We now have our own website, thanks to the incredible Tim Raveling, and you can read the magazine here —
http://thesurvivorchronicles.org
Posted in Editor's Notes | Leave a Comment »
Way back at the beginning,
you said something mean,
unfair.
I dialed your mother’s number
hoping
that hearing her voice
would make you see the light.
I held the phone up in the air
between us.
We could hear her:
Hello? Hello?
We both held our breath.
I chickened out and hung up.
Then I stepped in dog shit
on the kitchen floor, from
our new puppy,
and you laughed. I threw
an orange at you, but it crashed
through a window. I wept
while sweeping up
broken glass.
Anna Kendall says: “I was married for twenty-six years to a very successful man. These poems emerged seven years later because I wanted to forgive myself, because I needed to cough them up, to purge the vile memories, because I desperately needed to make sense of a long and
abusive marriage.
My ex-husband was a sex addict. It’s hard to explain how his extreme narcissism affected me – my poems say it best. For now, let me just say that to live with this kind of man is a very lonely existence because any kind of touching has nothing at all to do with love.”
Posted in Poetry | Tagged Relationships, Sexual Abuse | Leave a Comment »
The multiple troubles of man,
my brother, like slander and pain,
amaze you? Consider the heart
which holds them all
in strangeness, and doesn’t break.
Shmuel HaNagid, Hebrew poet of Muslim Spain (993-1056)
I am Yeats according to Auden.
For poetry accomplishes nothing:
it survives in the valley of its making . . .
I accomplish nothing but become
the poem that survives.
I am no righteous poem keeping score.
Hemingway was right,
The world breaks everyone:
Her rape. His torture. Their neglect.
All unloving shatters the glass
of our words learning to be poems.
Scars are ugly, but strong at the broken places.
I ran with that pack,
until I grew my own bootstraps and bared teeth,
trying not to save or scare all
who want to love me.
When she isn’t teaching the abundant virtues of the comma, writing about big hair and Elvis, and doing the Cha Cha, Kim Baker works to end violence against women. Kim performs in the annual Until the Violence Stops Festival Providence. Her poems have been published online and in print. Her most recent reasons to cha cha cha include fourth place in the Poetry Society of New Hampshire National Poetry Contest, This I Believe essay broadcast on NPR of Rhode Island, and first play stage-reading at the Culture*Park Play Marathon in New Bedford, Massachusetts about a middle-aged female survivor of childhood sexual assault.
Posted in Poetry | Tagged Aftermath, Healing, Inspiration, Musings, Rebirth, Survival | Leave a Comment »
At the edges of the day light hesitates
as if to respect our dreaming
shy until it meets
the heat of our morning eyes
Our embrace binds us
and the tender dawn
binds the air in wispy zephyrs
that are flirting with the sun
Full energy purrs
through our standing hair and naked nerves
Dawn filters between sky and river
between you and me my love my fair one
Can daybreak light the time
that lives before and after us
that lives
beyond the pulsing dying stars
Can dawn hold back the spinning hours
extend the project of renewal
as far as our imagination and desire
can reach can see
Sun
stop
and let
it be
Calaverita de dulce
mi panecito de muerto
detener quisiera el tiempo
tan incierto tan incierto.[1]
[1] Little sugar skull
my little bread of the dead
I wish I could stop time
so uncertain, so uncertain
From an anonymous Mexican children’s song
Juanita Garciagodoy says: “I was born and raised bilingual, bicultural, and binational in Mexico City by a father from Guadalajara and a mother from Minnesota. I published Digging the Days of the Dead in 1994 while I taught in Macalester College’s Spanish Department. I’m married to novelist George Rabasa, and we live, write, run, and walk within sight of the dark and changing Mississippi River.”
Posted in Poetry | Tagged Healing, Inspiration, Love, Musings | 2 Comments »
christened by Katrina, she was on a roof for twelve days,
while my mother knit and my father
drank pomegranate juice with ice cubes in a glass,
and watched FOX 2 News forget about her, on a roof for twelve days
while I put my socks on inside out and thought of myself
in love and acid
churning in my stomach.
That’s not the painful part, she says,
articulate fingers, wristbands too tight.
She folds her arms to a rock-a-bye cradle, empty.
Lena Judith Drake is the editor-in-chief of Breadcrumb Scabs poetry magazine (http://www.breadcrumbscabs.com). For more information or her previous publications, please visit her personal website (http://lenajudith.sedentarygecko.com).
Posted in Poetry | Tagged Aftermath | Leave a Comment »
. . . determined to do the only thing you could do—
determined to save the only life you could save. Mary Oliver
Unsainted and unsouled,
November rips the scab off childhood,
wounding, yet again,
veteran of domestic violence.
Malfeasant birth month,
beasted and feared,
like grandfathers and other departed souls
whose secrets ooze putrid from the family tree.
Blood-red abrasions and healing-yellow bruises
struggle toward abscission,
denounce the diseased lineage each fall,
save the only life they can save,
and let,
conflicted,
go to a safer, if uncertain, fate below,
where they drift aimlessly on fickle wind,
pile in dead refuse,
or settle, recluse,
fingered and veined,
but bloodless.
Perchance,
blessed to be plucked
by a delicate hand awed by russet and amber,
pressed into palm or poetry,
caressed.
Rescued.
When she isn’t teaching the abundant virtues of the comma, writing about big hair and Elvis, and doing the Cha Cha, Kim Baker works to end violence against women. Kim performs in the annual Until the Violence Stops Festival Providence. Her poems have been published online and in print. Her most recent reasons to cha cha cha include fourth place in the Poetry Society of New Hampshire National Poetry Contest, This I Believe essay broadcast on NPR of Rhode Island, and first play stage-reading at the Culture*Park Play Marathon in New Bedford, Massachusetts about a middle-aged female survivor of childhood sexual assault.
Posted in Poetry | Tagged Domestic Violence | Leave a Comment »
Slipping it off before coming to bed
you are suddenly here. The way your small fingers
slid that device from its regiment loops
the long leather tongue dropping free in your hands.
You’d turn one end twist to add strength to your wrist
and come at us then like you came at the cat —
terribly foaming from bedroom to stair
where you painted its flank ’til it cried like a child.
We knew that such animal fates were not ours.
Our transgressions paled by such grave disregard
as would turd on the couch or put nicks in the rugs.
Such was our comfort, our stay to the wind.
With years we found more things to vex you to ire:
gravel chunks pitched at a neighbor’s broad glass,
feet pitched at other kids’ spines. In a park
a sapling I whittled once clean of its skin
digging the soft exposed sides with a pen.
We were your boys then, as we are your men;
never quite knowing just why our hands act,
watching them flash out before us, now, like
players on some stage, amazed at their lines.
Amazed at their fortieth year, and one night
suddenly standing here
watching the clumps
of red earth
smack against your empty house,
again, and again.
William Orem writes in multiple genres. His first collection of stories, Zombi, You My Love, won the GLCA New Writers Award, previously given to Sherman Alexie, Alice Munro, Louise Erdrich, and Richard Ford. His second story collection, Across the River, won the Texas Review Novella Prize for 2009. His first novel, Killer of Crying Deer, will be published in September of 2010.
Other stories and poems of his have appeared in over 100 literary journals, including The Princeton Arts Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Sou’Wester and The New Formalist, and he has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize in both genres.
His plays have been performed in Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, Louisville, Buffalo and Boston, with a recent staged reading in Manhattan; currently he is a Writer-in-Residence at Emerson College.
Posted in Poetry | Tagged Abuse, Aftermath, Violence | Leave a Comment »
My quilt is weaving dreams for me
looming tales from random threads –
yellows are the sunny days
and sickly smells of night;
blues are bruises; greens are hope;
reds will underline the loss of sense
while pinks replay the sounds of wind.
Cocooned within its weightless warmth
my chin is listening to the quilt –
dancing trees tripping me to stumble
flying cats daring me to follow
skiing on the kitchen knives
then cutting off my toes
kneeling on the frozen river
bathing in the mud.
And when I wake I’ve just a hint
of all the trails I’ve traveled –
curl of leaf and silver whisker,
glint of light or drop of blood,
a damp and dirty thumbprint on my pillow.
Denise Clemons holds a BA in Biopsychology from Vassar College and earned an MA in Writing from Johns Hopkins University. She spent the first twenty years of her career as an executive in the technology industry before escaping the corporate world to devote her energies to the non-profit arena. She has published fiction, non-fiction and poetry in journals, chapbooks and anthologies.
Posted in Poetry | Tagged Musings | Leave a Comment »
You long for a past you didn’t have
the way your tongue keeps finding
empty space that once held a tooth
surprised to find it gone and certain
it will return.
Denise Clemons holds a BA in Biopsychology from Vassar College and earned an MA in Writing from Johns Hopkins University. She spent the first twenty years of her career as an executive in the technology industry before escaping the corporate world to devote her energies to the non-profit arena. She has published fiction, non-fiction and poetry in journals, chapbooks and anthologies.
Posted in Poetry | Tagged Aftermath | Leave a Comment »
What are words?
Pictures of my soul in symbols
letters from a heart that is so sore
it only wants to write beauty.
Past is past,
healing is today
moving on is tomorrow.
Words could never hold all the pain.
Words were most often
SHOUTED!
They were never a soft caress,
Nor the sound of tenderness.
Maybe that is why
my words flow best
when they capture the beauty
of my life in nature.
Words are my escape,
my grasp on the future,
my joy at having survived
all the ugly words of the past.
Words are my lifeline,
my celebration.
My ecstasy of recovery and rebirth
in my ancestral homelands.
I can soar with eagles,
dance in the reflections on the river
drown in the smell of cedar.
bask in the beauty.
All because I survived.
All because I can touch life,
touch Nature with my mind,
sing to Her with my words.
The healing is here,
In the letting go of old words, old wounds.
As I sing the beauty of life
I need no testament to pain.
Judi Brannan Armbruster is a direct descendant of Ah Ish Ka’a, Full Blood Karuk of northern California. In the mid 90’s she returned to ancestral territory, and found the threads of her poetic voice and a way to heal her past. She is 61 years old, married, and the mother of one daughter. Her poetry is found on the internet and in literary magazines and anthologies.
Judi’s poetry covers the journey out of an abusive home, abusive relationships, and finally to healing as she connected with her ancestral roots and grounded herself in Nature.
Posted in Poetry | Tagged Healing, Nature | Leave a Comment »