Category: Uncategorized

Today a woman went mad in the supermarket.
All too much for her, you might say.
No one with a mask, then the jeers and the insults.
It proved too much for her sensible logic.

They say it was due to this pandemic.
But she railed against the idiotic
Who kept us on this carousel,
Going round and round and round
With their circus clown theories
‘Bout reasons for variations and this virus.

“5G waves,” she screamed as she used a frozen turkey
To smash the glass where the frozen chicken nuggets
Stood, waiting to be grabbed by anxious parental hands.

“Designed by big pharma for profit,” she yelled
As she used a frozen cry-o-vac of pork ribs
To smash the deli section all to hell.

“Wonder why there’s no Polio?!”
As she overturned the endcap of Velveeta.
“You wear a damn seatbelt. Don’t you, fool?”
As she threw oranges…

She carried the weight of being told

Young girls didn’t ride the school bus into Charleston.

The wages of sin rode in the school bus

When left unsupervised that long with boys

And their untamed hands pushed and held

Girls under the Devil’s sway.

Seventh grade was good enough

For a girl of the mountains anyway.

She needed to be hired out to a family for pay.

It was time to learn the ways of mountain women,

Time to stop all this wanting of books and play.

She carried the weight of escaping the mountain,

Leaving her mother and family to struggle.

She had the wonder of electric run to the house,

Bought an electrified ice box for her mother too

With the wealth she earned in the city.

Yet she could not escape the weight of escape.

That was the start, the birth of her dream–

Held…

I entered life an accidental tourist.

My mother’s body served an eviction notice,

But I ignored it and burrowed deeper

Into placental warmth.

My twin, however, weaker,

Entered the world a clotted, bloody,

Gelatinous mess on the white tile

Of a bathroom floor.

The doctor told the man,

Who wasn’t really my father

But thought himself to be,

There was still a heartbeat,

Still a baby left. 

I felt the absence of my twin,

the lack of another’s heart

beating a rhythm to match my own,

racing toward emergence, light, life, breath.

A ghost-like memory I carried with me

Always– Even when I, who survived

By claiming squatter’s right

To my mother’s uterus

As it tried to evict me

And who had never been told

Of my twin’s existence, would

Turn in childhood play and talk

To my twin sister.

My mother asking to whom I talked

And I answering—My…

That is me
I am of my own making.
Rather than ignore, pretend
A pretty sky for my façade—
I chose to make of myself,
A real thing, a living thing,
A patchwork quilt of scars:
Sown together scraps of terror,
Of pain, of suffering,
Of the dark wells into which I fell,
Of the dark wells I clawed and crawled,
bloodied fingered, nails torn off,
Out from the depths,
Of the wealth of human darkness
I have known, of my failures, of my triumphs—
Follow the stitching with your fingers
If you wish to understand
The quilt that I am
Though the batting be made
Of my tears, my blood, my skin,
My scars, bits of my spirit, bits of my soul—
The quilt that I am
Can offer you more
Than any villager can.

Photo by Dhilip Antony on Unsplash

I am a retired teacher, enjoying everything that…