Survivants
Three women padding in bare feet
around the wood floors of a cheery home
amidst the flat mud green
wasteland of Louisiana lawns.
Three generations, mother
daughter and grandmother
slit open wide with grief
and joy - finding comfort
in each other’s laughter during
this forbidden visit.
Now floating through ancient cypress trees
whose knobby knees kiss
a blue crack of sky, through winking
Spanish moss eyelashes -
our drifting boat rocks
daring sleepy-eyed alligators
to perform their favorite trick.
Displaced French tourists seek lunch
conversation, screeching RV wheels spin,
stuck in the swamp,
crunching apples, salty olives,
New Yorker crossword puzzle,
peanut butter and marmalade sighs.
A mockingbird pitches his song in oak
branches scratching puffy drifting clouds,
wet underbelly wind caressing my neck -
the patriarch now gone,
whispers of churning discontent
in sublime contentment.
published by: Atlantis Creative Magazine
Summer 2021
editor: Jenna Johnson
lust
they call you a red
bellied woodpecker, melanerpes
carolinus, zebra backed,
but it is a lie because the red
i see is your red head -
like the gore of holly berries mashed in the snow
as if the lifeblood were pouring from
your skull after a jealous blue jay lodged
a hatchet there.
year round you assault my feeder and i
shouldn't have favorites but
you are
despite the gaudy scarlet pajamas of
cardinals, or the soft
delicate fluffiness of the eastern
towhee or the cooing grey doves who try
to seduce me with their call but are too
meek to lay me out.
you with your sharp piercing
beak, stabbing the suet the way
you would skewer a lumbering stink
bug or sleeping spider
would be my mate.
when you hammer
acorns into the bark of the ancient maple out back
i swoon
and yearn to touch
the flames exploding from your warrior's
rat-tat-tattered brain.
published by: Wingless Dreamer
in their Fall Anthology 2021
editor: Ruchi Acharya
Dyslexia
social studies book in hand, first kid, first
then the next kid back, then the next behind
dreding reeding and re-reading, trying to
any flaws, it’s getting closr and closer to my
too fast, trying to nreathe, when the kid
bathroom, and i’m falling, faling,
to see or heer anything except my own
of turned heds, gawking to see the enormus
head.
published in Kakalak 2021
editor: Anne M. Kaylor
teacher at the board standing
row center starts with paragraf one
them, and i.m counting and sweeting
memorise my paragraphe without
turn, i’m squirming, hart beating
in front of me asks to go to the
falling down into darkness, unable
failure, and the resounding silence
DUNCE cap placed on my
Why We March
We are the soldiers.
We are the warriors of our own bodies,
fully capable and able to decide when
and if we will bring forth another life.
I first marched for this choice in Washington, DC
in 1983, then almost every year afterward
braving spit, insults, bodily harm - communing with
my sisters - to be heard, to be heard.
The most memorable moment took place on
a park bench just after the march in DC in 2003,
me in my forties, my tired bench mate in her sixties -
she rubbing her feet, me the instigator of chit chat.
Somehow a damn opens and the truth rushes forward.
She tells me she was raped and then pregnant at seventeen.
Her parents forced her to go to a Catholic home for girls
where she delivered a child who was whisked
away before she could hold it. At seventeen.
At seventeen, I had an abortion, in Austin, Texas.
I had the support of my mother, and a boy
who also had a head filled with dreams and ambition
for an adulthood just beginning. Just beginning.
She says she never married, never had children.
I tell her I have two young daughters,
and I worry for them.
She says she worries for all of us.
We hug, long and unabashed, two strangers
bonded for life. We turn and walk away
stronger for the intimacy, and I wonder
which woman has peace of mind, and untroubled sleep?
Neither of us.
Neither of us.
published by: In Parentheses Vol. 7, Oct. 2021
editor: Phillipe Chatelain