Questions from my sisters children when I joined them on a family trip And Other Poems

By Aurora Lee Passin

Questions from my sisters children when I joined them on a family trip

Which room do I want
What do I eat that for breakfast
Can they have some too
and tomorrow can they have it tomorrow too
Poetry 
Why I write poetry
Why I have 4 different kinds of pills I take
What do those pills do
And these
and what about these
and these
What the pain in my hands feels like
Why I get tired
Why am I tired
Am I tired now
Why I am not skinny like their mom
Why my body will not comply with their wish for my skinniness 
Why I went to the beach without saying goodbye
Why I went to the beach without them
Will I go to the beach with them
Will I play in waves
Will I get in the pool
Will I take them to their person in the pool
Why I am leaving
When will I be back
Am I going to the airport with them
Will we fly together
Can they switch places with me on the plane when we get there
When will we get there
Why is the airport dark
Why are all those people standing in the rain in the dark
Why won’t the lights come back on
Where are we going 
What are we going to do
Did the wind or rain make the car rock
Why are those trees bending
Are we going to be ok

Foxlight

So much is coming to light,

take for instance the fox

bounding up the hill.



There all along, but there to me now

only because I am looking 

when the headlights catch her.



striped tail rising and falling

like a barber pole leaping

through the dark.



I admonish her wordlessly:

That’s no way to sneak around.



My first Colorado fox, I think

as if were my first fox ever.



Except for all those times I was not looking

Except for when there was no light.

Crows on a hot day

The crows are angry, insistent

companions in this dryache heat,

all smoke and ash from so far away

drifting across our sky now.



I cough and they stomp around the yard grunting

unconcerned with my brave lungs.

They demand more water, understandably,

more peanuts, because: greedy.

More more more they

practically speak the word

in croak that is a growl.



Past the crows,

in the farthest corner,

the first flowers to appear on the pumpkin plant

were a star burst of orange

on thick rising stems,

they stood and pointed at the sky.



For two days they shouted and shouted

calling for the bees to come

and sometime last night, gracelessly,

they fell off in a swift decapitation 

decaying now at the base of those stems, 

headless sentries left behind.



And if the bees have not come in time,

if they find only strange stalks

there is nothing to cling to their thin legs,

no offerings to place in mouths

of the second blooms just now waking,

there will be no small fruit to bare and nurse,

to bring the fall

to show that something was made from this summer heat.



And still the crows demand more.

Aurora Lee Passin (she/her) is a middle-aged queer poet living in the Denver, Colorado metro area. She explores nature and her long-term chronic illness through poetry.