Two-Gear Gal
Got two gears
Speedy and Gonzonked
Today feels orange, time to
RUNRUNRUNRUNRUNthunk
Mind did a hit and run
Curse, put ‘er in reverse
Survey the carnage
which looks like me
Time to drive
to the station
and on my knees
confess, I guess
But then this lass
Runs out of gas and
smack into my barcalounger
Time to
f
a
a
a
a
d
e
.
.
.
© 2013 Amy Barlow Liberatore/Sharp Little Pencil
Imaginary Garden With Real Toads pays homage to the poet Billy Collins (for more on him, click HERE). He often uses humor to mask the deeper meaning. Can you guess my vehicle in the poem above? Also for NaPrWriMo (two #13s today), and appearing in the side margin of my favorite rumble seat, Poets United – proud to be a member!
Jiminy Was Right
She sits up
sweat drenched, crying
Doesn’t mind pix with smeared makeup
After a miscarriage and abortion
she didn’t think a baby could emerge
Her first child suckles
Proof that dreams come true
© 2013 Amy Barlow Liberatore/Sharp Little Pencil
Trifecta asked for exactly 33 words about a “dream come true.”
Many women experience misfortunes when it comes to timing pregnancy, carrying a baby, and actually coming to full term. I’ve held the hands of friends who were going to terminate a pregnancy – even paid for one, whose boyfriend was beating her. I’ve said “I’m sorry” and cradled sobbing girlfriends in my arms like she was my own child. The miracle of childbirth is a dream come true – a dream deferred for some. For others, they “drop ‘em like tadpoles,” lucky women!
The song, “A Child Is Born,” was written by jazz legend Thad Jones, with lyrics by Alec Wilder. Peace, Amy
Ted and Riley, back in the States, 1993
She’s Gotta Have It
Just after Daddy flew back
to the States and I was hiring
nannies so I could sing at the
casino lounge each night…
Riley and me in Plaza de las Americas
(translation: da mall). She spied
a toy so huge, brown, sweet,
huggable, fuzzy… and pricey
“¡Mamí, es MÍ oso!” The teddy bear
to beat them all. So tall, big as Riley,
a faint smile, Hershey-Kiss eyes,
just like my beba’s eyes…
“Maybe another day,” I sighed after
checking the price; in a trice, she
sneezed, spewing snot all over
the poor bear’s head. ALL over.
I scraped the boogers off with my
credit card in the checkout line.
He’s mine, for now, as she
gypsies her way around L.A.
Ted sits on a small rocker, with a
tiny bear on his lap, waiting for her.
When I miss Riley most, I find Ted.
Sit on the bed, hug him, and smilecry.
© 2013 Amy Barlow Liberatore/Sharp Little Pencil
My sister says that once a child has peed, pooped, puked, or deposited any bodily fluids on a blanket, it’s theirs forever. And so it went with Ted. True story – I’d never seen a two-year-old put out that amount of mucus in my life. She really wanted that bear! This will appear on the side bar of Poets United, and it’s my NaPoWriMo #12 (National Poetry Writing Month: A poem a day!) Peace, Amy
© Chelsea Bednar, used by permission for this posting only
Broken
Shards of a gender
Picture-imperfect
Fragments of the feminine
Lacking evident wisdom
Made up for a mag
The desperate sound of
duller-colored cardinals
all together, singing a battered blues
Altogether shattered
Smatterings of health care
elusive as dust bunnies,
scattered like crumbs under
the White Man’s table
We long for freedom from
beauty measured in
facial symmetry, not in
the output of our brains
The Divine Sofia calls
The Painted Diva says
leave a message
© 2013 Amy Barlow Liberatore/Sharp Little Pencil
Artistic Interpretations with Margaret, at Imaginary Garden With Real Toads, wanted an ekphrastic piece based on the artwork of the insanely talented Chelsea Bednar, who granted us permission to use her work for this prompt. The challenge was to speak of how the piece made you feel, rather than inhabiting the subject.
This piece spoke to me of women’s declining civil rights today: Denied access to safe, doctor-performed abortion; often refused birth control because “the pharmacy owner doesn’t believe in it.” We are half the species, under attack, including the late, lamented ERA. Look at the picture: The Pale Stale Males took a hammer to this mirror image. Keep your lamps trimmed and burning, sisters. The time is coming when… Peace, Amy
What Color Am I?
In the burbs growing up
I was browner than the other kids,
Black Irish, but still “white.”
In NYC walking about
I was one of many shades of brown,
but lighter than most.
In Bermuda, I tanned and
matched the other workers;
they called me their Little American Onion.
After Riley popped out, she
compared our “skins” and asked,
“Why am I darker than you, Mommy?”
I told her she was descended
from desert people, the Jews, who
were used to more sunlight than the Irish.
She went to high school and
her favorite teacher was Mr. Fuller, AKA
FullDogg; his dreds up in a knot, proud Black man
She only called him Mr. Fuller, and
I was pleased that, before I met him, she
hadn’t said, “He’s Black” or anything at all.
I don’t think the world is ready for “color-blind,”
but we are ready for “palms up,” for viewing
commonality and remember the truth:
We are all from Africa, and I am not “white,”
I am Euro-American, born of a race who dwelt
in colder climes… I am beige and melanin-deprived.
© 2013 Amy Barlow Liberatore/Sharp Little Pencil
Image from mnsu.edu (Minnesota State University, Diversity Office, used by permission)
“Colored” was the prompt from the fabulous Kim Nelson at Poets United, and I decided to take it head-on.
Try this: Line up all your friends,or your kids’ friends, all ethnicities, and have then put their palms up.
Without exception, unless they’ve been playing in the mud, the palms are white,
as are the soles of the feet. Then, for a beautiful array of browns, hands down! Peace, Amy
Mama’s Gone
Still can’t believe
the ‘heart on my sleeve’
gone on heaven’s highway
Mom’s grief now has passed
Since she breathed her last
She’s taken the skyway
Let’s raise glasses now
to the one who knew how
to smile in earthly hell
Tell stories, we will
as bar counts its till
of Charlotte, pre-death knell
© 2013 Amy Barlow Liberatore/Sharp Little Pencil
For Three Word Wednesday, which gave us Grief, Bask, and Raise. Sounds like an Irish wake to me! Also for ABC Wednesday, brought to you by the letter “M.” I don’t know whether this poem is a form, but it makes some sort of sense!
My mom could tell stories ‘til the cows not only came home, but went back out to pasture. I think she was a undiagnosed manic depressive like me and like her mom, Blanche, and she had that gift of gab. When she was drinking, she was either hilarious or hideously depressing; either way, I heard every story she could spare and committed it to memory and soon to memoir. Momoir?
Her death should have been scored by Puccini – agonizing, the slowest two weeks the world has ever seen, full of drama and angst. Twenty years later, I can still remember having to shoo close friends away from her bedside (“Don’t let them gawk at me, promise, Amer”) and take her home (“Promise me, no nursing homes”) to die in her own bed, another promise. She had not had a drink in 10 years, and after that last breath, I left sister’s side, clutched Charlotte’s hand, and sent her up with, “Mama, you died sober!”
Amen. Amy
Heads or Tails
Symbiosis
Play or battle?
Neither realizing
both have scales
and cold blood
More things in common
than not
So it is with the game of war
played out across the globe
The US, the big fat crocodile
Everyone else worldwide
viewed by our military leaders as
slippery, needlekiller snakes
Croc’s jaws are mighty,
but venom has its own power
© 2013 Amy Barlow Liberatore/Sharp Little Pencil
Mama Zen’s Words Count prompt at Imaginary Garden With Real Toads gave us several gorgeous scientific images by Maria Sibylla Merian. I chose this because I could not ignore the balance of this drawing; and yet, there’s also an imbalance. So size “matters,” but the lithe serpent has fangs. This could go either way. The huge, well-fed croc (America) seems to have control over the snake (pick a country), but will that be the end? Or shall the snake morph into Medusa, exacting her own revenge… or quagmire? As a tiny scale on that croc, I wish I had some sway, some say, over who the hell is grinding our military jaws in MY name. Both let go, everybody wins. Aren’t we above animal games?
NOTES ON ILLUSTRATOR: Ms. Merian was a woman ahead of her time. She traveled (with her daughter and – GASP! – no male guardian) in 1699 to South America to illustrate wildlife. Click on the “Toads” link to see more of her artwork, which is all public domain. The name of her insect collection, published in 1705, is Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium; however, this is obviously from another collection.
Also posted at my snake-free swamp (in the very best M*A*S*H sense of the word), Poets United. Peace, Amy
Dark Voyage
Another dark alley
Why aren’t there ever any
light alleys? she quirks to herself
She waits for the next john to be sexed
Pawns her body for a fix
Used to be kicks
First the hash pipe
Upgraded to Opium 5.0
The real deal, the needle
Heroin
Looks like a smear of poop on foil but
once it’s lit, it’s hit and
she isn’t worth shit
Heroin, a nightmare cannibal picnic
sliding down the clever beanstalk
into the tar pits for a long slick sick soak
Heroin. She’s nodding, her mind
smolders with visions conjured from
the greasy plank decks of the U.S.S. Sheol
She forgets the mess under her dress and
presses her mind against a wall of sounds
When she wakes, her stomach will ache
She’ll john once more to score
to black it out
to empty the chasm
already scraped bare
The addict: A mind forever voyaging
through strange seas of thought, alone
© 2013 Amy Barlow Liberatore/Sharp Little Pencil
Image: Wikipedia Commons
Kerry at Imaginary Garden With Real Toads wanted us to write using a line from a William Wordsworth poem, since today would have been his 243rd birthday. The Wordsworth line I chose was, “A mind forever Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.” This is how I see many addicts: isolated, caught in a foreign place (even if it’s his/her home town), and always wondering. The “aloneness” of the line grabbed me by the ear and said, “Listen!” And so I did. And then I picked up my pencil. This is also for the Poetry Pantry at Poets United… proud to be a member! Peace, Amy
Attica Arrest(ed development)
One day, by my driveway
A man in a used sedan was stopped by a cop
for D.W.B. (Driving While Black)
I know this is so because I asked the officer
why the man was pulled over
Officer Smithjones replied,
“He was driving with an impaired view of his windshield.”
Come again?
“He had Mardi Gras beads hanging from his rear view mirror.”
Oh. Then my sharp little pie-eater opened wide,
first muttering, then sputtering, uttered at top volume
(for the benefit of staring, but unconcerned, neighbors):
“All the rednecks in this town with
big fuzzy dice like dried-up 20-mule-team
cajones hanging in their big ole trucks, and
you stopped this man over a string of beads?
And you wonder why people decry we’re a
‘don’t-let-the-sun-set-on-your-ass’ town?”
To make it more poignantly, patently ridiculous,
the poor guy was trying to make his way to AA
Ironic, since that town
almost drove me to drink
© 2013 Amy Barlow Liberatore/Sharp Little Pencil
For dverse, our ‘bartender’ Kelvin asked for poems in the form of an anecdote. Keep it short and sweet and interesting. Also for Sunday Scribblings, where the prompt is “sharp.”
I still can’t believe I survived five years in a town where someone flew a Confederate flag in front of his house and the “N” word was used without hesitation. Of course, I have no time for racism and I do call it out. I hate being in a Wonder Bread crowd and people assuming I’m “one of the gang.” I’m social justice, hard core, sharp tongue and all. It loses me friends, but when it does, I say, “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out,” because they were not friends to begin with – friends share values, like integrity.
True story, edited from an old version. Though I knew many wonderful folks during our years there, the authoritarian figures were often racist and WAY out of line. I believe it’s part of the blowback of never having reconciliation sessions after the “Attica Prison Riots” of the ‘70s.
For Peggy Goetz’s prompt at Imaginary Garden With Real Toads , a poem about going outside (mind, body, spirit, your choice!). I’ve been trying to hang with the Real Toads during NaPoWriMo, because it’s a small group of intensely focused poets who gracefully critique each other’s work). This will also appear on the sidebar at my first and always poetic home, Poets United (proud to be a member!).
Inside, Out
It stirs within him
The call to get out
To explore the
yet to be, yet to see
He stretches,
not wanting
to leave home yet,
but knowing it’s time
The way to the door
is dark, narrow,
but he’ll squeeze
through the gate into…
Bright lights
Much noise
Something pushes him on
Then a woman’s cry –
sharp as a thumbtack and
bright as an Easter bonnet –
sings across the hall:
“It’s a boy!”
© 2013 Amy Barlow Liberatore/Sharp Little Pencil
Sharp Little Pencil 