the aftermath
our first-and-last therapy:
she uncorked a drain
at the bottom of my heart
and let each secret spill out
FYI: This character tanka could be read as a sequel to my tanka below:
I close my eyes
and slip into childhood ...
these ghostly thoughts
jostling one another
on the therapyist's couch
Shot Glass Journal, 41, 2023
And for more about character tanka, see To the Lighthouse: Character/Persona Tanka
Added:
my mother
loves her husband, my stepfather
more than me ...
in the dark, this nine-year-old
folds her abuse into silence
FYI: This tanka was inspired by Alice Munro’s daughter' sexual abuse story.
Toronto Star, July 10: How did what happened to Alice Munro’s daughter stay quiet so long? Start with our uniquely Canadian devotion to silence
Andrea Skinner’s memoir amounts to a national horror story, a specifically Canadian conspiracy of silence, and evidence of a national pathology: It reveals so much of our desire not to tell stories.
Added:
eulogy to her father
the weight of what is left
unspoken
Added: Game Show, 2024, LX
written in response to The New Yorker's July 13 remark: an indelible portrait of our era of political crisis and conflict
with his fist raised
flanked by a giant flag
bloodied and defiant
Donald Trump mouths to the crowd, fight...
the night gets louder and darker
FYI: The New Yorker, July 14: A Nation Inflamed
After the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, who can heal a country so threatened by menace, violence, and division?
Robert F. Kennedy, spoke to the Cleveland City Club about the “mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives.”
Violence, whether it is carried out by one man or a gang, degrades an entire nation
Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire weapons and ammunition they desire. . . . Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear; violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleaning of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.
