For the New Year I will buy myself a chocolate éclair filled with custard. Eat it slowly, with an infinity of joy, without concern of woe and tight underwear.

Susan’s mother was directed by her doctor to cut down on salami or risk death. “But, doctor,” she said, “is life worth living without salami?”

For my new year I will sit down in the sun and dunk in my coffee a little knob of bread hard as my elbow, and on it, without concern for cholesterol, I will spread delicious butter, the kind that reminds me of Mexico City’s Café La Blanca on Calle Cinco de Mayo, or the clinking glasses of El Gran Café de la Parroquia in Veracruz.

I will snooze with my dogs till I radiate love, for they are life’s true gurus. I will wake gently so as not to disturb the dreams that have alighted overnight on the branches of sleep, and before they flutter away on soundless wings, I will examine and admire each.

This season of my escape, I will push my foot down on the accelerator of my life, vámonos vobiscum, and hurry to sit under a tree with a book thicker than a dozen homemade tamales. Henceforth, I will read only for pleasure or transmogrification.

All toxic folk are to be excised from the remaining days of my life, the chupacabras and chupacabronas, who are a purgatory of pain.

I will allow myself the luxury to laugh daily and in liberal doses to overbalance the bitter compost called the news.

I will cease waiting for someone to do something about the war, the walls, the guns, the drugs, the stupidity of leaders, and ally myself with citizens who practice the art of tossing their shoes at heads of state.

There is much I know and much I do not know as a woman at fifty-six, but I am certain I know this. Life is not worth living without salami.

Four Poems on Aging

Ménière’s

This loss of the

Right ear’s hearing,

No cross.

I only half listen

Anyhow.

Funny Bone

So much depends

Upon a staircase

Glazed with

Rainwater

Seven

Years

Ago.

A Universal Truth

Expanding

Like the universe:

Teats, ass, feets.

Floaters

FOR DR. JULIE TSAI

They taunt and tease

From peripheral vision.

Duendes at quiet play.

Semi-colons too

Coy to see directly.

Dr. Tsai my opthamologist

Insists:

“Harmless. I’ve checked.”

To date, three

Medals of distinction.

One on my right.

Two on the left.

Both dizzy as cinder.

Startling like falling leaves.

“Harmless,” she says.

I say, I’ll believe it

When I see it.

Making Love After Celibacy

I bled a little,

Like the first time.

There was pain.

Not unlike the first time.

And a winged bliss

Just beyond reach.

Like that first time, too.

More pain than rhapsody.

To be sure.

A female body

Ashamed of itself again.

Not a girl’s modesty

This time.