Kintsugi and Other Poems

By Paula M. Rodriguez

Kintsugi

(The Japanese art of gluing broken pottery pieces 

back together with gold,

a process that embraces the beauty of imperfections.)

In the old yellowed photograph,
I’m  posing in a pale sundress 
by a small table 
that holds the Satsuma vase
gifted to my parents for their wedding.
I must be about three years old.

My grandmother stares at my father
with the fury of a mother
who’d lost her precious daughter to a stranger.

My father glares at my grandmother
with the rage of the narcissist
who cannot worm his way into devotion.

I am in the middle of them.
I love them both,
with a strange love,
tainted with guilt,
for I always felt that to love one
was to let the other down.

One day, out of spite, 
my father smashed
the Japanese jar 
against the wall.

My grandmother picked up the pieces
and glued them back together.
Its precious scars, like veins of gold.

It never looked the same.
It never was the same.

Many years into adulthood, 
I found a Satsuma
quite similar to the lost one
half-hidden in a flea market.
It had a crack, 
but I treasured it,
nonetheless.

It still holds a child’s guilt,
and love, broken, like I am,
its shards lacerate my heart 
beyond its beating.

Little Seed

(for Aunt Pepita)

She sat in her stool
surrounded by twilight. 
She leaned her head,
withered daisy,
clad in the blue 
plastic gloves
with a knife, 
minus the hilt,
to pluck skin warts
out of potatoes.

The serial
in the background 
always spitting 
the voices of
women with a past,
men torn by desire.
Tears ran down
the riverbed
of her wrinkles
into the basket weave
of her soul.

While the potato peel 
continued to unravel
the ribbon of distance,
the vines of time
weighted on her spirit
like a whisper.

Palpitations

It’s a damp autumn afternoon, half wet, half tearful. As Franklin and I progress through the park's tall dew-topped grasses, we discover a tiny gathering under the branches of a pine tree that stretches to kiss the clouds, and we stop to share the joy of strangers. The expectant mother dives a sharp knife into the chocolate richness of a cake, and a sliver of pink shily emerges. It’s a girl! The revelation is met with utter silence. Then, the grandmother begins wailing.

On your first steps
in your mother’s
wedding slippers;
on the first synonyms
of love written
in your tongue of cloth…

there is a kernel
that will become an ocean.

On the times
when your teacher
picks up the wrong name
out of a hat;
on the long shadow
of your first kiss
passing you by, 
leaving you puzzled…

there is deep-seated trust
that tomorrow will rise.

On the tingling of the lonely bell
after grandmother is gone,
and you can’t ask anyone
if this is love or not;
on the times you find yourself
cuddled against the raging rain
and your phone can’t speak 
your language…

there is laugh in the pot
buried under the rainbow.

And when you start wondering,
and you pass that test,
and you call your mother,
and she hopes it’s a boy.

Life is waiting.
For you.

(Loosely inspired by “For everyone who tried on the slipper before Cinderella” by Ariana Brown)

Paula M. Rodriguez is an educator in greater Los Angeles. She started her literary career in Spain, where she won first award on the prestigious literary prize Francisco Nieva, but focused thereafter on academic publications that deal with different aspects of the literary experience, from Shakespeare to Henry James. Her first poem published in the United States appeared in 2006 in The Blind Man’s Rainbow, under the title “Other Words for Absence.” Since then, she has earned prizes in the Urban Ocean poetry contest, she has published her work in four anthologies, her poems have been published by Scintilla Press, New Note, Humble Pie Literary Magazine, Mercury Retrograde, Vita Poetica and Bacopa Review and her novella “Angelus” has appeared in The Write Launch. More recently, her first book of haiku, The Joy of Seasons. A Treasure of Haiku  has been published by Poet’s Choice.