perfect, lifeless boys in the sunshine dead or dying in this new battlefield in schoolhouses here, where guns are business, this country where we dare not want or mention the poison claiming them in such great numbers
too long in this season is blinding us to what we love
~kat
NaPoWriMo2023 Challenge Day 6: off topic today. Just could wrap my brain around the ask. Soooo….It’s been a while since I wrote a blackout poem. I found this stunning poem by Molly McCully Brown. The title grabbed me right away because I live in Virginia. Her words resonated with me and my own experience here. My take after gleaning from her words resulted in another poem right from the current headlines. I wish it wasn’t 😟
October, I’m dragging the dog away from perfect birds lifeless on the pavement. By the water, boyin dress blues with bayonets, the blistered hulls of boxships. Everything is sunshine. Everything is dead, or dying, and this isn’t a new thought. I grew up here, but farther from the ocean. Each April, they took us to the battlefield, marched us in schoolhouse lines up courthouse steps: here is where the war ended. Never mind that it was fall before the final battleship lowered its flag; never mind that we still haven’t fired the last gun. What business do I have wanting a baby here: in this body where I can’t keep my balance, this country wherewe can’t keep anything alive that needs us, or dares not to, not even the switchgrass pale and starved for groundwater? And still, I do want. I search the news formention of the birds, whatever poison or disease I’m sure is claiming them in such great numbers: meadowlarks, house wrens, chickadees, starlings. Once even a gray gull, pulled open at the chest before we found him, hollowed of his organs. It takes a long time—too long— for me to understand the sun in this season is blinding, and the birds are flying into windows all around me, fourteen stories up. Flying into glass and falling. What we love is rarely blameless. Is it a failure that I wouldn’t trade this brightness? I imagine pointing upward for my daughter: Look, there, how it catches in the changing trees.
there once was a shyster named Don a scammer in chief, a vile con to court he was dragged by a porn star he shagged how climactic, his just denouement!
~kat
A limerick today…straight from the headlines! You can’t make this stuff up! I shouldn’t be enjoying this, but I am. I can’t look away. Not sure I captured the theme…but the past few years have been over the top inappropriate. Hoping this brings a little levity to this absurd train wreck!
NaPoWriMo 2023 Challenge Day 5: write a poem in which laughter comes at what might otherwise seem an inappropriate moment – or one that the poem invites the reader to think of as inappropriate.
how unnatural it feels this chill in the air the changing of seasons winter to spring arrested held captive for excruciating seconds, summer in the wing collecting souls for the keeping never to be seen again, transported to the fragrant fields of summer land, of endless summers just beyond the veil, while we weep winter overstaying it’s welcome night spilling into the dawn
So it is easier for you to find all the parts/chapters of my ongoing fiction series, I created a new page that lists all the links. You can check it out HERE!
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