saved them all in nut jars you can see overlooking the living room little red cameras both of them that stopped with their mouthsopen at the castle on the way home from Kyushu to avoid Fukushima the puppet from Prague with a cracked femur from the uphill cobbled streets the sake cup cracked at the golden temple a little blue dolphin mom loved pendulum from a gift clock she gave orange ocarina from Peru we didn’t go there a gallery on the top kitchen shelf best pieces of the red and yellow unfired plates crushed in our daughter’s suitcase home from Morocco I broke the rest for the hearth mosaic the too fragile still-holds-the-moon- bowl crescent the hand painted yellow rose ramekin from the Tehran glass museum half an adopted collectible sea wave pale green bakelite bracelet her mother left her mixed with tears annoying unusable butter knife that wiggles in its faux amber handle the rest of them haven’t broken yet waiting white open empty cookie tin with the big caps reads HOPE I don’t know where it came from next to the foot high fat raccoon transparent screen 3 inch elephant the baby in it going the other way still unbroken the ceramic carrot fed hippo mouth wide open at the Beppo Zoo
I throw them in
one by one
my rough edges
Kath Abela Wilson lives in Pasadena, California. Her free verse, and Asian short form poetry is published in hundreds of journals worldwide. She has traveled the world to math conferences with her husband Rick, a math professor and historical and world flute collector and player, performing flute and poetry together. She hosts poetry meetings and salons at her home and the local Storrier Stearns Garden and performances by Poets on Site in museums, other gardens and galleries. For the last year she ow has hosted three zoom meetings a week for community sharing, consolation and inspiration. Her first book, Figures of Humor and Strange Beauty, a serial personal Odyssey, was published by Glass Lyre Press, 2019. Her two chapbooks The Owl Still Asking, Tanka for Troubled Times, Driftwood Monster, Haiku for Troubled Times, were published by Aria Press, LocoFoChaps 2017. She created and leads the group Poets on Site, a Pasadena writing and performance group which has produced many anthologies. Most recently she edited with James Haddad, Stone Lantern, celebrating the Storrier Stearns Garden in Pasadena.