Video of the week

NEW Work

Happy Birthday Wonder Woman

Fruity pound cake to celebrate:

Favorite:

Throwback

Video of the Week

NEW Work

So Fresh and So Green Green

I've never been prouder of anything in my life, or at least for 2013. My beautiful cucumber:

Favorite: Tennessee Williams

Throwback Thursday: A Persona Poem

Thrift Store Books

The golden printed letters on our once compact bodies have faded,
The black text within accompanied with fluorescent pink highlights and brackets in blue ink.

But our bending binds are not like the younger ones,
We can crack back to the exact pages that were read and folded over many times.

The dust on the shelves is almost as thick as our pages,
The pages that are almost as yellow as the dated flowered wallpaper.

The hardcovers stay hard but the paperbacks are the tender ones that cry the most,
At night we tell sob stories remembering times spent under sheets, in hammocks, on the beach.

Still, we keep faith that we’ll make it out, today will be the day,
We may be mistakenly placed near the Harry Potter books, and maybe then, find a better home.

Video of the Week: I Go Jogging with Jay Sean

NEW Work

Time to Dye

Probably what my hair will look like in 50 years:

Favorite: Sylvia Plath

Throwback Thursday: A Sonnet

Kin and Curry 

The coffee table is crammed with rum,

near empty bottles to show for last night.

Swaying to calypso songs and dad’s drum,

stories told ‘til the sky turns pink and white.

Silver pots full of mom’s peppery meals,

dishes spilling over with curries and sweet rice.

Dancing bare feet so blackened at the heels,

skirts curling in the warm night to entice.

Some knock another shot, some are just knocked out.

There’s careless hugs and kisses passed along,

soon to greet the morning, their eyes worn-out.

For now they leave the home where they all belong.

Good-bye, more hugs and kisses, yawn after yawn.

Time to go elsewhere, all the rum is gone.


-Amelia Badri

Video of the Week: Happy Holi/Phagwah!

NEW Work: Haiku for Things That Remind Me of You, Part 1

Kisses like cursive
letters, twirling to write on
brown parchment paper.

Kite Season is Here!

Some girls get flowers and candy, I get kites and Scrabble nights.

Favorite: Richard Blanco

Throwback Thursday: An Ode

Ode to Home

            Our small, peach house in Little Haiti was the first that my parents owned in this new land of Miami. In the good neighborhoods people could afford to wrap their homes with tall, silver fences and plant mango trees, and not have to worry as much about fruit pick-pockets. On our street, the only thing enclosing the houses were patchy coated dogs that peed on the hibiscus trees and green and brown beer glass pieces that made a crunching noise under our bikes like someone chewing on beach sand in their Cuban sandwich.

            The color of the homes and the rainbowed graffiti on the nearby stores flourished beyond the simple hues I had only recently learned in daycare. The flamingo pink, powder blue, and macaroni and cheese yellow houses were paletted straight from a Crayola crayon box. 

            Out of every car stereo or neighboring house party, there was music spilling out like puddles in the street for everyone to play in. The road would sway like cotton clothes on a line to the rap songs coming from one direction and the salsa tunes from another, and inside our house the complaints of my parents, they can’t understand.  My dad decided to give his neighbors a taste of what real music is. The steel-drummed rhythms of the soca and calypso cassettes chimed the china in the cabinets, pounded the walls three houses down, and I imagined, thudded down a few green coconuts into the hands of the kids as they passed.  

            Six years I blew the candles out in the one bedroom, one bath house, witnessing two robberies, category five Andrew in ’92 from under the dining room table, and driving up and down, down and up the street with mom in the Nissan Maxima, practicing to get her license. 

            But everything we needed was in walking distance, including my uncle’s convenience store. He wasn’t really my uncle, just a close family friend from the same village as my parents. On Saturdays we went into the confined store packed away in the corner of the shopping plaza.

            It felt like entering a Toys”R”Us. My uncle would fill my pockets with Jawbreaker and Crybaby candies and topped it all off with the remedy to all my childhood woes, ice cream from the freezer. It was just big enough for me to stick my head into and pretend to be a polar bear or a penguin. I normally reached for the orange-cream flavored Flintstones Push-Up Pop. The wary sun melted down slowly, like my sticky Popsicle, and I’d let the sweet iciness drip down my cheek and neck as we walked back to our little, peach home.

-Amelia Badri

Video of the Week: Still Ed Sheeran's Best

NEW Work: Rough Hands

A reminder of days spent with the boys keen on cardboard pieces tied around their knees during cricket matches.

A reminder of paper kites plastered with the wrong shades of green and yellow, the attached fishing twine warring through your fingers into the sky.

AB

Something Green

Hello March and my neglected blog. I'm back and I come with gifts of close to blooming sunflowers and hopefully some poems.

Throwback Thursday: A List Poem

Jobs of Key West (past and present)

            A marine biologist that swims with yellow-blotched turtles, an artisan of thick Cuban cigars, a three-time winner of the Ernest Hemingway lookalike contest at Sloppy Joe’s (that also feeds the six-toed cats cans of tuna on the side), a writer looking for a new muse and  finding it in the form of fuchsia corals, the sunset and waves, in slices of Key lime pie and the pretty girls with Hibiscus in their hair, a local band that only knows the chords to one song (Jimmy Buffett’s Margaretville), a fisherman that catches everything from pink shrimp, whiskered lobster, mahi mahi, mangrove snapper, kingfish, red grouper, and shark, and makes trade with a local restaurant for bottomless shots of Bahamian rum, a scuffed-up  railroad worker (that tells the exotic ladies of the night that he’s the real eighth wonder of the world, the real steamy locomotive, not Flagler’s toy train), a drunken bum that falls asleep with the Atlantic wetting his toes and awakes with crab bites bruises that he thinks are love marks, an on-foot only tour guide that stops in front of Elizabeth Bishop’s house on White Street everyday and recites, “Florida—the state with the prettiest name, the state that floats in brackish water…”

-Amelia Badri

Video of the Week: All About Audra

 

New work or No Work?

I started this blog to get myself back into writing, and at least post new work once a week (every Tuesday). I have yet to write anything. So, I owe myself and this blog 2 new pieces. To be continued...

Lazy Days

Nothing like a beach day in the middle of Miami winter.

Favorite: Derek Walcott

 

Throwback Thursday: A Patoum

Purple Hydrangeas

Her hand is cold and wet from holding his drink for so long.
The smell of rum and Coke normally bothers her but the light watering into the room distracts her.
She wants to say something to him about how pretty the purple hydrangeas grow this time of year.
She reads his face carefully as he scrunches up his nose, struggling to knot his black tie.

The smell of rum and Coke normally bothers her but the light watering into the room distracts her.
She knows for certain not to mention the flowers; it would only lead to an argument.
She reads his face carefully as he scrunches up his nose, struggling to knot his black tie.
He always tells her not to wear purple around him; it’s a color of death in his family.

She knows for certain not to mention the flowers; it would only lead to an argument.
It’s her favorite color; it’s also her only salvation from his controlling ways.
He always tells her not to wear purple around him; it’s a color of death in his family.
She read in Reader’s Digest that purple, like a hue of lavender, gives off an aura of calm.


It’s her favorite color; it’s also her only salvation from his controlling ways.
In secret, she wears a shade of purple or a shade close enough to it, to rebel against him.
She read in Reader’s Digest that purple, like a hue of lavender, gives off an aura of calm.
She wears a bra with little polka dots of it here and there, a charm bracelet with a tiny heart of amethyst.


In secret, she wears a shade of purple or a shade close enough to it, to rebel against him.
He turns to her and tells her “that’s a nice dress, you look good in red”, and leaves the room.
She wears a bra with little polka dots of it here and there, a charm bracelet with a tiny heart of amethyst.
The near empty nail polish bottle hidden in the back of the drawer is like her soothing friend.


He turns to her and tells her “that’s a nice dress, you look good in red” and leaves the room.
She puts one leg up at a time on the dresser, painting her toenails as if it’s some sort of military tactic.
The near empty nail polish bottle hidden in the back of the drawer is like her soothing friend.
She admires the purple sheen on her toes, quickly pulls dark stockings over her legs and joins him outside.

 

She puts one leg up at a time on the dresser, painting her toenails as if it’s some sort of military tactic.
She wants to say something to him about how pretty the purple hydrangeas grow this time of year.
She admires the purple sheen on her toes, quickly pulls dark stockings over her legs and joins him outside.
Her hand is cold and wet from holding his drink for so long.

-Amelia Badri

Video of the Week: This Magic Moment

New Work Tuesday

...will have to be completed tomorrow because I'm sick.

That Far From Home Feeling

Favorite: Sandra Cisneros

 

Throwback Thursday: A Movie Inspired Poem

Grandma’s Address Book

She likes the black and white Bollywood movies

with the actresses that have faces as round as clocks,

the ones with big eyes rimmed with dark liner

set off with small red dots

on their foreheads and thick braids to their waist

that toss back and forth when they walk.

She likes to imitate the movements of the dancers,

especially when she’s wearing a skirt or a dress

that flaps. She’ll spin in slow circles and twist her hands

as if she were screwing a light bulb, or picking watercress,

moving to the movie’s flute-and-drum-pulsing-songs

until she has to lie down, panting, and out of breath.

She likes to sit on the couch with a knife and bowl

of plantain, carelessly chopped into strips,

enthralled by the screen’s company and console.

Sometimes she pretends she’s the pretty, young girl that runs

shyly away from her handsome lover, until he grabs hold

of her arm, and walks with her into the sunflower field.

She likes to see the same ones over, and over, and over again

until she can watch them without the subtitles and note

the words of her favorite phrases and the names of characters and pen

them onto the blank lines of her address book,

possible names to give to her unborn grandchildren

and the ducks she feeds in the backyard.

-Amelia Badri