My third Pushcart nomination! And then

Walter watches the ducks

Walter and Betty collaborate

Walter in winter

Thank you thank you to Dale Wisely, F. John Sharp, Annie Stenzel, Bill McCloud, Steve Klepetar, Ina Roy-Faderman, and F. J. Bergmann for nominating my poem "And then" for the 2023 Pushcart awards. Right Hand Pointing is champion of the small but mighty and I am always honored to appear there. But this is much more. My other two Pushcart nominations I could rationalize away:  it was a new journal; I had done the editor a kindness, blah blah. This one has no such handle. And, really, this is a double endorsement: the same group nominated the poem also for Best of the Net.

And we are on the verge of the five-year anniversary of his death. I am on the verge of the five-year anniversary of his death. I will never be done grieving, just as I will never be done loving him, but I am moving through grief, and continuing to live.

 

We Gather Together

Some years back, Ruth Reichl ran a column about someone who analyzed family dynamics from the contents of the Thanksgiving table. It was a provocative piece, and it got me asking a question that I now ask, in a different spirit, as I make the rounds this time of year: What has to be on the table for it to feel like Thanksgiving to you?

The process has been quietly hilarious. Most start by essentially denying that there is anything special in their mouths or hearts: "Just the regular things." Regular to you, maybe. Or a reversion to the more-or-less cheerful assumption of childhood that what is familiar is how all the world must be.  Everyone names the bird, but almost no one lights up at its mention. “Oh, turkey, of course,” said A, with a self-deprecating giggle. She ended up admitting that for her it's ham, smoked ham, that she has had as long as she can remember, from her mother's table on to her own, and that the turkey might as well be a center-piece. B, who lives by the juicer and makes her own turkey-breast sausages so that they will be safely fat-free, spontaneously recites recipes from her Pennsylvania-Dutch childhood, all of which seem to start with a cup of melted butter and to finish with an inch of sour cream. Her eyes gleam.

The taste of some childhoods: green bean casserole, made entirely from processed foods, canned fried onion rings and frozen green beans and cream of mushroom soup, so much a part of some traditions that the recipe stands on the onion ring can. Its memory brought tears to the eyes, for a variety of reasons. I recently saw a recipe I can only think of as cruel, recreating this dish with fresh and scratch ingredients, including shitake mushrooms. What's the point? It won't taste like childhood, disappointing the Cs, and D who spent two-plus hours slivering fresh green beans and whisking béchamel will feel, accurately, unappreciated. I think this taste-of-childhood issue is the root of the two religions apparent at Thanksgiving: E reveres the marshmallow, F holds it to be an abomination. "Yams, with marshmallows of course. The little ones." "Yams, the way I make them, without marshmallows."  Do mixed marriages take turns, double up, or mix the sacred with the profane and go half-and-half with a DMZ?

In G's tradition, it's tamales, the only time of year that her father takes serious action in the kitchen. As many as can be found gather the weekend before, mix the masa, prepare the remembered fillings and make up some new ones. H always promises to bring me a sampling, but there are never any left, just descriptions. J waxed ecstatic about dinner rolls and stuffing and yams and corn and mashed potatoes.  Any particular kinds? “Nah, out of the box or the can or the freezer is fine, just so they are all there all at once.” “Mashed potatoes,” said K shyly, “real ones.” Real to her means smooth and soft. “Real mashed potatoes,” said her husband, agreeing with her emphatically, “but real means lumpy, and stiff enough to make ponds for gravy. If they're lumpy, you know they're real.”

L has tried many paths to holding a kinder gentler Thanksgiving. One year everyone offered to bring the touchstone dishes, and she took them up on it. The trouble was that it was then no one's Thanksgiving: the special dishes weren't the way she liked them, and L found herself trying to accommodate everyone else's notions of what ought to be there. For instance, a daughter swore that her new husband's family always had three kinds of Jello molds, that it was generations of tradition and critically important to them. L wanted all the families to feel welcomed. So, she took up scarce time and scarcer refrigerator space and duly produced the Jello molds. Came time to clean up and there they were, each one with only a spoonful or two removed. Slow burn.  Some years people would brightly bring pies, but "tricked-out pies, pumpkin with molasses or pecan with chocolate, and they tasted just plain wrong." Now a daughter-in-law brings plain pies from Costco.  They do not thrill, but neither do they offend. One year L decided to do a completely different Thanksgiving, and changed everything. She ended up with a sort of Italo-French-Chinese Thanksgiving, which sounds intriguingly post-modern until you think about how and where the whole feast began. Never mind the culture wars: it was better in theory than it tasted in practice.

M admitted that her husband is the cook, year-round, and that his rule becomes yet more imperious at this time of year. (I recognize that.) This year, she wanted to have green beans.  “No,” he said, “it's gotta be peas.” “But—“ she said.  “NO,” he said, showing some strain, “it must be peas or it is not Thanksgiving.” Did he command the entire meal? “No no NO,” she said, eyes flashing; she always made the dressing. It started with her mother's recipe that included several kinds of nuts and seeds and herbs, and that was only where it, and she, started.

And how about my table? For me, it seems to be recipes that take time, advance prep, and at least two stages of pre-cooking. Spiced cranberry sauce whose spices are whole and start with steeping in a sugar syrup, and that must ripen for a week. Dressing with at least ten ingredients of which two themselves require what amounts to a recipe. Yams that are parboiled, then bake very, very slowly in fresh-squeezed—not negotiable—orange juice. Various guests asked one year about various dishes, but when someone asked about the turkey, one friend sighed, "Probably parboiled and then roasted in cream." Actually, that turns out to be rather how I feel by the time we sit down: wilted, seasoned, opulent, a bit crusty. As a family member used to say when she was a competitive cyclist, "Stick a fork in me, 'cause I'm done."

Best of the Net Nomination, 2023: And then

 WWalter, Karen, and Julie chez Christine and Anand, 2010

Thank you Dale Wisely and other editors of Right Hand Pointing for nominating my poem And then for Best of the Net 2023. I am honored. This poem also appears in The Beautiful Leaves.

And then

     How empty his body became

once he’d left it,

his jaw hanging slack, then slacker,

his face emptying, dissolving

into mere parts. Empty of him,

no longer his face. Still his hands.

     I still expected him

to pull away 

from my tugging fingers

when I tied up a bundle of his silver hair 

with a length of thread, 

binding a sheaf

before I cut it off.

right hand pointing/ambidextrous bloodhound productions | Facebook

Poetry In the Marketplace--Literally

 

Fresh herbs are where it's at in the open air market

Chinese or Asian eggplants in the farmers market

Marketplace

 

Thin blondes and their teacup Yorkies yap

next to the baby beets, the bunches of purple basil.

A wannabe-Dylan’s harmonica whines,

but these organic buyers don’t look back.

By the heirloom potatoes, fitful typing chatters

as the Unheard Poet taps out a poem,

free, for anyone who asks, plus a bill or two for Art.

He is taking the Basho challenge on his dusty portable Olivetti.

Hipster skulls twitch on his brown suede sneakers,

and he works his toes as he hunts and pecks his way.

Behind him, a puddle holds a scrap of lettuce

            floating in its mirrored milky sky. 

Rowdy Seniors Close Down Poetry Reading, Get Booted from Bookstore

Signing copies of TBL for Stephanie and for Sherry

McKenna DeLucca, much-tried bookstore manager, and Mark Givens, my esteemed publisher

 Last Saturday, September 9 2023, I threw a book launch party for The Beautiful Leaves at the Claremont Forum's Prison Project Bookstore. The Prison Project sells donated books to fund prisoners' requests for books. (The most requested book? Dictionaries.) It was a great afternoon. Official start time was 2:00, but we kicked off at 2:20 to give people a bit of time to gather and to buy books. Mark Givens, my publisher at Bamboo Dart Press, introduced me warmly (and told me privately that he thought this was a really good collection, and that it gave him ideas for expanding the purview of his press). 

I read five poems. I selected them on the fly, so I could gauge my audience’s response. I found myself avoiding the poems I wrote closest to his death—not really for read-aloud. Nancy Murphy commented that my poems sounded conversational. It’s true that I strive to write the way I talk, which is sometimes conversational, sometimes more elevated and holding forth. Left over from having taught pre-docs, I suppose. It’s also true that I am a fairly experienced reader, so choose poems that read more conversationally. The more intricate poems work better on the page, and that’s where I leave them. It is also true that it takes a lot of craft to sound artless.

Partly because of my age, most of my friends are seniors. The rest comprised friends from all parts of my life:  high school, acupuncturist, voice teacher, psychologists, poetry people, people affiliated with the Cal Poly Chemistry Department whom I met through Walter, friends who are simply friends. People drifted, congregated, saw old friends, talked with new people, milled around. Then the manager received a call—three calls—from Claremont Forum board members. They were ‘concerned’ about people blocking the aisles. It was at this point that I noticed a camera surveying the bookstore. Apparently board members can monitor the feed. The manager apologetically asked me if I could ask my guests to leave those spaces clear, in case some emergency arose and the place had to be evacuated. I thought to myself that the board apparently hadn’t minded people in the aisles before my event started, when the bookstore was so full of people milling around in the center space that I had trouble entering. But anyhow. My guests fitted themselves into a bay, rather the way you arrange yourself in an elevator, talked and sampled refreshments, ventured out of their improvised compound to buy the bookstore’s books. Then the much leaned-upon manager told me that the board was insisting she stop the reading, or else close the bookstore. I read another set, a little grimmer this time. My daughter and friends packed up the refreshments while I chatted with folks and signed some more books. We were out by 4:00 instead of 5:00.

How often do you get to say, “Dude! Raging seniors kicked out for partying too hard! Whoot!” Walter would have been proud.

The Beautiful Leaves, the book arrives

 

You’ve been hearing me talk about this collection for a few years, and now it is about to see light of day. The Beautiful Leaves , the collection of my poems about my beloved last husband Walter, will be published on August 8 by Pelekinesis Press (specifically, the Bamboo Dart division). Usually, I feel somewhat constrained about promoting my collections, but not this time. I feel that I am honoring Walter as he deserves. I feel also that my particular take on death and dying is not one you commonly encounter, and that my approach might strike a chord with other bereaved folk.

If you would like me to sign a copy and send it to you, please send $12 ($9 for the book, $3 for packaging and mailing, to my PayPal account, pieplate8@yahoo.com. Be sure to include your address in the notes. If you prefer Zelle, send me an email to the above address, or leave a comment, and I’ll send you the account number. Venmo also works:  @karen-greenbaum-maya. Of course, if we will see each other soon, or if you are planning on attending my book launch, or any of my readings, then just the $9.

I am so happy to have this collection come out. Walter loved the poems I wrote before his death, and I am glad to leave testimony about him.

AHA: a blast from the past, so to speak.

 

A very striking (no pun intended) virtual installation. You had to download the app, then sign in and view this creation through your phone. Naturally, the other people on the pier have no idea what you're seeing--and the phone just adds them into the scene

There is a little game in this prose poem. No one has noticed it yet. Perhaps you will.

Aha:  Atomic Apron

Hidden in the fold of the hem are the secrets of the atomic bomb, the equations and transitions that won the war. A white cotton apron, trimmed with satin-stitched wild roses. How can it have gone through the war and still be so pure? And the cloth, gauzy, open-weave, nothing but a net of threads. How did the secrets not leak through? Always the question no one asks out loud: Did that really happen? He’s the one who knows. Archbishop of physicists, eighty years ago they say, he inscribed the breakthrough on the cloth, then stitched it up tight. He is now so famous that credit, blame, renown no longer concern him. All respect is temporary. He knows this, as surely as he knows everything atomic reverts, sooner or later, to hydrogen. Ad infinitum, he will remember the moment when he understood: My God, he’d said, ja mei, mais non, aha.

Take it or leave it: Actually

 

The beginnings of a wildfire, near Sunland, CA

Actually…

…before she grew up in a barn, she was raised by wolves.

Her hair's a mess, but she has a fine big voice.
You can hear her down the street howling out Mahler
with something of an accent.  Sends a shiver up the spine.
She was a wild child, looking out into the moonlight,
snarling and nipping if someone interrupted.
School wasn't easy, what with the biting and the fleas.
No one has ever been trapped so long and survived.
She woke with the chickens, she slept with the cats.
Their smells kept her safe with the other animals.
People in the house made horn-signs, spat to avert her.
Their every sigh drew drops of blood.
This brought bad luck.  If you stumble as you go,
you are not welcome, and she never stepped right,
as sure as dancing, not even once.

Play her the song.  Maybe she'll sing.

Not quite Shakespeare: About the Author

 Found poem with refrigerator magnets

In college I had a friend, then known as Frances Harrod, who adored Alexander Pope. She had memorized hours and hours of his work, and would recite at any provocation. I loved it. I particularly loved Pope's Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, where Pope complains about the travails of being a famous poet. Alas. At one point, he mocks folks who try to flatter him by telling him how he resembles the greats, but only in their defects:  "Go on, obliging creature, make me see//All that disgraced my betters, met in me." Naturally I found it very possible to take the same approach.

About the Author

 

Like Proust, I’m not inventive.

Like Henry James, I’m fat.

Like Melville, slow to publish;

Like Eliot, I’ve a cat.

 

Like Stevens, I do other work;

Like Jarrell, write in prose.

Like Thurber, I don’t see too good;

Like Shakespeare, I wear clothes.

 

Like Kafka, I remember dreams;

Like Shaw, pontificate.

Love Paris just like Baudelaire;

Like Henry Roth, I’m late.

 

Like Freud, I must have enemies.

Like Gilbert, I’m not glad.

Like Wilde, I’m snide but tactless.

Like Sylvia Plath, I’m mad.

 

Like Joyce, exploit allusions;

Like Tolstoy, I’m no fun;

Like William Blake, can’t catch a break;

Like Reverend John, I’m donne.

Stradivarius in Press Pause Press

 

Street musician in the plaza in front of the Pompidou Center. 

Damn he was good. Playing Bach, as I remember.

Stradivarius, a prose poem about the Judy Garland-Van Johnson vehicle, In the Good Old Summertime is the headliner in The Family Room on Press Pause Press. Another ekphrastic prose poem about one of my life-long obsessions, Buster Keaton. If you like, paste the address below into your browser. One you get there, I suggest you 'select' the text. Otherwise, pale gray on white on a monitor is kinda hard to read, though it looks cool and all that.

Stradivarius in the Family Room of Press Pause Press. Thank you!

https://www.presspausepress.org/press-play/2022/2/15/karengreenbaummaya

 

 

Blast from the past: Abecedarian of the Budgies

Hawk in the apricot tree, November.

 

When I was coming up on fifty, my dear husband told me, "I know I'm supposed to throw you a surprise party, but I'm no good at those things. If you like, I will try. But I could also take you on a vacation to Paris and Athens. What would you like?" That was an easy decision. In preparation for the trip, I scoured guide books for targets of opportunity. In the event, however, I was in the middle of a health crisis on top of the ongoing midlife phase (it's not a midlife crisis--it lasts too long to be considered a single crisis). The trip itself was much more difficult than either of us had expected, Still, worth having done. This photo is not from that trip, all of whose photos were on FILM, as was still the custom, mostly, and I would have to scan them, manually to post them here. Maybe someday. In any case, the only birds we saw were hungry sparrows. And, you can probably surmise that the initial words of the lines of an abecedarian follow the alphabet. This below is a double abecedarian: the last letters of each line also follow the alphabet, in reverse.

This piece first appeared in Unshod Quills in July 2013.

Abecedarian of the Budgies

 

A week in Athens for my half-century birthday, sure antidote to Weltschmerz.

Believed Frommer’s:  owners parade their budgies in Oneiros Park every Sunday.

 

Could caged canaries be freed? Imagine seeing each avian aviatrix

dance, bound only by cotton strings that would trail daintily below.

 

(Elastic cord would have launched each bird like Barishnikov,

feverish, entangled like the louche courtship dances of Corfu.)

 

Greeks lock bumpers, jump from cars, snarl and brawl in traffic, but

Hellenic birds, even on Sundays, must stay separate as dolmades.

 

Icarus convinced folk you could fly too high. Greeks remember.

Joy-riding birds of Athens, loosed every Sunday from deux à cinq,

 

kites with tiny minds of their own, would soar while locals nap.

Limp, weepy, off-kilter, sleepy, I was not philosophical like Plato.

 

My half-century found me so much less settled than even Helen,

noodling my way through midlife, out-of-step and off the rhythm.

 

Olives of Athena sprouting in every park; now, this mythic marvel:

parakeets uncaged in the polis? What a custom! I was wild to gawk.

 

Question that I never sent to Arthur Frommer, trusted tourist Raj:

Remind me, who told you this tale of tethered birds? The Oracle of Delphi?

 

Simple me, I asked the hotel clerk how to find the park. In fine English,

truthful, not at all unkind:   Never have I ever heard such a ridiculous thing.

 

Unstoppered, fabled birds flew away. I felt my whole flock take off,

vanishing back into the naïve guidebook of this faded layered place,

 

where nods mean no, where one conveys yes by shaking the head.

Xenophile I might be, but that wasn’t enough in Athens. Organic

 

yoghurt was the only soothing part of entire days I spent silent as a tomb.

Zeno said, Once delayed, you can never catch up. You can bet your last drachma.

Newly published: Rembrandt at Fifty, Eve the Inventor, where he did go

 Walter in NYC at the Frick in 2006, contemplating a younger Rembrandt. And thank you, Isabel Niremberg of Offcourse, for publishing these poems.

Poems by Karen Greenbaum-maya

Self-Portrait, Rembrandt at Fifty

He is already looking at you.
No speculation, just appraisal.
The painter plays down the all-seeing eyes
peering from his famous shadows.
The arms of his chair give him a throne,
the right hand easy and magisterial,
deploying a paintbrush, or a baton,
something with a point
suitable for pointing out.

Those rich fabrics we’ve seen before.
Perhaps they distract, dazzle us,
so we don’t read the bulk of his chest
as a swell of maternal bosom,
cinched, but not by the crimson sash
whose crimson brings out the same tone
in his drink-mottled cheeks, his winter-bitten lips,
in the whiskey nose that may be no such thing.
Could just be temperature shifts, spicy foods. Or stress
of bankruptcy, one after another infant
dead before summer,.

You can barely make out his head covering.
A squashed cloche, perhaps velvet.
Deep red-brown. There’s that red again.
Hard to distinguish against
the darkness that surrounds him, yet
it makes a hole, still darker, in the darkness,
shadows those bleak eyes
no amount of dress-up can soften.

Seems what the painter saw
left the sitter with a bitter taste in his mouth.
Just don’t blame the artist.

 

Eve the Inventor

When Eve bites into the apple, she invents Time. She crunches the bite, tastes the juice released from the crushed chambers. She swallows. Now it is Gone. Now there is a Now, becoming Then. Now the apple starts to enter the past, The next bite is a little less  crisp. We are told that Eve has invented Death. Do not forget that she also invented Loss. And Music. Birds sing for the first time when their song begins and ends. Grasses bend in the new little wind, and the sun starts to drift to the horizon. The serpent is astonished to feel the desire to shed his skin. Eve discovers her apple’s green-woody stem that doesn’t even know its useful life is over. She has not yet discovered that no good deed goes unpunished.

 

where he did go…

…when he left Brasil at nineteen
cheapest passage was on a freighter
Took eight weeks. Crew got to know him
They offered him a job as Sparks
because he knew Morse code
He saw himself as Joseph Conrad,
wearing dress whites,
writing in his cabin below the waterline

Where he did go was New Orleans, then
the Greyhound to Austin,
counting on the scholarship they yanked
when they realized
he was no US resident
He said the accents in the hallways
sounded like a joke, a movie
but it was for real
same as those fancy cowboy boots everyone wore

Where he did go
After death is told by the living
We looked
into his face losing its faceness
his jaw drooping from its hinges
the muscles off-line
forgetting what they were there for
retired at last

I took a photo
I will never show,
the last thing I have of him
except the last glimpse of his face
the coroners looking over at me
for a signal, for permission
before they closed the bag

The New Normal 2.3 (Jitterbug, and Father's Day)

 My father, David Greenbaum, probably 8 or so, already deaf. (1927-1979)

Jitterbug

 

You have to understand:

at six months he should have died

when fever torched his otic nerve,

scalded his inner ear.

Grandma bargained, connived, even

changed his name to change God’s mind:

David, always outmatched,

yet understanding the swing of sling.

The odds shorted him, every time.

 

Somehow he knew music,

sold vinyl in Hollywood after school.

His heart beat 4/4 like the blues,

just right for a jitterbug slow enough for flair,

to place, to plant the back foot

so the wave snaps right up your spine

to your thrown-back head.

Loved the cool grunt of the bass

sounding diminished thirds,

augmented sevenths. Vibes poured

through the pencil

he held like a straw between his teeth,

eraser braced on the turntable base.

 

The man could dance.

Taught me the off-kilter tilt of hips

kept balanced by the partner’s hand,

shoulders spiraled around the core,

each of us styling, saved from falling

by the back-beat back-step.

 

He’d raise his arm and I’d strut under,

turning as natural as walking.

We’d move into the snazzy draw,

hands sliding along the other’s arms,

no words needed for the trick

of snagging fingertips,

catching and pulling back to the center,

leaning and returning,

solid on the beat he could not hear.

:::

The New Normal 2.2 (featuring The Clairvoyant Widow)

 

Karen Greenbaum-Maya Archives | U n l o s t (unlostjournal.com)

The cento is a fun form and something of a Rorschach test for the poet. You pull out some other writers' work and take lines that strike you, in no particular way. Then you arrange them so that the order makes sense to you. I love found objects and found poems anyhow, and when I saw that line of Roethke, I knew what to do. I have included this one in my tribute to my husband, The Beautiful Leaves, which Bamboo Dart Press will publish in August 2023.

The Ballad of the Clairvoyant Widow

--a cento of lines of Christine Gosnay, Michelle Brittan Rosado, Russell Salomon, and Theodore Roethke

   Slow, slow as a fish she came,

A green angel swaying branches.

The wide streams go their way.

She went in slowly, and found him.

She watched the river wind itself away.

 

   Everything undoes itself.

He woke with mountains in his knees.

She saw her father shrinking in his skin.

She thought a bird and it began to fly.

The light cried out, and she was there to hear.

 

   The wings have fallen off. The arms too.

It was as if she tried to walk in hay.

Once she knew how to run.

She came to the western river,

breathed as if moving a hand toward a candle.

 

   The sleep was not deep but waking was slow.

The outline of one is inseparable.

The New Normal 2.1 (featuring Busy)

 

https://bodyliterature.com/2020/01/27/karen-greenbaum-maya-5/

B O D Y  is an estimable journal published out of Prague. Yes, that Prague. I am honored to have placed several pieces there over the years.

Busy

French bees are dying, she tells me. Not because of big Agro pushing its products, threatening finance interruptus, the short-term win killing the long-term love. The bees are dying because the Chinese have planted killer bees that lay their eggs in the French bees. Like mantises they behead, like termites they eat wood, like wasps they colonize from within the good-hearted worker bee herself.   

Oh, these Chinese bees. They’re aggressive as South American bees and twice times the size. Easily they kill the French bees. A single smear of their honey leaves you braindead but unable to stop consuming Chinese imports. There you go, buying twice what you need. There are bees flying all over the blossoming trees, cherry and quince, even willows and camellias, but she knows the bees are dying, just going through the motions.

 She can tell the Chinese ladybugs from the French. The vulgar Chinese are gaudy with too many dots. The French ladybugs are subtly accented with two, at most four, asymmetrical for interest. Chinese ladybugs adapt quickly. They do not care about tradition. They undersell the French ladybugs and take over their turf. You’d think there would be enough for all, aphids being what they are, but no. Oh no.

The New Normal 2.0 (featuring To Die in Cochabamba)

You realize, of course, that I'd rather be able to go back to the way I was managing this blog before, namely, putting forth my comments and observations and posting links to any on-line publication. But Google improved the format over a year ago, and as a result I can't figure out how to set up the links. So, I'm going to make it possible for me, and I hope simple for you, Gentle Reader. When I get something published, and when it achieves publication, I will post the link and the text of the poem right here, in the post. Where you are reading this. If I actually achieve a thought worth sharing, I'll put that up here too.

Today's post, not a new one, but from an expired link to The Centrifugal Eye, a project of Eve Hanninen, who set it down so she could spend some time with her own work. What an excellent editor she is, reading closely and considering what might improve the poem.

To Die in Cochabamba (I Will Not Die in Paris) 

Cochabamba, green valley at the mountaintop,

umbilical scar high on the equator.

No one dies in Cochabamba.

I will die in Cochabamba.

Cochabamba of eternal spring,

no longest night, no shortest day.

Streams freeze hard after sundown,

winter comes every night in Cochabamba.

 

Cochabamba of bum leg, the fùtbol ploy.

The center herds the ball around rival feet,

threads it down the field on bamboo legs

while fans shout eternal spring in Cochabamba.

 

Cochabamba, hit samba of Carneval.

Close the window, that cochabamba

is getting on my last nerve, I tell the nurse,

but she is busy slipping morphine under my tongue.

She cups my face in her dry hand,

and my eyes, lips, bum leg relax, Ay, mi cochabamba.

 

It seems in Cochabamba everyone knows,

but I don’t understand, I never have.

I am a plane crash in Cochabamba,

aisle lights down the center in the darkness.