Eleven women gather in the darkening of dusk;
eleven threads of story are exhumed from beating hearts.
Grief and fear comingle into winds that whisper messages,
seeking relief from men corrupting power to control,
men who don’t know what it’s like to live within a female form
impregnated by your mother’s slimy boyfriend—
or raped by a football player and his friends,
or assaulted on your way home from the library
and left damaged and alone.

Your femaleness invited it,
your vagina,
your sex
and now you’re bound by this parasite,
this tiny feeding being,
too angry to think about rape,
and babies,
and the intentions of God.

Too scared to hate the world any more,
too scared to nurture life within,
too scared to let your mother know
when she’d beat you for doing her boyfriend,
or the football players would haze you in the halls,
or you’d revisit in a belly round, the pummeled pillaged mess
that you’d become; the baby a scarlet letter,
a rape tied around your waist.

Eleven women gather in the darkening of dusk;
eleven threads of story are exhumed from beating hearts.
Second chances dance their histories, their lives without that “we”
banished to the freedom of not having to be.
Eleven liberated women gather in the gloaming
rippling outward inklings of energy through darkening skies
all their wishes woven into one single thread
that grants the right for future women
not to be forced to bear their rapists’ bread.

Brenda Warren 2012

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Visit The Sunday Whirl.

Peanuts are seeds.

How odd—
scores of them line her pockets
and she’s never planted one.
She pops one into her mouth
then remembers the shelter her grandmother
recommended before Death scored
points handling her capture.

Memory guides her, and
she feels lines deepen on her face
as she sinks beneath the canopy of ferns.

Contemplating shadows, Death marches by.
Cursing mud, cursing bugs,
cursing its unrelenting job as it
brushes by ferns, disturbing her—
interrupting the cadence of her heart’s
sturdy cabinet.

She sinks a peanut deep
into moist soil that feeds ferns,
and releases fecundity’s earthy scent,
reminding her that nothing ever really dies.

Her grandmother likened life to her café’s compost bin.
“Rotting vegetation fertilizes life,” she’d say.
“Energy never dissipates, it merely changes form, child.”

It took 48 years and a peanut
for that one to sink in.
From below, she could see her grandmother’s
face through the ferns.

Brenda Warren 2012

This is a product of the wordle words from The Sunday Whirl. I had no idea where it was going until it went there.  This is fiction.