but ready for transport and transplant
to Michigan

The genesis of my hydrangea devotion was not Martha Stewart’s ubiquitous “Living” magazine, also of 1990s — though she certainly named, informed, inspired and validated many a hydrangea obsession within those pages — rather, it was the nostalgic ubiquity of enormous white snowball blooms and arresting blue-purple poms on heritage shrubs that I admired, coveted, played and hid among during my childhood summers spent with my maternal grandparents in Murphysboro — a sleepy, rural town in Southern Illinois — where my maternal great, great grandmother, my great grandmother and grandmother were all born.

I was entranced by those plants each summer — yet without the language to name and fully describe them to my mother when I returned back home to the Chicago Housing Authority’s Lathrop Homes aka “the projects” – which was usually, just in the nick of time for back-to-school in late August. Interestingly, I don’t recall ever drawing a picture of hydrangeas or taking a photo of them with my hard-earned Kodak Instamatic pocket camera as a child – even though I frequently used both methods to capture/record my favorite things. //

“Nostalgia Kills”

Nostalgia makes us psychologically pine for a sweeter but largely false time in our lives — a naive, shallow or ignorant time that we prefer to, that we choose to, remember as “innocence” or romanticize, idealize or distort as the “best times of my life” or the “good ol’ days”.

Instead of thoroughly revisiting the entirety of the time, place, people or experience, nostalgia often robs — or kills — the opportunity for true introspection and material dialectics. ///

early July 2023

Nostalgia sounds like the name of the a psychological condition catalyzed by avoiding “dis-ease”

Continue reading “Hydrangea nostalgia” →

le claire [street] in june

On By ©️K.T. 2025In Chicago, Gnosis, june, Narrative, Poem, poeme, poetry, summer, TreesLeave a comment

originally published june 17, 2016, revised june 11, 2023

* please visit the website/app Falling Fruit to add a fruiting tree that is located and accessible in the public way to the foraging database for others.

the author’s mulberry-stained fingers

A clear glimpse
A clear thought
on this clear June night

Of age,
and Alzheimer’s
the old-timer’s disease

A clear memory recorded and archived tonight
An acute awareness of myself
tonight, in time and place
a new track to play on loop for a listener in my future life

a husband, friend, or son
a caregiver, a kind one
a visitor, volunteer, or nurse,
a grandson, or maybe — no one

A reddish dog, eating mulberries
from the sidewalk in shadows
Mottled concrete in the dim light of a city street lamp
obscured by the canopy of that beautiful, June, fruit tree

Woody Guthrie, the mulberry forager

A woman, middle aged, seems so young, even a tad pretty, in her mind’s eye now
Stretching her still strong body upward for plump, dark berries
Reaching for branches trimmed too high by the urban foresters
or arborists or surgeons, I forget what they’re called

On her tippy toes
grabbing, pulling, picking
squeezing the dog’s leash between her thighs
don’t let him get loose in the dark, don’t let him get skunked in the dark

contorted mulberry tree at night

the same contorted mulberry in Sun’s light: wowowow

Some of the best ones are lost in the awkward tussle
before she can palm them, save them, taste them
She triggers a reverberative rain from boughs on high
That precise, delicate sweetness of the bounty in her mouth

The dog’s belly full of the ripe windfall
sustained by both gravity and this woman
His name was Woody, or Digby, I think
He used to climb into our sleep

Smashed and whole
The street, sidewalk and cars stained
by the impressive purple mess
the dark grass hiding perfect treasures for doves tomorrow morn

She and that dog,
They were urban foragers and gleaners in June.

All month long, her fingertips, feet and lips
tinted with their fuchsia dye, it didn’t even once occur to her to check his paws

A clear, recollection of acute melancholy:
this day — that day was also her son’s birthday //
The first birthday he ever spent away from home, away from her — in Nebraska, or was it Alaska?

That glorious tree, that good dog, that golden boy

an impressive purple mess-feast

2023 addendum:

Continue reading “le claire [street] in june” →

james, thank you.

On By ©️K.T. 2025In Poem, poetryLeave a comment

a man who knew my father befriended me
and caused me to question the nature of my reality,
my history, its validity,
my possibly-false memories
— all, viewed through the lens
of the person
who had a vested interest in
indoctrinating me
who preferred my naïveté
under the guise of protectivity

my last photo with my father,
Christmas break, age 6, Waukegan, Illinois

parents can write stories on the folds of a child’s cerebrum,
their pens go unchallenged
until they’re challenged /
their ink is like cord blood,
except it can re/generate — or damage

but it only takes one person
to crack their sky,
then, we astronomers spend
our lives asking these zealots
the non-answerable “why?”

Crown

On By ©️K.T. 2025In Aesthetics, Assay, Beauty, Essay, Eve, Exegesis, Exxay, Feminine, Gnosis, Gnostic, Her, Knowledge, Narrative, Ode, Poem, poeme, poetry, Rebirth, She's, Shes, Spiritive, Spirrative, UncategorizedLeave a comment

my hair holds memory,
i know this because

i cut my own hair today

20151002_1838021772227513.jpg
her, at ten.

as i held the ends

in my hands

i said

 

did you touch the Merced with me and my boy?

i said,

do you remember my father?

and my other precious loss?

i said,

do you remember the first dog?

i said,

were you here when

i still loved

and was loved?

i said,

you were there when my mother was so near death’s door

i said,

and when i found and lost,

and lost and found, my Self again?

smiles
sighs
cries
laughs
rage
wail
and
song

i still have possessions from all those times

and places

but no skin,

my skin long shed, my bone resorbed

and renewed over and over

but my long hair is still me from many years ago

that is why hair is so precious,

i thought,

this is the genesis

of what i have always

mistook as phobia

but no,

i know today

that

physical memory is held particularly, and only, in my hair

more than Samsonian

or vanity

or femininity

my long hair

is

my body
my health
my energy
my sensation
my emotion
my years
my identity
my essence

thank you

for growing

for remembering

for showing

for staying

for flowing

for tangling

for blowing

for graying

for glowing

for floating

for knowing

with me

all these years

 

no more cuts
without ceremony

and
i promise
i will never agree to lose you