Hi! This year (2023), I’m continuing my quest to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
My spoken voice
My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
Hi! This year (2023), I’m continuing my quest to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
My spoken voice
My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
King Kong Trolls
The self-appointed
writer-guru
on Substack
with four-
thousand
devotees
to his biweekly
missives
has decided
there are
no
more
geniuses,
really,
not any
more.
Someone
needs
to tell him
that he
just doesn’t
know
where to look.
The geniuses
aren’t banging
their chests,
King-Kong like
in their glory
despite being
ground dwellers,
telling the world,
“Look at me! Look
at me as I roar
and pontificate.”
They are the
discarded,
dreaming,
creating,
thinking
outside
the main
streams
of
plagiarized
discourse,
unnoticed
beneath
the giant
feet of
oversized
apes
capturing
all the attention
as our culture
dangles
from
their
plump,
hairy
digits.
Hi! This year (2023), I’m continuing my quest to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
My spoken voice
My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
Hi! This year (2023), I’m continuing my quest to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
My spoken voice
My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
This poem is (I think) part of me delving into a character of a young adult novel work in progress.
Spring
My nerves are jangled, frayed.
Panic touches the under layers
of all my skin, and I take off,
breezing past Jackie and Joe
in as fast a walk as I’m capable of
without actually running.
“I’m out of here.”
I announce this
like I’m some kind of bad ass.
Spoiler: I am not a bad ass.
If I was a bad ass, I wouldn’t write poems under a pseudonym;
I’d be able to pass a damn driver’s test.
“How are you going to get home?” Jackie calls after me.
“I’ll walk.”
“It’s five miles,” she yells.
“Just go to work. I’m fine.”
And that’s it; that’s as much yelling back through the halls that I’m capable of. I’ve turned a corner and am pounding down the stairs, hanging onto the handrail as I go down, down, down even though the bannister is probably covered in germs from everyone else hanging onto it. I let go and unbalance hits me.
This world is pain.
This world is me
lacking balance.
This…
I am two seconds away from crying as I move past people and push through the doors. The outside air is a little cold. Spring has barely sprung. But it’s full of promise, normally, the smell of dirt losing its frozen solid nature, the buds on the trees popping through the tiniest twiggy limbs.
Branches.
They aren’t limbs.
They are branches.
“I don’t know how to exist,” I whisper as I start walking.
Hi! This year (2023), I’m continuing my quest to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
My spoken voice
My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
The apple fell to the ground
joining the others; rotting
had already begun the way it does.
We all fall and crack.
On the wire a squirrel ran to the right,
green apple in her mouth, prized
obviously, bigger than her head. Another
fell before a second squirrel appeared, apple
in mouth, bounding on the wire to the left this time.
I know I’m not the squirrels. I know
I am not an apple (though I feel round lately),
but I gather things too big to hold and drop
so many, bringing them to the road
where they’ll be carried off
by others or maybe smooshed under
wheels of cars or just left to rot.
I know. I’m not the apple
rolling aimlessly
until I can’t move anymore.
I know.
Hi! This year (2023), I’m continuing my quest to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
My spoken voice
My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
Parent Not Expected
I know nothing about the weather
I was born in or how the sky whispered
or stormed. I know nothing
about the man who helped make me,
other than his name and he smoked
cigarettes, constantly, until he got skin
cancer. I know his mother had thick,
dark hair, immigrated here, which was so different
from the story of my birth certificate
and the ancestors who had been here
for centuries, taking their time to take
the land. I know nothing about how
my mother struggled to hide the secret of me.
My nose gave me away. My quirky clothes gave me
away. The way I didn’t fit gave me away. I know nothing
of the people who came before
me on one side, grandparents,
great-grandparents, random uncles
and aunts, their pains. They are unknown
stories. They are wind that I can’t feel. They are
stars that don’t tell their secrets.
I am their secret and they are mine.
Hi! This year (2023), I’m continuing my quest to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
My spoken voice
My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
The Lettuce
Again this summer
I’ve forgotten to harvest
the lettuce that we planted
when the ground was barely workable,
warm enough to support the tenderness
of seedlings, brown, pale, and white, barely
opening to the world, the air, the sun.
We are still human, he tells me, even though I think
that we may be losing whatever it is that makes humans human?
Humanity seems a fickle word now that pundits use it
to talk about the unfurling of threats, bombs, lies. The lettuce,
when you forget to harvest, shoots up
like it’s trying to reach the sky, but it rots
from the outside and in towards the core,
slowly taking over the joy of green, crisp leaves.
We are like this. Everything greens and grows and rots
when we aren’t looking. Democracies,
romaine, bibb, souls, humanities.
How can I forget to harvest the lettuce?
Why do we plant it at all?
Hi! This year (2023), I’m continuing my quest to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
My spoken voice
My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
Everything Makes Us Scared
The professor and his wife argue about the party though they love
each other. Chairs are meant to be where exactly
on the porch? Burgers pre-made or created on site?
He’s a hippie from the Marines. Everywhere is danger,
possibilities of pain. He wasn’t in a lot of war, but it was enough,
enough to know that things can become out of control
if you don’t take care. She just wants people to talk, mingle, to eat
grilled vegetables and be happy, to have a moment away
from fears and worries of this year, this country, this culture.
He says he isn’t worried. He’s older. He’s seen worse. And when the first guests
come to the party, he knows no-one. They are the mommies, he says. The daycare people.
Her friends. He lumbers off to the side.
The charcoal doesn’t light. Of course. Everyone stares.
The grill’s gas is low. Their daughter, three, twirls in circles, studies
the people, twirls again, a perfect mix of caring too much, caring too little,
the joy of being alive and chocolate cupcakes with sprinkles and the worry
of so many faces in her backyard. The mom, she is decades younger;
she’s cleaned the forest of wood, picking it up in the days leading to
the party. So many potential weapons. A little boy
takes a ball, pummels another.
A man says scathing things to his wife,
cutting her down in warning.
So many threats. We watch it all. My back
goes up against the wall of the house,
spine hitting shingles. They talk about pandemics,
violence. So many threats. We murmur our agreement.
Everything. Everything makes us scared.
Hi! This year (2023), I’m continuing my quest to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
My spoken voice
My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
So, this week I’ve decided to read one of my grandmother’s poems instead. Full disclosure: I have a lot of grandmothers and they are all dead and this one was about 4’10 at maximum height and this grandmother was already 75 when I was born.
Luckily, she lived a long time so I got to know her. But her poems? They were hidden away and only brought out when my little hobbit dad begged her to see them. It was rare. She, like me, was pretty fearful about sharing her poems and her art.
But art and communication and thought isn’t meant to be hidden away, is it? So here’s to Grammy and here’s to being brave.
Grammy Barnard Poem #2
March 11, 1927
A Wish
Love, she goes hand in hand with spring,
To thoughts of this girl then you will cling,
Go dear, and to her tell,
Of the desire you have in her heart to dwell,
Tell her while sweet spring is here,
Tell her while she still is near,
Tell her of moonlight, tell her of flowers,
Tell her of love, and its wondrous powers.
