If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.
Question
Category: Body Art/Tattoo
Disconnected
Oxfam‘s January 14, 2024 report, Inequality Inc., explores the disparity between the uber-wealthy and the rest of society.
Since 2020, five billion people have become poorer, while the world’s five richest men have more than doubled their fortunes—at a rate of $14 million per hour.
Choose
Between stimulus and response
there is a space.
In that space is our power to
choose our response.
In our response lies our
growth and our freedom.
~Viktor E. Frankl
Vida
They threw us away
but forgot
we are seeds.
~Clarissa Pinkola Estes' friend~
Graffito
GRAFFITO Three distinct letters, discrete as whispers yet stark as sunrise, stain this park’s concrete wall. S insinuates the dark entrance, secret from those passwordless, but once in, one snakes along this sinuous passage toward E, which sighs like a wind-filled cavern in the fold of a word so bare it exposes the language of pores opening like stomata along nerve-laden skin, of tongues probing tasting moistening unveiling revealing the voracious pulse and press of pelvis belly even neck, bared for the thin membrane of skin, primordial as sound rising from ancestral marrow formed of molten rock and sky-filled sea before X marks the space within and between.
Thank you to the editors of HOT FLASHES: sexy little stories and poems for first publishing this poem.
Touch
TOUCH hands awaken stars in skin till our palms press peace deep as breath yet this snow-blind animal need for touch shared by grooming apes and dogs sleeping entwined is rarely about sex but instead our primal need to know we are not stones tossed out to sea as we breathe the same air molecules shared in this brief habitation of skin
Thank you to the editors of 5AM for first publishing this poem.
Will doing this
…bring you joy?
Cult
I wonder if other dogs think poodles are members of a weird religious cult.
Soul Friend
Taken
TAKEN
I’m haunted that it happened here. Thought this was a safe community. Yet Tammy took that woman’s diamonds, clothes, and almost took her life. She starved that poor woman under the guise of helping a shut-in. Tami helped herself instead.
Never met the woman even though she lived across the street. Didn’t even know she was there for the longest time. Nice home but I thought it was deserted—blinds drawn, never saw anyone go in or out. That is till after I heard Tammy tell a neighbor, “…poor thing…broke her hip…no, no children…needs help.” After that I saw Tammy walking a runt of a dog that trembled and skittered as she drug it down the street till it did its business then half-choked itself lunging against the leash toward home. I’d see Tammy go in around dusk and leave not much after with bags in each hand and always two more tucked under her arms.
I’m embarrassed I didn’t think about it till the deputy asked if I’d seen anything unusual. This was right after the woman’s son came. Apparently she did have a child and he fired Tammy and packed what he could in this tiny trailer hitched to his cigar box of a car. The deputy asked what I’d seen—wanted to know how often Tammy was there, if I’d noticed her wearing fancy jewelry, or how much weight my neighbor had lost the past few months. But all I’d seen was brown bags and that scaredy-dog and how skeletal that woman looked in her boy’s arms when he carried her to his car.
Thank you to the editor of Doorknobs & Body Paint for first publishing this piece.
Elizabeth Oakley Weaver 