1. Smash the pot onto the concrete, hard.
2. Collect as many pieces as you can, it’s alright if you miss a few, right?
3. Use expired Elmer’s Glue to paste it back together. It’s sticky enough
4. Put it very carefully on your shelf (which you also didn’t construct very well)
5. After repeating steps 2-4 far too many times move it to a better shelf.
6. Act surprised when you drop it and it breaks.
When you’re lying in bed,
And you’re in that sweet spot
Where you’re not completely awake,
And not completely asleep
Do you think of me?
Of how my eyes looks like the forest
Of my voice, how it’s just a little rapsy
Do you hear my laugh?
You always made me laugh
Do you think about how much I loved you?
Or lie there and regret all of the times you left
How we’d stay up late talking
Never running out of subjects,
Or how well I knew you?
Do you think of the times you yelled?
How pretty I looked when I cried
What I would give to just read your mind
My girlhood was
taken by a man
in a sweltering
July heat
six months before
my seventh birthday.
For years,
I filled my summers
hazily with what
was left behind
when everything else
seemed stolen.
Now, its
the summer before
my thirties
and the seeds
that were left
have taken root.
I listen to pop songs
shamelessly and
I watch bad
reality television
and I write poems
and I take
solace in a girlhood
I thought was
forever lost.
I allow myself to
rejoice in
all I have reclaimed.
i am not a victim.
I am not a victim.
I AM not a victim.
I AM NOT a victim.
I AM NOT A victim.
I AM NOT A VICTIM.
How strong you are—sinking
into the plush room of your resolve,
a cozy boudoir—to love while on fire,
in the face of rearranging all your remains
into ash letters. How can you
walk on coals and swallow embers
without remembering you are
summer’s child—a heat seeker,
a sun drinker, now melting in a cold
embrace. How like water—the fluidity
to freeze, boil, evaporate into
whispers patient as wallpaper.
What a ghost you are—observing,
listening close for the chance to throw
your voice against hope, as a flame
knowing it dies with the candle.
“I’m sensitive to light,” she writes,
and says she loves the way the plants
hold the light, a jungle glowing
and I think of my mama and daddy
and how I hopped rows of plants
at Clegg’s Nursery on Sunday afternoons,
when they liked to look and name
and dream and I liked to jump, and how
all these years later, I have heirloom
plants, richly green, a “plant room,”
she says, she doesn’t know what else
to call it, and a rocking chair,
and good light for writers.
At the art museum today,
my daughter and I sat at tables with red
paper and an array of colored pencils in
front of mirrors and drew self-portraits.
When we finished, we added them to a
wall where others had hung theirs.
Faces of people who visited this space
before us we have likely never met and
will likely never meet, but these
imprints of who we are hang
together on the wall, a tapestry of smiles
and braids and earrings, overalls, dresses,
and eyes a spectrum of colors welcoming
other visitors to add a square to this
patchwork picture portraying the power
of those who paused to play for a while.
no she’s not dead to me
we just don’t talk anymore
in fact, i don’t even remember
what her voice sounds like
i bet if she opened her mouth
all i’d hear is air or maybe
a whistle or a thousand
bees coming at me all at once
buzzing & electric & full of stingers
& pollen & she makes me wanna sneeze
or scratch my own skin off
& my words are never enough
or maybe i speak & all she hears
is sobbing or siri
maybe i’m the dial tone on her cellphone
a year ago she waited for her ex
boyfriend to pick up
he begged for her life force back
& i wonder if all my ghosting has made
me a phantom to her too do i
haunt her like she sometimes haunts me?
am i dead to her?
the problem with ghosting someone for
the first time is that you will always
remember them an afterthought, a wrong
turn to nowhere, separate
divided teeth
biting into the hand that feeds me
my teeth just go through
every time someone says her name
all i smell is fumes like an aftershock
& i still defend her sometimes
bad aftertaste & backtalk she never lets
me breathe anymore the weight of her
ghost permeates a room & she’s better off without me
& i want to be her villain origin story
but so many people have wronged her
i guess i’ll have to wait my turn
guess i’ll settle for haunting her instead
Ollie Combs stood up for what she believed in
Or rather, she sat for it, right in front of a dozer
Meant to strip mine on her farm, take away the
Lush greenery for the profits of a coal hungry
Nation run by greed and lined pockets and not
By integrity; The Widow spent Thanksgiving in
Her jail cell, locked away for refusing to let that
Dozer through based on a deed that said she had
No rights to what sat beneath the farm rich land
Mineral rights, the broad form deed, a way to put
Profit over people, time and time again, a signature
All it took to strip away your livelihood for a rich-
man’s dollar, one piece of paper and a trace of coal
Twenty-two years slipped by of protests and hardship
Twenty-two years since Ollie “Widow” Combs put her
Life in front of that dozer to save her farm, her family
Twenty-two years too long, but not for Ollie Combs who
Never gave in to the black gold beneath her feet; not one
inch; she stood strong, took her stand, and won the battle,
hard fought, against Falcon Coal; an Appalachian heroine
The green lake slowly shimmers in your brown eyes.
We talk too loudly, and mercifully you do not mention
the blackness growing into a shadowed haze in mine.
Dark as mold, it creeps inward like pond scum to flood
and choke out blue lotus flower irises. We watch as
the two white swans beyond the concrete pier dive
down to hell, rushing backwards in memory and time,
finding at the lake bottom: our childhood, my open heart,
and years later, your sad, pitying smile. It drowns me.
