I lost a week in there with oral surgery (no, they didn’t sew my mouth shut, but I know of a few people who wish they had!). But I used last week’s Sunday Whirl words, which I will share with dverse and Imaginary Garden With Real Toads’ Open Link Monday.
My friend Rev. Tisha is working on a program concerning violence against women. Please feel free to forward poems to me by email – either paste the poem in the message or attach. Here is an example, and I can only say that, as a survivor of a different type of violence, these girls huddle in a corner of my soul. Peace, Amy
SECRET TO SURVIVAL
Three girls
torn from the cradle of mothers’ arms
peering past bad circumstances
The secret
to their survival in exile was the stories
Pry open clues with claws forged of need
Pile bits
of memory, tiny green apples
as unripe as they. Their rash hope:
that spirits
would comfort them as they endured
man after man on a filthy mattress
The spirits
were their only treasure, clutching and reciting
concocted tales of their shared princess-like past…
© 2013 Amy Barlow Liberatore/Sharp Little Pencil
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
Sharp Little Pencil 