Marriage & Family Therapist | Registered Poetry Therapist | Poet
Baggage Claim, WordTech Editions 2014 ($18), The Privacy of Wind ($10) and With Nothing Behind But Sky: A journey through grief ($12) can be ordered directly from Perie.
To order, contact her at perie(at)west(dot)net, visit Amazon.com, or phone her at 805-687-1619.
Playing Crash
for India
Back from swimming lessons,
my granddaughter doesn’t care
about her baby sister’s tears
or the fire’s smoke turning mountains
into ghosts, nor does she mind
her mother’s squinched face
at the mouse found in the rice,
or the new tenants who’ve taken over
the washing machine. We talk about
evacuation, should the fire mount the ridge.
She hears the word car and hands me
her favorite Matchbox, demands “uppy”
with a soosh sound, not shoosh for quiet
but soosh to dash the car
over the counter so it crashes
into dishes, over the ledge
and I scream whoopsy-doodle.
Soon we’re crawling on the floor,
crashing it into the garbage pail
where the rice has been thrown,
the table waiting dinner,
she attempting to say whoopsy-doodle
so hard each time, it comes out
with a spray and chortle and
we all collapse with laughter,
not giving a fiddle about the smoke
or the mouse, the game reducing us
to such carelessness
if everything came crashing down
we’d barely notice.
(Compass Rose (vol. IX 2009))