Posts for June 25, 2026 (page 3)

(Another peom from Artemesia’s Revenge)

The press release from Artcurial  
predicted a modest €600,000 to €800,000.  
The newly found Lucréce would draw museums  
and collectors, but no spectacular bidding expected. 
This third of Lucretia represents a young woman’s surrender to shame.  

Artemesia returned again and again to this story –
women     once powerless     seizing their power, 
stabbing self-determination in its aching heart.   
Where to start the bidding for lost virginity? 
The price would   

                              shock the artist.            

                                      €4.8M   

What do I say when he asks what I know?

The future I see is not one he wants.

He would be king, ruler of all

But I see bewilderment when he learns

Someone else has usurped his throne

He is not the first to be a pawn

Of another’s manipulation.

He will not believe me while he

Can wield power like a dagger

Shaping destiny by severing those

Who do not bow and flatter every move

Heedless of the subterfuge around him.

But there is a propitious moment coming

That will bring him down.

I could reveal the visions I have seen

Or let the future go forth on its own.

When he calls me to tell him

What the future holds

I offer what I know to be true:

“A just ruler has no need to fear

The wrath of those he governs.”

Ah, the dulcet sounds of eastern 
bluebirds and eight a.m.
zelda battles, nephew’s up early

Feed me a slug

A fragment of my day 

No doubt the well’s run dry
but he returns to it
day after day expecting
to retrieve an oak bucket
full of clean, quenching water,

not sand and sediment, 
three bucks fifty in wishing coins,
certainly not the desiccated 
carcass of a bullfrog.
It would be insanity to think

tomorrow will be any different,
but he already knows he’ll be back, 
drawn to that miserly well,
sporting a new necklace of hollow bones,
singing a mid-summer’s song.

I’m afraid of being full

I don’t want my body to be satisfied

The implications of that are far too heavy

A woman cannot feel or be enough

Most don’t even know what that means

And so to quell my hunger is wrong

I’m much better at running on empty

Much more comfortable pushing through the pain

To be sated is an impossible standard

One placed far too out of reach to be attainable

And so I sit, starved, waiting for a moment of fullness that will never come

The garage held the cold air.
Not enough to send us inside,
but enough for my breath to turn pale
in the darkness.
You stood across from me,
rolling a joint with slow hands.
Outside, the moon hung low
and stars slipped through the open door.
From the kitchen,
Frank Sinatra drifted,
crooning about strangers in the night,
like he understood something we didn’t.
I remember the paper cracking
faintly between your fingers,
the embers glowing in the dark.
The joint was warm when you passed it,
still holding the shape of your hand.
It tasted earthy, smoke heavy on my tongue,
clinging to the back of my throat.
The smell clung to everything—
your flannel, my hair, the cool air,
the silence between us.
We passed it back and forth
without speaking,
watching the smoke disappear.
There was only a narrow space between us,
and still,
I spent the whole night staring across it.
Moonlight caught your mouth,
eyes half-hidden
between tiredness and smoke.
Part of me believed
the night would never end.
Sinatra would keep singing from the kitchen,
the cold would never deepen,
and we would stay young.

so much to figure out:     
the cracked vessel of my heart,  
the mind’s erasure,  
the cells stitching quiet in the dark,  
a needle whose language finds its tongue.  
I want to hear those stories,  
to witness the wreckage.    

All the women in our family are seamstresses, 
knowing how to stitch a hidden hem.  
We are containers,  
here in the land of remembered things.  
This is our history, where we go, we walk on bones.  

There exists ways of listening.  
Unreel a bit more of yourself each time.  
When the hum arrives, hum back   
like a flower of sound opening, into a trumpet,    
a wishing moon, a slipper of ancient rock, 
a goddess, a wink, a dream of wildness.    

There is a knocking in the blood.  
It hurts to love the world.  
What if we remembered the shy soul in everything  
that joins two selves like a hinge,  
the way we slip stitch and knot this love.
For the moment we’re mirrors,  
but there’s this stitch and the next  
coming together into a circle.    

I know something of the pull,  
to be swallowed by  
that brief kinship, of hold and hand.  
I’m trying to soften  
the raw places  
to find a way to  
set things in motion,  
planting my secret seeds,  
honeyed and slow   
abundance.   

~ A cento, using lines/phrases from the following books: All the Fierce Tethers, essays by Lia Purpura Blade by Blade, poetry collection by Danusha Laméris Entwined, Three Lyric Sequences, poetry by Carol Frost Hereafter, fiction by Sarah Freligh The Hurting Kind, poetry collection by Ada Limón Telling the Bees, a poetry collection by Cathryn Essinger Maps of Injury, poetry collection by Chera Hammons Everything Gets Old, poetry collection by Grace Curtis