*Featured image courtesy of Eric Ward on Unsplash.*
L. Lois has submitted some wonderful poems to us that touch on a deep emotional level. She fits right in with our humble community, so let’s give her a warm welcome!
Intimate Partner Ricochet Biscuits
fragile flowers
are precious
because
they survived
the runaround
of a dangerous game
Ricochet Biscuits
played in earnest
up is down
and questioning
sanity
is the point
where you can’t
clarify the rules before
the next assault
arrives
and the survivors
spend a lifetime
placing themselves
in a vase
with cracks that seep
chips that cut
flying objects and words
that land crooked forever
Literary Ironic
from the Times: smart, funny, captivating
from the Globe: ingenious literary conceit
from the Post: dazzlingly clever, gravely profound
from the Telegraph: a comic tale, a masterpiece
from the Chronicle: fantastically entertaining
from the author: like microorganisms mindlessly intent on some distant objective, like sperm migrating towards an ovum
I’m two hundred pages into the torture
I will finish
I am inspired by this novel
this author is published to praise
I divine this means
I have an excellent chance, too
Loneliness
I don’t do those things
nor that
and I find myself alone
unable to go forward
repulsed by what it might take
to find company
after clearing this space
on top of my iceberg
Mother Dearest
I wondered, today,
how negatively
my mother might have talked
when I was growing up
I haven’t spoken to her
for about six years
or maybe ten
and the choice is mine
I don’t ever wonder,
don’t miss what she might say
don’t think of what was spoken
(though she should take some of it back)
and all this makes me ponder
how bad it must have been
for forty years
and especially when I was young
as the oldest child, only daughter,
of a woman whose absence
finally gave me
blessed peace
L. Lois lives in an urban hermitage where trauma-informed themes flow during walks by the ocean. She is pivoting through her grandmother-era, figuring out why her bevy of adult children don’t have babies, nor time. Her essays have appeared in the Globe and Mail, her recent poetry In Parentheses and Woodland Pattern.
