Andrea L. Watson
Requiem in Radiant Time
for B.
Your soul-of-doves flew from Chama toward heart
of Antonito, over the 1911 Jewelry Factory, half-past 2
drug dealers marking time in front of the Palace Hotel,
nesting finally at the hilltop near your 80-lb mother.
You had a good time. The time
your 3rd grade teacher kept you after study-school
to give you watercolors from the Narrow Gauge Gift Shop;
the time you painted your step-brother’s barn
Buddhist gold, adding a colors-of-the-rainbow flag;
midnight, by mountain central time, when
you boarded the airplane for New York City with 24
other guys, sassy rally ribbon on your right shoulder.
Remember, you sewed on 11 ripe rhinestones?
I kiss the time you nicked my neck with thinning shears;
pale beer was your antiseptic: I was not afraid.
Today, the hospice is cold. Your bed is a coffin,
white-muslin lined, waiting; you do not recognize me.
The illness snips at your brain like a comb and scissors set.
In your strands of dreams, your mother is not drunk,
and you are not alone, at age 7, watching
for her to come back; you are sure she is dead
but you are dead; rain on her window fades to 0.
Andrea Watson is the founding publisher and editor of 3: A Taos Press. Her poetry has appeared in Nimrod, Rhino, Ekphrasis, International Poetry Review, and The Dublin Quarterly, among others. She is co-editor of Collecting Life: Poets on Objects Known and Imagined (3: A Taos Press, 2011)and of Malala: Poems for Malala Yousafzai (FutureCycle Press, 2013), the proceeds of which are donated to the Malala Fund for Education for Girls.
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Here is today’s prompt
(optional as always)
Na(HIV)PoWriMo is dwindling to a close, and we have not seen many poems in form in the series (perhaps a few sonnets). Write a poem in form touching on HIV: sonnet, villanelle, sestina, haiku (perhaps a series of haiku), ghazal, pantoum, etc. Use our old friend the Internet to find out about forms you are interested and to learn or review the rules for their composition.