Pink Moon 5 a.m. & the moon looms large in my pollen-streaked window, tree branches knocking across her surface. It’s been ages since I’ve been awake in this early morning hour, I’ve forgotten how solid the night can be, empty … Continue reading NaPoWriMo Day 27
You sat at the back of the room like a glacier, non-moving, non-blinking, arms crossed over your chest. I chattered on, ignoring you but sneaking a side-eye now and then. Thousands of days have passed, this thing moved way past estrangement into forever-gone land long ago. But you reappeared, hovering like fog over shifting ground until you finally walked over, handed me a letter,disappeared again. Fog. The first sentence read, I was sober for 9 years, 8 months. Now I’m not. I don’t know what to do with this, this unsettling psychic information. That’s the thing about dreams, where does … Continue reading 9 Years 8 Months
I began working on a CNF piece a few months ago based on an interaction I had with a woman in the jury lounge when I was called up for Federal jury duty. The first three paragraphs flowed out easily. The next couple came weeks later. Now I can’t stand the thought of going back to work on it at all. There are memories of the aftermath of Katrina interspersed and I just don’t want to think about it. It’s Spring, new beginnings, a time of optimism. The thought of revisiting that time is just abhorrent. Hopefully, this is just … Continue reading Brain Dump
“…poetry isn’t revolution but a way of knowing why it must come.” —Adrienne Rich, “Dreamwood” Why It Must Come (After Adrienne Rich) The one great choice is made instinctively, there is no manual no set of directions. The hand-me-down desk has no typewriter or even a pen and paper. The poet needs none of it. Possibilities birth in the brain, its crevices filled with currents and hot-air balloons flying with ideas. The poem is the possibility of a myriad of choices. To create the poem is the one great choice. ***** So it’s the last day of National Poetry Month … Continue reading Why It Must Come
No matter how old you get the nightmare still horrifies the scream for help is just a whisper the thrashing in hostile arms hopeless but still… there’s a last hard push for recognition and the strangled cry for “Mamma!” that awakens and you turn on the light with heart to bursting and wild eyes searching dark corners and the smell of fear in the room. What does it mean that in your fifth decade you still cry for mamma in the middle of the night? _____________________________ So, yes, I had a terrible nightmare last night. The kind where you don’t want … Continue reading Unsettled
One time I bought a fake rock – somewhere, I don’t remember where – that had “Dream” cut into it. At that particular moment in time I couldn’t not buy it just because it was a fake rock. “Dream” is probably my favorite word because dreams are so ripe with possibility and anyone can dream, in any circumstance. I bought the rock and put it under my magnolia tree in the backyard between two roots growing on top of the ground. Every time I walked by the tree I looked down and the rock was there, reminding me to dream. … Continue reading Dream
I see you in sleep, the sands of remembrance collecting in the corners of my eyes. You, walking across the kitchen bare feet padding quietly, slim legs in blue shorts, slipping in and out. Your face smiles familiar with a luminescence defiant of gravity as you fall in slow motion into my arms where you could not lay in the unconscious world of your last hours Continue reading Defiant of Gravity
I wandered down Vagary Street amid colors clamorous and clandestine a melding of brights and pastels and muddy depressives, people eating, laughing, frowning, lapping tears sliding down cheeks and onto lips, salty and seasoned with sorrow. I lay down on a park bench, curled knees to chin, overwhelmed with merciless waves of fervor and the unfaltering glitter of imbroglio and fell into an exhausted stupor until the bus came hissing to a stop, a giant bloated lizard ready to snap me up like an errant fly drunk from riotous flight and into the belly of an unknowable destination…..or maybe just … Continue reading Anxiety Dream
I needed to call you but I’d forgotten your number, the one I always thought was burned into my memory — for hours I anxiously thumbed through white and yellow pages, forgetting then remembering your name. Between the pages I could see your dining room, the floor tile cracked like a spider’s web, the old fridge where all your kids stood before the open door to feel the frigid air on desperately hot days while upstairs pretty ladies on a calendar lounged without a drop of sweat to mar their fleshy perfection. Continue reading 803 Monroe
I caught you in the air like a lightning bug You glowed between my hands, my feet left the ground Our effervescence could not be harnessed, could not be saved in a glass jar with a lid We escaped through the holes and became swallowed in the night Continue reading Through the Holes
Charlotte Hamrick 