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!
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!
I say all that, but sometimes I feature a Grammy Barnard Poem. Grammy Barnard died at the age of 102 and I was the youngest child by a lot of her youngest child, so in my head she was always older. I think she was in her 70s when I was born.
These poems make me feel a bit closer to her, allow me to imagine her in her 30s. And I like being able to do that. So, here’s a Grammy Barnard poem.
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!
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!
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!
What kind of person does that?A person person.
What kind of person does that though, really?
A person.
That’s not an answer. That’s a nothing answer. It’s just an answer you don’t want to hear.
If you know that, why’d you say it then?
I didn’t know it until I said it. That’s how life works. We don’t know things. Look, the other day, my sister told me on the phone that she shakes after she has a colonoscopy. She’s old now and she’s had three. Every time she has one, she shakes and shakes when she gets home, almost collapses into bed. She’s fine the next morning. Her daughter’s a nurse administrator, and she told her that it was the anesthesia. But I think that’s not what’s happening.
What do you think is happening?
I think her body is remembering things she worked hard to forget.
But why do people do that?
At our dad’s funeral, a man showed up, and I heard her whispering to her husband the same thing I was whispering to my daughter, which was “Oh my God, why is he here?” We were talking with the same moan about the same man.
Who was he?
A man.
Who really was he though?
All his friends called him Uncle Hal, the kiddie’s pal.
And he was at your dad’s funeral?
They were friends.
But why do people do that?
Because the body remembers things the brain tries to forget. The moans become men become memory stuck inside of us, impacted, curled away. My sister hates having those procedures not just because they are invasive and it’s weird having people studying your rectum. She hates it the most because of the shaking afterwards. She told me that night that sometimes she worries it will never stop. I didn’t have the heart to tell her.
Tell her what?
That it never does.
Because she’s not some drugged up doper or anything like that, but shivers have taken control of her whole entire body because it’s cold, cold, cold in Bar Harbor, Maine and it isn’t even winter yet.
Because she’s huddled behind the dumpster outside of Geddy’s. There’s a giant lobster claw at the front part of the restaurant and a massive moose on top of the ceiling because that’s what gets the tourists. Fake moose. Broiled monster lobster claws, red with death and sprinkled with white Christmas lights.
Because it gets to be too much, huddling there against the cold and the sun’s rising over the Porcupine Islands, so she gets up. She gets up and she heads out to the wharf where all the lobstermen tie up their skiffs, so they can get out to their moorings. The wharf’s not much of anything really, just a lot of pilings holding up a parking lot and then there’s some docks holding the skiffs. WE get
Because she runs out there because sometimes no matter how cold you are, running makes you warmer. It only works until you stop, though. When you stop running, the sweat against your skin turns you even colder. That’s why she usually don’t stop running.
Because she does today. She does today because today she is cold, cold, cold all the way into her capillaries. Today she is cold, cold, cold all the way into the roots of her teeth.
