I. Inside Looking Out
I, too, see the elongated, tortured face
Stretched along the window screen,
Looking like Munch’s The Scream.
I tell the frightened ladies,
This neighborhood is safe.
II. Outside Looking In
Perhaps I should not have lingered so long,
Pressing my lidless eyes against the screen,
Wanting to know your world,
For when I looked into your eyes,
All I saw was fear.
I never asked my mother
About her father.
The one who gave his DNA and
Left before she had memory.
I wonder how it felt being
Abandoned by kin,
Replaced with a second family that
Grew half-sibling strangers.
When she would see him walk down the street
In the small town they shared
Did they lock eyes, did they speak,
Did he know her?
At the age of tthree, she had a real
Father, a Daddy.
He swept her off her feet and
She fell head over heels.
On Sunday afternoons he brought her
Peanuts and read the funny papers out loud
As they sat on the front porch.
Finally, my grandmother let herself
Love him too.
She was loved completely and for the
Rest of her life she was his daughter as
Much as the siblings that followed.
They were a family – whole.
Still, did she miss the first one,
Did she forgive or forget,
Did she still hold hope for love?
I never asked.
i was elbow deep in dishwater
when the Daddy talk came up.
i kept my grasp on the glassware
and turned to watch her
picking at a microwave pizza,
sipping some chocolate milk,
casually digging up the questions
some people never manage to pry loose
i wipe my wet hands
Silas House is in the ball room, reading song lyrics and quotations about growing up poor in Kentucky, about how you shouldn’t let anyone tell you that you aren’t good enough.
In the park, a rental company is setting up tables. One of the workers finds a squirrel having a seizure.
As I write this, Silas House says “Stories matter. We don’t have to be writing about a big issue, like mountain top removal. We can be writing about a woman breaking beans on her porch. And that is an act of activism […] of giving the voiceless a voice.”
The receptionist runs out and wraps the squirrel in a canvas bag and places him in an empty box of copier paper and drives to Animal Control. They will put him down.
I Google “cure for squirrel seizures” and got a link to The Squirrel Board. Someone says it could be low blood sugar. I text the receptionist and say that she might be able to save the squirrel by dissolving table sugar in water and using a Q-tip to rub it on his gums.
Someone asks Silas House if writers need to be political and House says that, in some ways, everything is about politics. He says that it doesn’t have to be about a particular political party, but about improving the world. “I’m thinking about how can I make the world a better place with this piece of writing.”
No response yet.
Maybe you’re like me
Typically having a marginally positive attitude.
Then you allow the world in
While you were sleeping
Unimaginable senseless violent horror
The subtle happiness you didn’t realize you had
Is gone
Feelings of helplessness and despair
Have wandered in
Painted rose-colored glasses
A sticky shade of dried blood brown
You ask yourself
“What can I do?”
“I am so _____ sick of this, what can I do?”
I can walk for peace.
Every Saturday morning at 8:30
I grab my flag and a sign
And I walk for peace
Just peace
Naïve
I’m Don Quixote’s dumb little brother
Wishing the impossible
Expending actual energy for a hopeless dream.
Or is it?
It doesn’t feel like it to me.
Today I walked for two DC cops
And people on the London Bridge
Silently dedicated
Silly?
I’m more tolerant, less angry,
More focused, less sarcastic.
This miniscule commitment
Gives Peace
Maysville, KY
2nd & Limestone
Every Saturday no matter what
8:30am
Why would anyone sleep
past 6 a.m. ever? I’ll never live
to find out because I have two cats
that act like the four horsemen
are at our door if I’m still asleep
at 5:45.
(Found poetry, from a Facebook post by Craig Price.)
4 lines about what calls to my heart from your dark eyes
Aching, my words have not touched the mystery
nor the burning wonder I am drawn to like I am to
golden April daffodils, succulent beauty, pleasing to
even God.
two months seem
so long until days
melt, one into another
buttered corn on stalk
eaten row after row,
barely stopping for breath
sweet bursts of sunshine
savored summer moments
lasting sixty measured
days allowing space
to swell in humidity
thoughts wander beyond
calendar boundaries
schedule the other
ten months demanding
attention, one into another
Hoof prints on the forest floor, I wondered what a life is for.
Family cemetery in the clearing, headstone with a lamb, infant daughter, 1934.
I couldn’t help but to wonder, whats a life for?
To hold what you cannot keep, to weep in the night, a mother in the moonlight, generations ago. Wondering, perhaps, what this is all for; I walked along, the forest floor.
