Thank you for visiting the Writers' Morning Out blog.
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Thank you for visiting the Writers' Morning Out blog.
You can now find up online at WritersMorningOut.org.
We look forward to seeing you there.
Leaves break free, fly in the wind,
scattering, scattering. Silhouettes bank
against chipping, cracked brick buildings.
Leaves play a whirling dervish beneath the
sun’s mercurial tempers.
Under a maple tree I sit while red souls
of summer’s spent drop onto my
windshield as shadows dance on the
dashboard—my arms, my face, and
I think of pumpkin pie, log fires,
football games and Halloween.
Autumn’s nostalgia fades to cliché,
like memories of Maw Maw’s threadbare
Sunday dress, like my vacant thoughts.
Even wistful melodies eventually play out,
as do autumn leaves, as do laughing
children jumping in autumn leaves,
and love.
Went walking in the mall where we used to walk
During the cold season.
It was the first time since you had gone,
And your footprints still glowed to me.
And I saw your face in the empty store windows.
Next to me
Shoulder to shoulder
Hand in hand
As we made our circuit around the mall.
I can still feel
When I put my arm around you
As we walked
And I pulled you to me.
My innocent,
My little one
Who needed my protection
When your world had lost
Its color, its light
And so much was grey.
I could feel, and I knew
I was your color, your light
And your connection
To this world.
So, as I walk this place
You still linger here.
Flickers of motion
Flashes of feeling,
And so much emotion.
My tears realize my pain.
Thank god something remains.
Enough to help me get through
Without you.
It's difficult to come back here.
“I want her back when you’re done.”
They will toss you out, flush you down.
They won’t know to stop when my Grandpa’s eyes –
like sky – are there.
And your nose? They won’t know.
That’s your daddy and sister –
right there!
“I want her back when you’re done.”
Forty-five minutes of waiting
stacked next to the three months
I carried you.
The brown hands of a nurse handing me hospital Tupperware.
“I want her back when you’re done.”
Tucking you right there in the safety of me.
Self-preservation not letting me look,
but little by little my warmth breaking through coldness.
Carrying you home to the wood of our kinfolk:
Loblolly tall and Maple wide.
Scrubby Oak to decorate your spot
with acorn crowns.
“I want her back when you’re done.”
Your daddy – muddy with earth –
Your sister and I searching the hills and
bases of trees for marble quartz.
Sweating out our grief that day.
“I want her back when you’re done.”
At church it starts and keeps up
through five hymns.
Two creeks flowing, meeting up
at my chin and falling into two open palms:
waiting for the Good Lord to dry them up
so we can pass on dry land.
“I want her back when you’re done.”
In the by and by.
Rising, surprising,
from Arizona’s dry palette,
Jerome is still clinging
to the side of its hill,
its roads steeply climbing
and lined with the houses
and shops built by miners
long since moved on,
where Slim Chance & Friends
are pickin’ nights at The Palace
drinkin’ watered down high balls
in tall, smoky rooms,
where mornings, the locals
are gathered at Macey’s
downing coffee and pies
and the talk of the town,
where Dede won’t stay
in hotels rumored haunted,
where Tracy, the potter,
makes up his spare rooms,
where Still Life With Woodpecker’s
on the shelf in the hallway
signed by Tom Robbins,
still wishing “Good Luck”.
by caren stuart
previously published in Wish You Were Here: A Poetry and Prose Anthology
by Old Mountain Press
Scat in the rose beds,
scat in the drive,
under the pine trees,
dotting the lawn,
down in the ditches
where day lilies grow,
scattered on flagstones
that lead to the porch,
by the nandina the deer
strip of red berries,
over to beauty bushes
and swamp azalea
they prune for us.
Two hundred dollars
worth of tulips
beheaded before
they bloomed.
Whose property do
they think this is?
my exasperated
husband asks.
Ours, their cloven
hoof falls whisper,
since the dawn of time.
By Judith Stanton
Previously published in Deer Diaries, 2017
We were playing 20 hands of 5-card draw
It was a 4-some, with my best friend, my wife and Jimmie Carter
The prize-2300 match-sticks and pennies by the dozens-
Was just 72 inches away, and tingling. We were in the 9s all the way,
me and Jimmie, cheating under the table and counting
Up our winnings 20 at a time, fingers and toes worth,
until the talk turned to how many lovers you had? and
lemee tell you me and Jimmie had some low numbers
being shy Southern Baptist boys with strong mothers
and growing up in pint-sized towns where every girl’s
daddy carried 3 0r 4 shotguns-meanwhile my wife is
vaulting past 30 while I’m trying to get beyond my ten
fingers and my “friend” is racing forward in his size 13s
enumerating all his 27 rejections and 45 almost-loves
when Jimmie smiles and says “Well, I have sinned in my
heart a time or 3,” and I get that, like a 100 on a math test
and I jump up and shout “All my loves, over 50, more than 200,
probably 1000!” And that was just high school, 1966-1972.