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.”

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.

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]

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.