Damnation and Cotton Candy are poems from a dark and shadowy land haunted by memory, by ghosts still alive. But what would we be without these dark intruders from our past?
Vacuous passengers on the good ship Lollipop?
Guest Post
Face In Blood
Poetry is that, the poet showing her true face by cutting open old wounds.
At a recent book signing for my novel, Ghost Dancer, I was asked, because of the resilient nature of the book’s protagonist, a teenage girl, what made her able to not only survive abusive parents, loneliness, rejection, and issues of body image—not only endure—but triumph.
I put my microphone down a moment before answering. The complex emotions I have about my childhood often fuel my writing. This question struck at the heart of them. But I didn’t want to impose on my audience by making my background part of the discussion. A novel should create characters whose motivations are discernable from the story. A book signing isn’t an opportunity for a novelist to engage in woe-is-me group therapy.
My answer? I remembered what I had written in my Amazon profile--resilience isn’t an achievement but exists as a matter of luck. The central character in Ghost Dancer was lucky—
And so was I—that wasn’t part of my answer then. It is now.
By its nature, poetry is personal. The poems in Damnation and Cotton Candy are statement ones, vivid and visceral, nothing hidden, no boundary between what I feel and what I write.
Here are two poems about family that are in the book:
Father’s Day
Deep raspberry color staining violent
across
goose-fleshed
asphalt, the cinnabar of a death mark
all that’s left
of the old car he bought
after exchanging his
gold nugget necklace and leisure suit
for the plot that would dress him in Death Row diapers.
Drifting across
an old stone wall, amber light sways gently
on the spider’s
lacework where a white feather hangs between
beads of dew;
petals dry in the center of a broken clay pot.
Father splashed
it all with beer,
squashed the
spider in his hand.
Seen against
starlight, each rising bubble of croaking
and cricket
song break at dawn,
a worm family dancing to the
music.
Father had
heavy boots.
He picked up
the rest for fishing.
I didn’t know
what the word meant.
Father didn’t care about
anything I said,
but I guess it
gave him a reason
to push me down
the stairs.
On dirty
asphalt where his shitty car disintegrated
because he
could no longer afford even rust,
there’s just some faded crud and me standing, remembering him.
Happy Father’s Day.
* Mother
* Some poems don’t require words
Damnation and Cotton
Candy is available at Amazon
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