Laughing in the psych ward

Sometimes in the psych ward

Groups of people laugh together

Which is a way to relieve boredom

And cope with the confinement

Closed Coffin

When I first arrived

At writing group

At the local library

My grief was fresh

My soul was nailed shut

Like the closed coffin

At my fiance’s funeral

Plain Weird

It was not normal

Even by my standards

When my dream lover

Went from a young

South Korean man

Into a fluffy bunny

Before turning human again

Way to ruin the afterglow

Childhood Ache

I cried when my grandfather

Cut down the rose bushes

In our garden that winter

Not understanding that death

Came even to beautiful plants

Everything looked barren after

My heart learning emotional winter

Nightmares Kept Quiet

I don’t tell my mother

That I die in my dreams

For fear she will be disappointed

That I wake up alive

I Died

I died in a dream

And a random cat ate my face

While my soul watched

Ghouls

Ghouls make tunnels

Under cemeteries to travel

And eat the dead flesh buried

Baltimore

People look shocked

To find out I grew up

In this dangerous city

Death Is

The monster hiding in my closet

Is death waiting still

To devour

Bloody pieces of my heart

Korean Lover

His eyes large and chocolate brown

Skin caramel even in the dark light

Warmth, steam, fire in veins

Intense, crazy, good

Enthralling honey lips

Naughty, dirty, a little young for me

Mid 20s, sexy, gorgeous, accented

The passion only in my sleep

Melting into the sheets in wicked dreams

Waking sated and slick

My Conception and Birth

There’s nothing terribly unique about my conception. A black haired young woman with blue eyes who carried the red haired gene became pregnant by her red haired and green eyed hugely tall fiance. She left him about a month into the pregnancy.

I was born in Mercy Hospital on an April Saturday that just happened to be the day before Easter in 1980. Apparently, they stuck bunny ears on my mostly bald head. At the end of May, I was baptized at Holy Cross. So, yes, we’re Catholic.

I lived with my mother, my grandparents, and my cousins Willie and Essie in a crowded little house. Essie moved back in with her mother, but Willie was always there, fulfilling the role of brother as much as cousin. We spent most of the time getting along just fine with him being 7 years older than me, though we did occasionally squabble over the Atari.

Whole

Being whole is the scariest thing I think I will ever face. I have to take all the bad things that happened to me and integrate them into myself. I can no longer reject parts of myself or negative life experiences.

To the Angel of Death for Dogs

I hope you were there with my beloved Shrimpy when I didn’t even know she was being euthanized. I can’t bear the thought of her being alone. Though there will be other dogs, Shrimpy was my sweet daughter. I know well that grief is a steep price for loving a creature whose life is bound to be short, but I have paid it willingly every time. This one just feels so unfair, but then so is life.

Crawl Out of the Grave

All the night I waited for you

To come back to me

Sure you would crawl

Out of the grave

Do anything to reunite with me

But you stayed dead and gone

I lay on the floor all alone

In a puddle of tears

You weren’t coming back

Late Night

I feel slow

I feel aware

Contradiction in my brain

Trauma Revisited

Here I was thinking my trauma was healed when I saw the rapist today. I was in the Lyft on Ostend St, and there he was outside of a building. I thought he was gone from the neighborhood, but it seems like he might only have moved. The air was knocked from my lungs, and my heart hurt to beat. I haven’t talked to anyone about what happened today, but maybe I will mention it tomorrow. I didn’t know I was still traumatized. It’s been 3 years. Why am I not healed? Why isn’t he far away from me? It’s bad enough that he didn’t face justice. I don’t want him in my neighborhood. I don’t want to relive it. I don’t want the dread of seeing him. It’s probably only the isolation of COVID that has kept me from seeing him around. What am I going to do?

Intimate Kiss

A wet, hot intimate kiss

You put my body into bliss

On Writing Erotic Poetry

The strange thing is that I don’t remember writing much erotic poetry before I was raped. There were poems about attraction and kissing, but I didn’t really write explicit sexual poetry back then. After I was raped, writing erotic poetry became a rebellion against being violated. I still owned my sexuality, and he couldn’t take that from me, though he had taken my sense of safety and any ability to truly experience sexual interaction with a human unless there was a computer and many miles separating us. Through time and therapy, I regained some sense of physical sexuality, though it’s an issue I need to do more work on in therapy.

Australian Accent

His accent heating my blood

From the other side of the world

Jokes, not really jokes, about travel

When the pandemic is over

But we would barely leave the bed

He tells me in detail what he would

Do to me with his tongue

Pictures of his tongue and dick

A video of him licking his lips

And explicit details in that accent

Jewel

Men claim women are like jewels

Then cast them aside like trash

Or treat them like cheap trinkets

Passionate Ice

Your passion leaves me cold

As you laugh off my no

And I freeze at the fear

Of repeat destruction