The Venice Beach Portrait Painter

I paint exclusively in black-and-white. I pay homage to the past. I like to paint portraits of deceased iconic artists like Salvador Dali, Frida Kahlo, and Giotto di Bondone. I sell my portraits on the Venice Boardwalk to tourists and locals alike. My customers are often foreigners and folks from landlocked states looking for an escape from the routine of their suburban lives. These tourists are looking to drop a little cash on bohemian souvenirs.
          There is a special connection between art, ocean mist and people-watching. Call it inspiration or living off your mind. I truly live for these southern California weekends on the boardwalk. Don’t think I’ll ever leave. Except maybe to Acapulco, Mexico. Maybe in the next life.
 
**

Moon, Wind, Eternity

A man in a “Baudelaire for President” shirt walked in the city at midnight. He wasn’t drunk on absinthe, more like a late black coffee which had him over-stimulated. He saw the moon in the distance, alone like a scholarly monk. He saw the stars bright in the night sky: owl eyes. The man in a “Baudelaire for President” shirt had given up cigarettes when he turned thirty-five, but he couldn’t give up caffeine. He sat on a graffitied park bench and wrote a poem. It was about the miracle of the night sky and the chill of the wind. He titled it, “Moon, Wind, Eternity.” When he got home from his midnight stroll, he edited the poem. He submitted it to a few of his favourite literary magazines before drifting away to the ether of sleep.

**

New Year’s Resolution
 
A man jumped into a lake. It was the beginning of the new year. He’d never been up close to a lake before. He’d driven by Pyramid Lake on the way to Los Angeles or the Bay Area but never took a dip. He didn’t get out much. The man knew how to swim from childhood lessons, but not formal ones. Just testing it out: sink or swim. His family was kind of crazy, but they were also tough. He couldn’t take that away from them. Tough as Canelo or any working-class boxer, really. As he floated in the lake, it occurred to him that his new year’s resolution was to swim more: lakes, ocean, the gym. He would even take up surfing lessons. Start from the beginning, humble himself, crawling, until he could surf with ease. For now, he rested and thought about the Rose Parade earlier that morning. What a gorgeous concept, he thought, flowers on parade.
 
**
 
Confessions of a Failed Abstract-Expressionist Painter
 
I’m a painter who often fears a lack of money in life. I’m okay, for now, but will I ever own a house? Perhaps I can venture out to teach art soon? Perhaps I’ll find another occupation? There is also the fear of lack of fame. Mostly ego, of course, but every artist wants to be appreciated, especially while we’re still alive, right? I guess I’m already unknown, and it’s not the end of the world. Perhaps I can tough it out as a mere pedestrian in this vast, indifferent world. The next case scenario is lack of love. Certainly, the worst of the scenarios. Perhaps a result of lack of money or lack of fame. Lack of love cuts deepest, like a samurai sword to the gut. A life lived in isolation, like a drifting island, floating at sea, at midnight.
 
**                
 
The Garden of Lilacs
 
A man in a Deftones shirt walked in a garden of lilacs. He looked up at the sky; rain was on the way. Baptism? When he was a child, he was baptized along with his twin brother. His twin brother was named after pointing randomly to a page in the Bible. He was also named this way. Later, he left the church to watch football and basketball on Sunday mornings. When he was a teenager, the man in a Deftones shirt used to surf the concrete on a longboard, headphones, sunglasses and all. Now, the man in a Deftones shirt, walking in a field of lilacs, is a professional photographer. His favourite photos are of his Abuelo, who worked the fields in Mexico and the U.S. as a Bracero. The man in a Deftones shirt shared the photos of his Abuelo and family in Mexico as part of a canvas exhibition on collage style painting. The name of the exhibition: Arguments, Baptisms and Other Epiphanies.

**

Jose Hernandez Diaz (he, him, his) is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020) Bad Mexican, Bad American (Acre Books, 2024) The Parachutist (Sundress Publications, 2025) Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man (Red Hen Press, 2025) and the forthcoming, The Lighthouse Tattoo (Acre Books, 2026). He has taught creative writing at the University of California at Riverside, and at the University of Tennessee where he was the Poet in Residence.

The War, Photos by Robert Doisneau

To know when your mother was born is to know when you were born. To know when the clock struck noon was to know that time dies in an abandoned castle where all floors look crooked from an opposite doorway. You were the tallest boy in the class. You wiped your tears with your teacher’s kerchief after the priest punished you for running when you should have been walking to the lavatory line. Among the girls posed side-saddle on the metal chairs between two rows of chestnut trees about to dosey doe, your hair was the shortest. In a shop window, a doll’s head, like an apparition, rests on her own head; champagne bottles in tuxedos; un chat endormi. One wall displays boys playing war. Socks pulled up below the knee. Metal, barrel hoops—foxhole slingshot. A white pigeon or a white dove? Her boots are drowning in puddles of milk. The exit from the exhibit is through a curtain holding two lovers kissing before a sculpture of a naked woman in repose. The heft and the sheath secured around my own body sets off the museum’s alarm twice. I’m always getting too close to what I’m not allowed to touch.
 
 **

The Buck Stops Here
  
If the deer looks back, there are children behind her. If the deer looks at you there is no one else but you and the deer. I’m crossing this island on a road called Old Milk Route near Chaos Corner. On this island we match our colours, we match the palette of ourselves to the granite and cobblestone and shingles. Exceptions are found in mid-August where some trees start to colour, the Burning Bush and the hydrangea’s blossoms, as big as cotton candy, with the hue of summer pastels still living in their branches. I recite these words into my phone; these words will soon become this poem. I do this in my poetry voice as if the universe were listening, as if I'm talking to somebody, but lately the only person I talk to is you. You, a month and a half dead. You, who fixed my house, who became a man I loved for a very short time. A man who wore his black shirt with Banksy’s Butterfly Girl Suicide iron-on, the day he turned science into magic. At my new house in my new yard, I leave all the milkweed for the Monarchs. And when they bloom and find the air and pastures and meadows and flowers, I will call them by your name. After all that time in the cocoon, after the opening and the stretching and the transformation, like you, each will be called to another world too quickly. Called to the dark, distant heat of a sunless day that is halfway through billions of years of its own life cycle. We sometimes fought about money and I can’t figure out if there is any currency, any promise, any bargain, any stone I could use as payment to start over. 
 
** 

Selling Our Mother’s House 
 
When I think of California, I remember my mid 30s, West Hollywood’s haze burning into sun. This was before I knew what I was or what I was becoming. The truth? Not much, and not much more. 25 years have passed since I last visited Santa Monica. Then, my spirit drifted over the cliff’s edge and created circles of refuge like a fog over the right hand of the mountains. I return to reconcile the dread and the heart’s insistence that my years of mourning require reprieve. I photograph birds of prey and birds of paradise, cacti and waving palms. I settle into the green, wooden pagoda I photographed years ago with film that had to be developed through the mail. I descend the steps to face the vast Pacific and baptize the beginning of the last third of my life in water and sand. I leave some of my pain behind, some of your death, some of the weight of the bricks called, “Goodbye.” Now, airborne, fear not sister, I return with most of you with me. But, it’s time — it’s time for spring to break me open instead of grief. This will mark the last year of picking blackberries in our mother’s yard. From their flowers, bees will make a honey so sweet, it will whet and wake the tongue of my need for forgiveness from my guilt for the wounds that took you from me. I’ll be leaving our former home before the bruised, grainy, bulbs appear—a bird’s delicate sustenance. With only one song left to sing, I sing to thee:

I’m sorry, my own sweet, beloved fruit; I’m sorry, my heart-drenched succulent --

I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
 
** 
 
 Denied Access
 
I am the blood borne pathogen of a fish-eyed ferry. Crossing a sound that zips its lips. We reach an island with a train. I board and find my seat, wear a mask so no one will sit near me. I’m not sick, but the abdomen is congested—belly fat, belly flop. Ask the instructor who taught me to swim, held my back, let me sink. The water became a surface; my back became the footsteps of Peter, the apostle. Having long been betrayed, which of you will deny me? The geese form a V, fly south—down, down, down, descent and indecent. We all learn to love by being held and being let go.
 
**
 
Baptism By Fire
 
There’s no tell-tale heart beneath her floorboards. And by that, I mean her chest. It was strong and clean until the chemo: my heart's fine, she always said, but I knew this wasn’t true. What caused or revealed the thickness in the chambers? What caused the attack? Rushed in an ambulance on I-95 South a couple of hours before midnight, where they claim the best cardiologist is. A pandemic burning through the city, no visitors allowed, my 81-years-old mother in New Haven alone. She never ate that day, that’s what bothered her most. And the guy near her room tainted the hallway with rage swearing so she couldn’t sleep, but insomnia was common. At 1 a.m. tests and images that revealed blockages, calcifications, tunnels tightened with milk’s hard extractions. They drilled just enough not to kill her—enough for blood to re-activate her heart. The heart I’d never seen. She saved her gloom only for me; her cusp of evening dark glowed like headlamps on black ice. Others, instead, witnessed the lights in her windows, the ones she taped to the sill from the boxes labeled “Christmas.” In the gloaming of her final week, she deemed this Earth suddenly good, this life suddenly worth living: “I don’t want to leave,” she said, too quietly, too late. Alone, I escorted her down death’s aisle across the constellations; I left her at the threshold of her former home. Despite all her fears, no one was waiting there to punish her, even for leaving me years ago, not that she considered that a crime, her own mother had done the same to both of us. I remember my grandmother’s red nails stirring the rocks in her afternoon bourbon—she'd dab a little on my lips— as I licked them it burned my tongue like a slap.
 
 **
 
The Nobel Prize Museum, Stockholm
 
A pair of pigeons lived in the antenna. In the name of science, we shot the pigeons to challenge The Big Bang theory against The Steady State. The Big Bang won. It was vice versus versa, it was residue of light and waves, the expansion of collateral damage. Did Neil’s Bohr fret about his body? Did he have to look at himself under a microscope and apologize for every flaw? Did he hold a mirror up to his penis and scrotum, in a circle of men, and say— “I can name the three chambers under my foreskin, I can trace the line on my testicles and call it by its Latin name.”? In Stockholm there are too many steeples steeped in fog. Even the magpie, in its coat & tails, stops looking for gilt around the graves, recognizes itself in the stone’s reflective surface and flies offstage singing I want to be loved for my mind.
 
 **

How We Keep What We Name
  
I am feeling sullen. If a bench were placed beside me, I’d sit on the cold ground instead and break every rule I set. For instance, I’m supposed to walk outside for two miles if it’s over 40 degrees. I’m supposed to get my steps in before dark. But instead, I plop on the couch and binge-watch videos on my phone I made about death. I could be a nomad; I could have a donkey. In fact, I do have a donkey, it followed me to the desert with a few years’ worth of surgical masks and a canteen filled with sanitizer for the pandemic that was only a mirage about death. Not everyone’s, but yours. I know it’s time to sell the donkey. But what would he do, what would he carry? Plus, I’ve named him already, I call him Melvin, and he calls me Story because I’m a big talker. He listens to every word I mutter about death while I lie on the cold desert floor. I dream that Melvin is an insomniac, and I have sleep apnea. In the dream he tells me that I was dreaming about you again, dear sister, and I told him, not that he asked, that you were sitting on the bench beside me and that is why I was sitting on the ground. That this dream is not a mirage and there is a distance where my sister and I are still in it counting the white sails on the white boats between us.
 
 **
 
Sea Glass
  
There was not much my mom and I liked to do together, but since I was very young she taught me how to hunt; how to toughen the soles of my feet to endure the pain; how to stand over a wide-spread assemblage; how to look and look and look; how to never give up; how to shade the light when it blinded everything into blending; how to weigh down my pockets with things that were once whole and clear; how to curate the fragments inside glass cylinders and stand them in the light; how the glass became light; how the beams became glass; how she protected and carried her collection, her years of genuflection and reverence, a bending toward the shore. A life’s work, the slight roughness from salt and churning; a legacy. She separated each by colour. These are passed to me. Some she found by my side. I’d often keep the bigger ones and hand her what I felt was too small. From me, she would take anything she could get.
 
**

Dianne Bilyak is a Pushcart-prize nominated writer and a CT disability rights advocate. Her book of poems, Against the Turning, was published in 2011, and her work has also been featured in America Magazine, Drunken Boat, The Massachusetts Review, and The Tampa Review. In 2021, Bilyak's memoir was published by Wesleyan University Press. It was a finalist for the Gilda Award. The book is titled, Nothing Special: The Mostly True, Sometimes Funny Tales of Two Sisters. She enjoys staring into space and eating chocolate. ​

 
I am Broken / 
Heart
 
Line breaks have a bad rep: wildfire flames lick over the crest of the Pasadena hillsides. Firefighters breathe plastics and melted tires. Here in Vermont line breaks mean power outages. Wind. Snow too heavy for trees to hold up their heads. Pick-up-stick trees crossing down wires along the unplowed two-lane road to some small village. In the kitchen, cold soup. Grabbed candles that smell of tea tree, bergamot, and soy wax. A dead lamp where I want to read police procedural mysteries. No light over my mirror. A nine-battery flashlight.  The rhythm for the line? I’m the Mimer Clapper in the gospel service that waits for someone else to clap first so I can dance and clap with them. Someone always goes first. On the beat. As for poetry, I faked my way through a master’s degree as if I could parse rhythms other than iambic. Even now I break an adjective from its noun. 
 
**
 
Lace on Sunday
 
I wake up as lace. Like fresh snow that lines every twig. No black or scarlet mantillas. Handmade. Like the tablecloth my mother crocheted when she was pregnant with me, nine months of forever. Her work fits the longest dinner table I’ve ever seen. I’ve washed red wine stains from it. Beef blood. Blue birthday cake frosting. Now I’m white lace. Too old for lingerie, weddings or baptisms. I am intricacy, open spaces, and symmetry – inklings of what to expect in complex knots. I will not surround a neck like Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s signature collar to remind everyone she was a woman – not a person of coat and tie, a person of lace. Imagine how I felt to realize I am only slightly bigger than a doily. An antimacassar sized to protect the back of a chair from male hair oil. Unacceptable! I reinvent myself.  I am prayer flag hung on a tree to let wind taste lace, wash with rain. I flutter in the breeze until longing spreads. Til I unravel.
 
**
 
Cosmic Latte
 
Astronomers at Johns Hopkins studied 200,000 galaxies. They determined cosmic latte is the average color of the universe in stars, galaxies, clouds of dust and gas.  To be specific: HEX #FFF8E7 if you want to dip your computer’s eyedropper into it and fill your image. Think Milky Way. Color of great espresso stirred with cream. No cinnamon on top. Sugar optional. I can’t overstate how comforting I found this. Fleshed out with the hums and whirs of espresso machines, the shuffling feet of people waiting for a paper cup with a siren wearing a crown to appear on the counter with their initials on it. When an endless night of beyond falls below the horizon, each sip feeds a star nature.
 
**
 
The Immortelles
 
Three story ingredients: man, horse and death. Siddhartha rode the white stallion Kinthaka when he escaped from the palace and left the horse behind on his path to the lotus and enlightenment. Kinthaka’s heart broke – to be reborn in what was said to be a heaven.  
 
Ulysses S. Grant, horse whisperer, and his famed stallion Cincinnati. Grant rode Cincinnati to the Appomatox Courthouse to negotiate General Lee’s surrender. He allowed Abraham Lincoln to ride Cincinnati, breaking his rule that no one else rode the magnificent horse. Grant died in 1885 of throat cancer in his cottage in Moreau, New York three days after completing a memoir he hoped would provide funds for his impoverished wife and family. His son stopped the clock at 8:08. The U.S. Grant Cottage National Landmark preserves decorations from his funeral – bouquets of immortelles, pearly everlastings, a six-foot floral gate, a cross and a sword. Blooms browned with time, tinged with grime. 
 
Friends of Grant Cottage who seek to preserve those floral arrangements study how. Spray glue? Wax? Replicas? Switch to framed photos? 
 
How long does a story last? See Buddha and Kinthaka painted on silk scrolls and carved on stupas. Alexander the Great and Bucephalus grace a mosaic from Pompeii, coins and sculptures and a Degas painting. Grant and Cincinnati in paintings. Roy Rogers’ taxidermied Trigger rears up in the John Wayne Museum.  
 
The Buddha said what rises also ceases. Lotus. Bread. Storm. Shadow. Mountain. Flood. Fire. Breath. Friends, followers and flowers for the dead. 
 
**
 
The Ark of Words
 
When scientists determine what to put in the next ark launched to save us, I hope there’s room for all languages, even almost-dead ones. Including words for corn or water disputed in footnotes. Once even tea enflamed war. Poems hidden in a cloud with no water vapor. The ship’s manifest may trail out as long as the scribe’s beard. On the loading dock, may a stevedore separate words that float from what doesn’t, what needs cotton buffers in an oak chest, is glass-fragile or soft as baby flesh. After linguists separate love from loss, war from military operations, what’s renamed as original. Then let longshoremen shift the weight onboard. Some words will get tucked into crannies with fudgel, snollygoster and woofit, too good to lose. Others share wisdom from ten thousand languages – mother, kindness, mercy, justice– even their variants of abuse. Lies aspire to be the ship’s figurehead until they fall off, food for the dragonfish. Where the ship sails, its ports of call, what flag it flies, we can speculate. If the ship sinks, let its treasure float off to wings of the ever-flying albatross and gentle dove, wind, rain, stars, and a following sea. 
 
**
 
Pulling Down the Stars
 
On the first cold midnight in October, I stare into the cloudless sky at star glitter. I want to see the smudge of Comet Lemmon as it zooms by and away for the next 1,350 years. Let this night sky plant a dream seed. Pull down the space frontier. Excite a sleep spindle.  Hook a sparkle from Orion’s belt into my ear lobe. But during tonight’s REM I yank the letter A off a dark-red marquee resting in the dusty backlot of a resale store. An antique sign hauled from a theater now retrofitted as a brewery. The salesperson said I couldn’t take the A; someone might want the whole sign which reads THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS.  I don’t know why I want only the A. I’ve aged beyond my Scarlet Letter irritation at Reverend Dimmesdale. But the blue sub-giant star Algenib marks where Pegasus’ wing rubs his hindquarters, the bareback seat. Bridling up to ride the wild stallion: relive a blue-ribbon ending to my race, drink the Milky Way. Let his hooves strike up lightning. My what’s-up ache to fly beyond the bitter first frost. To the edge of asylum, the boundaries where angels applaud, tomorrow’s awestruck.  
 
**
 
To The Motherboard on Our Mother Ship
 
Please. Power up with sunshine to share your memory of antidotes for the grievous mistakes the captains of our earth ship make. Share the  wisdom of gentle goddesses known and unknown. The She who heals mothers and children. Who softens mourning. Brings the lost home. Guards against scorpions, restores life to the gardens in Gaza, cradles babies and gives them bread. Start way back. All the Mary’s. Ask us to give Oshun gifts of honey and oranges for blessings. Help me name whose hand rests on my shoulder when I get stuck in cul-de-sacs of rubble, quack grass, and broken promises. Help me breathe into the Pieta’s grief. Loan me Antigone as my nails scratch droughted soil to bury the dread of love lost in onboard leadership mutinies. Offer us more than war-torn and refugees. Guanyin’s compassion. St. Brigid of poetry. The vision of Lakshmi. Urge us to right this ship and withstand the crash that looms under our star. Be AI-leen, voicing patterns and predictions that lead to hopepunk. Use the widest possible interpretation of ancestor to define action. Translate what the whales have been saying for millions of years. Shift, sift and splice something that shimmers in this creeping darkness. Help. Now. 
 
 **

Tricia Knoll’s The Unknown Daughter was a finalist in the 2025 New England Poetry Club chapbook contest. More than 300 of her poems have appeared in journals as diverse as Kenyon Review and New Verse News and nine collections, full-length or chapbook. Wild Apples, out in 2024 from Fernwood Press, details downsizing with aging and moving 3,000 miles from Oregon to Vermont. After 18 years of working with free verse, she is now writing mostly prose poems. She serves as a Contributing Editor to the online journal Verse Virtual. Website: triciaknoll.com

Drop by Drop
 
My temples stream with cold sweat like the walls of a subterranean cave, I need air, my heart spins, grows into a spiral, becomes petrified into a shell sealed around a Mayan cenote, a deep green pool filled with the mute echo of sacrificial virgins’ sighs: my dreams drown within the ashes of my memories, with dry eyes, I taste the salt of swollen tears as they flow away in an eternal drip, infiltrating through the fissures of mother of pearl: valves burst into a gigantic wave, propelling me out of myself over foam-covered dunes.
 
**
 
First published by The Bitter Oleander
From Under Brushstrokes (Press 53 2015)
 
**
 
Unborn
 
I have no eyes, no ears, no lips, a flower drawn from the wild seed of their eyes, elytra’s spark in the darkening riverbed, a trembling protean flame rising from an elusive space where skin meets skin. Hand in hand, they watch me grow tongues of flame licking the warm air, extending like fingers in a glove, intertwined vines blossoming in fiery petals. They hear the rustling of dry leaves nearby, a droplet bursting on a tin gutter, a crack in the icy roof, a tear of melting snow, read the sudden silence of wind chimes, hear me whisper: yes, I am, I know . . .
 
**
 
First published by GraFemas: Letras Femeninas
From Under Brushstrokes (Press 53 2015)
 
**
 
Visiting the Generalife
 
I linger along the rose orchard cooled by water fountains. A suspension of iridescent droplets rises and falls in splashing loops, trickles through inlaid channels. Here, air speaks with caressing syllables and fragrant language; each lemon tree heavy with golden globes, its crisp shiny leaf ready to break under my fingers’ slightest touch, oozes essential oils. Each rose speaks of the harvest of rose petals and orange blossoms my mother distilled in alembics in the vast white-tiled bathroom, the transparent essence imprisoned in a row of bottles stored in the sandara, that secret room above the kitchen, hosting a microcosm of flavours gathered from faraway plantations and mountain slopes.
 
Boabdil’s heart shrunk
eyes fixed at the Alhambra
a fragile star falls
 
**
 
First published by Dashboard Horus
From The Taste of the Earth (Press 53 2019)
 
**
 
Jacaranda
 
      Voy a construir una ventana en medio
            de la calle para no sentirme solo.
                                    —Miguel Ángel Zapata
 
 
The poet would like to build a window in the middle of the street so that he won’t feel lonely. I also want to build a window in the middle of the street, plant a jacaranda and then wake up at the trills of the songbirds nested in its branches. I will drink my morning coffee seated on the ground carpeted with the purple petals of my youth and every night feel its foliage tremble under the faraway breeze that blows in Beirut along the Corniche, bringing a mist of fragrant echoes through half-open shutters. Night is woven with the flutter of wings.
 
Windblown words travel
through thought’s countless corridors
turn daydreams ablaze
 
**
 
First published by ArLiJo 54: Arlington Literary Journal
From The Taste of the Earth (Press 53 2019)
 
**

The Burma Pearl
 
In my chest there is a dot that is a hole where I could hear my heartbeat as I stepped into the Burma store while you picked a pearl pendant just for me. That morning, dew was barely brushing the petals of the budding spring. I handed you my gold medal carved with the crowned Virgin and child, my grandmother’s gift at my baptism. I still have the oval-shaped pearl in my jewelry box; it has escaped looting, known so many homes in different latitudes and languages. It has never touched my skin since but remains filled with words said and unsaid, suffused within the music of a light that once ran over my cheeks.
 
Cicadas sing songs
hum a threnody for life
empty shells over bark
 
**
 
First published by Sukoon Literary Journal
From The Taste of the Earth (Press 53 2019)
 
**
 
Or How I Still Turn My Turkish Coffee Cup Upside Down
 
When I was single, mom, you used to bend over the dregs’ configurations, conjuring up budding shapes, intricate encounters rising along the porcelain walls. You’d ask me to press my thumb inside the murky bottom to petrify an incipient evil eye. After I got married, how you laughed at me: you already know your luck! We could foresee trips, reunions, question the cornucopia of inked silhouettes, hollowed tree trunks, animals whispering messages or bearing pearls in their mouths. After you were gone, twenty years ago, I have been reading my own luck every day, projecting my hopes and calming my fears. During the past ninety days at home I’ve maintained the ritual, defying all odds. What am I hoping to find in the cup? I know I won’t be able to travel to California to hold my son’s first baby boy in my arms.
 
**
 
First published by Cuthroat: A Journal of The Arts
From Or Did You Ever See The Other Side? (Press 53 2023)
 
**

Or Why Do I Fast-Forward Lovers’ Encounters On TV Shows?
 
What are elusive lovers if not erratic paths, mediocrity encountered at every major crossing when we get lost as we try to hold on tight to the wheel of fortune, lest it bends on the other side, tree stumps on which to stop and rest for a while, hoping they’ll grow into a maple, or an oak, become strong enough so that we could stretch a hammock between their branches, rest while reading, swayed by the wind humming Aeolian tunes, maybe find a shoulder to help cross a stream of discontent or uncertainty, a staff, a shaft, a wooden crutch once meant to grow twigs bearing buds but instead dries up and breaks under our weight as an illusory axis mundi? What of the inanity of such quest, of attempting to create with a deck of cards a story, our story, the way some weave fleeting tales with Tarots, aligning them in vertical or horizontal lines, inventing new signs and symbols
 
**
 
First published by Fifth Wednesday Journal
From Or Did You Ever See The Other Side? (Press 53 2023)
 
**
 
Waiting in a Field of Melted Honey
 
I am waiting in a field of melted honey, hiding behind a blue tree that is not really a tree, a root Vincent chose to paint as a tree, you know, the painting where roots are the size of trees, gnarled trees with severed limbs, sterile against the golden field swaying, the tall grass bending, and of course no one can tell, but l feel the wind too, swelling my blue-flowered dress, you won’t see none of it, for I am behind the huge roots that look like trees and you can only feel the wind in the brush strokes. You will mistake my dress bulging on the side for a knot as if I were a distortion of the oversized joints, leaning against the bark as if against one of his fingers, my space so
restricted I can barely move.
 
The master knows I am waiting for him, eyes filled with the beauty pouring from his vision. I know he will take these roots and me with them, trees growing into rising clouds at nightfall, and he will show me the city lights everything around us becoming waves of light. When he remembers me, the tip of his brush releasing me, I will tell him how hot it was behind the root that was like a tree, how the bright rays made me dizzy. He will take me into his brush, cool me down with linseed oil and in another field show me the evening sky. I come to life again, but no one knows I’m here, the gold of my hair, the blue of my dress broken into lines, narrow paths of colour spiralling among the stars on a warm blue night, the moon and the sun becoming one and I and him, the field and the sky circling endlessly. I feel the ripples of the wind, the ocean’s foam, my dress flows domelike, its flowers brighter and brighter, I am everywhere, hear our voices and you now understand what lies in each swirl, your life, mine, his, together in the dance of the stars.
 
**
 
First published by Puerto del Sol
From Tea in Heliopolis (Press 53 2013)
 
**
 
Last Night I Saw Mom at a Party 
 
She wore a brightly-coloured dress but her head was covered by a pharaonic double veil; the first in silk gauze was visible over her temples underneath the black velvet. I kept watching her from afar and couldn't understand this headdress a la Tutankhamun! Unlike her mom who never left the house without a hat and gloves, she seldom used her black lace veil during mass. When I approached her, she disappeared towards the restrooms and came out in a black spindle dress, her hair pulled back in a low bun a la Farah Diba. Stunned, I wanted to ask her, where did you find such beautiful clothes? I'd like to go shopping with you! But people kept cutting in before I could utter a word and with her usual stern expression, she joined other guests at the dinner table. I opted for resting in the living room that was suddenly surrounded with babies and several ladies flocked around them with doting expressions. Before I could get up from the sofa, a plump baby landed on my lap! I didn't know what to do with him. I put him in a nearby stroller and placed a soft beanie cushion under his head oblivious of what was going on around me,  all the while thinking of mom's stunning transformation and kept wondering why I could never find anything decent to wear. 
 
**
 
First published  by On the Seawall
 
**
 
Finding My Way to My Old House
 
I'm wandering aimlessly through Cairo's downtown avenues. I end up finding my way to the tramway station leading to Heliopolis. It's night when we reach the arcades bathed in streetlights where we used to shop and stroll with friends. Past Midan Ismailia, the next stop is Midan Saphir, my final destination. Only a few blocks away, on 12, Rushdy Street, our house still stands with its shining brass plaque on the front arch's stone pillar. Why come here since we've all left for other continents over half a century ago? Has it been twenty years now since mom died? Yet she still inhabits my dreams and I long to see her welcoming me back. I enter the hallway as a ghost visiting an empty tomb once filled with memory's faint echoes. The same Queen Ann carved furniture of the entry hall welcomes me with its worn out pink velvet upholstery. How come I still remember our phone number, 63869? 
 
**
 
First published by MockingHeart Review
 
**

Hedy Habra is a poet, artist, and essayist. Her latest poetry collection, Or Did You Ever See The Other Side? (Press 53 2023), won the 2024 International Poetry Book Awards and was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer and USA Best Book Awards. The Taste of the Earth, won the Silver Nautilus Book Award and Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Tea in Heliopolis won the Best Book Award, and Under Brushstrokes was a finalist for the International Book Award. Her story collection, Flying Carpets, won the Arab American Book Award’s Honorable Mention and was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. She is a twenty-five-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net https://www.hedyhabra.com/
​