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.
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.
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 Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.