Opening

Posted on March 11, 2013 by Susan L Daniels

Spring is less tentative now,
stretching degrees upwards
to short-sleeve weather
though snow still hides in ditches
and the shaded side of trees,
there is softening, opening of the air
to blooming,

untasted since tannins
painted days sepia,
yellowing the hours
to the tint of old photo albums
full of faces, familiar
but whose names have faded.

After erasure of snow,
I hunger for new color,
already unfurling in fiddleheads
and spruce tips, tender
and just fingering the air
my kin would have gathered
into a first taste of green.

Posted in New Free Verse | Tagged , | 9 Comments

Roadkill

Posted on March 10, 2013 by Susan L Daniels

That run, not away from
but under tires,

inevitable, I know it
reflected in that unblinking
flash of eyes and tail
white in my headlights

bone meets metal
in an unstoppable grind
to nothing

but blood on concrete, cooling
to a statistic

and meat for crows

Posted in New Free Verse | Tagged , , | 18 Comments

al(but not quite)most

Posted on March 9, 2013 by Susan L Daniels

You brought perfume
for Valentine’s day,
but it was Jovan’s
Musk for Men,

and because
it wasn’t as bad
or as permanent
as tattooing my name dark blue,
misspelled, right where your neck
fuses into your chest,
that clavicular arc
I like to kiss,

I asked you to return it.

Funny, how your misses
still strike this heart
so easily.

Posted in New Free Verse | Tagged , , | 32 Comments

Posted on March 9, 2013 by Susan L Daniels

God help us.

Posted in New Free Verse | 4 Comments

random generated insanity

Posted on March 9, 2013 by Susan L Daniels

Everyone’s bipolar, he says,
preaching paradox
and reductio ad absurdum easy,
as if insanity is imperative,
unremarkable as brown eyes
or blond hair,

and we, drying tears from our vision
crave the pain dosed away
with prescription pills
plump with  placebo crap.  Sure,
we’re all damaged some ways,

pitch(ed) out broken metaphorical windows
into a world where assembly is required
but we’ve lost the instructions
and instead of a life, we build
a collapsing scream.

My words were paradox, crap, collapsing, scream, pitch,  imperative, damaged, drying, preaching, and assembly.

Posted in New Free Verse | Tagged , , , , | 64 Comments

Posted on March 8, 2013 by Susan L Daniels

So important to share this.

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It’s not often – if ever – that you can witness a man grooming a woman to accept battering. We now have a visual record of how one man attempted it. And it may help to warn women away from potential abusers.

Sara Naomi Lewkowicz, a grad student at Ohio University, had planned to study the stigma of being an ex-convict. While at a local Corn Festival she spotted a tattoo-covered man who was gently cuddling a cute little girl. She approached and asked him and his girlfriend if she could photograph them over a period of time for her project, and they agreed.

Our photographer had met the couple only about a month after they’d gotten together. Two and a half months later she photographed Shane as he battered Maggie in their home. And she had already amassed a photographic record of how he had groomed her for…

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Posted in New Free Verse | 12 Comments

Ubi bene, ibi patria

Posted on March 7, 2013 by Susan L Daniels

my fatherland
is the land of my mother,

the deep woods in summer,
lichen walls shelved by bracket fungi

where green
is the color of silence
I will gather moss,

bed down wildness
and breathe home

Posted in New Free Verse | Tagged , , , | 50 Comments