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!
For Anne & Maxine
Why is it that the dead
Never listen to my pillow talk?
I am tired, but can’t sleep
Again and again and again.
You snore next to me
And occasionally twitch
As the dog snuggles in between us,
Released from her crate
Because she cries so much.
Again and again and again,
Why is that my whines
Never wake anyone up?
Not even myself.
"Bored and aching, I just wanted someone to love me."
We were visiting Mom’s best friend,
An aunt who wasn’t an aunt,
She taught school, the job my mother dreamed of
Before unplanned babies and rushed marriage
Turned her life into breaths clutching
At meaning. The ladies stayed inside with coffee
Laced with Kahlua and words steaming
At the edges of truths while I walked to the lake,
My body lurching forward. Last child by so many years
Made me a lonely only and I started singing
To the waves and the trees. The water-stained boards
Of their dock made me think of mermaids and tears.
Bored and aching, I just wanted someone to love me.
This is why I am a poet.
The dog emerged from the woods to the right,
A Doberman. One of Mom’s men friends
Had a dog like this. I reached my arms open, hugging the air
And the dog bounded into them. From the deck of the house,
My mother screamed, Carrie! No!
Bored and aching, I just wanted someone to love me.
This is why I exist.
What are you? I whispered to the dog as her tail wagged
And tongue lapped my face.
When the grown-ups came running out, the dog shifted,
Guarding me from their strange worries about credit and affairs,
Husbands who might find things out, children they left
Behind them, coughing and clinging to life.
They implored me to come with them. My hand ran
Along the dog’s fur and for the first time,
I felt powerful. I found a dog, I yelled, but she really found me.
The water clung to her fur the way I wanted to cling on
To that moment. Could she have really heard me wanting,
Singing need and loneliness into the waves and trunks
Of crooked spruce trees, my sadness hooking lines into the granite
That gave our state its name? Someone’s husband
Convinced them the dog meant me no harm. She didn’t.
Dogs never did. They still never do.
Bored and aching, I just wanted someone to love me.
This is why.
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Summer Spliff by Broke for Free.
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