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.