Can’t leave the world in this shape.  Wonder if I need to be a shape-shifter to reshape it?

Take all the wars and shape them into peace.

Take all the hate and reshape it to love

Take all the bitterness and resentment and shape it into forgiveness

Take narcissism and reshape it into accountability

However, I will continue to reshape myself and perhaps the more I do that, the more I will reshape this world

I hope I never have to rack my brain 

The old mirror stares
and your current self looks back.
Oh the stories that mirror would tell
if it could reflect the past.
Childhood relived in its image,
viewing simpler times
when tears weren’t all
your soul could hear.
Yet there is no going back
through the looking glass.
Only memories transport through time
your souls desperate cries
to remind, relive, return.

I have an old photo that hangs on my wall now
In a cast iron frame with bubble glass
It used to hang at my grandparents house
On the wall above my pappy’s bed
Too creepy to be kept in a common room

It is a faded, ghostly image of my great-great-aunts
The aunts of my  great-grandfather
Wearing strange hats, the background faded
They are a bit faded too, staring off at nothing
Strange looking yet so familiar

I brought them home with me after my mammy died
And they spent years tucked away at my aunts
Hidden in a room upstairs, away from people
As though they were something to fear
Until I claimed them as mine

I saged them and hung them up quite proudly
Thinking of childhood stories from my pappy
About how when he was young the frame
Would vibrate on the wall, shaking violently
He swore it was true, of course

Perhaps it was, but they don’t move for me
They only watch, and it’s a comfort
For they are haunting, yes, but also
They are mine; my people; my blood
My spectral ancestors

She is here beside me 
Peacefully sleeping 
Her long legs across my lap.
I’ve loved her 
for twenty two years,
carried her and her twin.
I am beginning to
think I might have 
the opportunity to 
truly know her.

6/4/2024
K. W.

Growing up, I only knew it as the worm tree.
We’d pick them off its foliage for fish
bait in the heat of summer,

long beans bumping our arms.
This magic tree in the backyard
growing the perfect worms.

So many, they’d fall on our heads
if we stood beneath its branches,
and on occasion too many,

and it’d get so hole-y it looked bare.
Sometimes, we’d rip off whole leaves and
tuck them into jars to carry our captives

across the yard or down to the creek
to catch fish from pools
deep enough to stand the droughts.

I never learned its real name until
I was a teen, or that the worms are
actually caterpillars until I was an adult.

I still love to think about stories of the
worm tree, but my favorite part now
are its blossoms buzzing with bees

until they fall to coat the ground like snow.

Congratulations
you get to spend your morning
sweeping hundreds of the shards of glass
that decorate your front seats and car floor

But they missed the stash hidden in the side door

Salutations
to the lady who weaponized the police against me last week
because she didn’t believe that I did what she asked me to
and now I have to choose to stay and argue my case or get to the car and flee

This week we get chicken for free

Blessings
to the sister crying in the car next to me
because it’s all too much or not enough or, both
and maybe none of the above, or maybe it’s neither, but the stoplight turned green

If you’ve been there before, you know what I mean

Prayers
to you for the losses you’ve endured
for all of the times you’ve seen no footprints in the quicksand where you are
for the ability to keep going when this life finds you with negative energy and forces

Love to you for making better choices

black hole where are you, where is my face?
is it rattling, my face? my face
black hole sunflower bitten 
in dirt & slow decay
rotting pretty pearl
shiny, lost, are
you? my face.
my face,
you.

Ze whispers:
    You get through this. 
    You get through this.
    You get through this.

There was a poet
Most certainly did know it
But would not show it
Then changed his mind, wrote one hundred poems, submitted them to journals, all of them were rejected, so then he self-published, and now he has a thousand books in his basement, minus the ones he gave to friends and relatives, who said they liked them.