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.

When everything holy scurries away in fear,
even water won’t bring tenderness.
The low spots roil.

Breathing flaps its ambivalence
in prayers filtering incense
until it dazes the low spots empty,
leaving only the Holy
no you, me, or Thy.

Brenda Warren 2012

Flying Down, David Salle 2006 -oil on linen

Life first fell apart when I was five.
Ducks flew upside down trying to save me from snakes
slithering toward the thin line of light that signaled their escape
out the garage and back to their swamp.

While flashlights lit my glory hole.

Five years young and open
to boys, yelling words I tuned out,
“Crush. Kill. Destroy.”
Threats and anxiety
wailed under airplanes.

When stories are told
of lives falling from skies in spiraled animation
my head disappears in yesterday’s cockpits
and bitterness visits my eyes.

Brenda Warren 2012

Visit The Mag for more interpretations of David Salle’s work.

nothing remains but
ash
feelings like a husk cover everything I said

our storm shook me
until damp bundles of tears quivered
in trapped corners of husk covered dreams
cold ashes and swollen eyes
reminding the dead
that they are dead
they bring nothing
to the souls of the living

bolts tighten as life repeats itself

this generation screams angst
with silent text messages
ripping through a plexus
of perplexity
searing scars
that never bleed through anything
but tears and rusty hope climbed for
reconciliation
trapped in its own futility

where did it all begin?

Brenda Warren 2012

For tomorrow’s Sunday Whirl, where I selected the words below from “The Summer of Black Widows,” a poem by Sherman Alexie.  My stepson and I had a blowout this week.  Writing this piece was cathartic.

Lilting lilies lull her eye
with lyric necks of stems.
Peering through their arching green tresses,
a sensuous echo of clouds explodes
in a saunter of silent sound
rolling across extensive blue exteriors.

Dabbing her brush,
rich silhouettes sing simplicity
in shining shocks of color.
She paints the morning’s alliteration
to counter the lull of lilies.

Brenda Warren 2012

Visit The Sunday Whirl.

Suffering silence, Batman!
How can I live through the shaken blessings
that reign down on my life?

“Not without my cows!”
I scream into rugged faces
fierce with de-fences

chiseled from marble.
Not without my cows.
Warriors to grace,

their remote splendor
blossoms on the roadsides
that dot the days of my life.

Brenda Warren 2012

For The Sunday Whirl.

Presented with evidence,
her parents shift their eyes for one split second
before the smooth surface of denial
glosses their countenance .

Privileged people,
upper middle class,
they paint themselves above numbers
that scream their daughter’s need
for help.

With a working memory of 69,
words become nebulous gasses—
instructions must be refreshed.
Redundancy becomes a classroom strategy
to facilitate student success.

“Our daughter is not stupid.”

Bare white shoulders shudder under 
parental expectations.
Reduced to tears
she bears their shame
behind closed doors.

“This will go in her permanent file,
so the high school understands why
we did not provide services to your child.”
Final answers disintegrate
when parents don’t sign a document
affirming their denial when all tests indicate
their child’s need for help.

*

At last, she sits in my classroom.
Beautiful. Nervous.
Geared up to show me she doesn’t belong.
We write and her work ethic
rises before my eyes.
This girl will develop strategies
to navigate the nebulous world of words on page.
She will pin ideas together in strings of meaning
threading a success she can weave into the story
of parental expectations that color her privileged
young life.

Brenda Warren 2012

Process Notes:
True story. Sadly, difficulty in reading can be a stigma in some families. This girl will be successful in my classroom because she has a strong work ethic. I am lucky to be her teacher.

Working memory is measured on a scale that goes from 40 to 160. The curriculum I teach is cyclical. Each lesson is divided into six steps, and each step has some redundancy. That repeated practice helps my students develop strategies to read and write.

Visit The Sunday Whirl

At dusk, the lines in my empty classroom begin to blur.
Sharpened pencils sit tips up ready for young people
to link traces of their heart to lined white paper.

Summer’s recipe for cracking wide that reading gap
is forgiven as September’s essentials start piling in:
bulletin boards, journals, and a teacher who dares

to break through fences that separate students
exposing the chains that bind and connect us.
A rose is a rose, and stories change lives.

Operator me, must hook kids into books
and link up discussions between readers
feeding a muse they haven’t yet met.

We build a scaffold for story connected and pulled,
written without fear of judgment or grade
written simply for the joy of linking hearts

to words on page.

Brenda Warren 2012

School starts Wednesday, and I’ve been readying my classroom and my spirit. It will be a great year.

Visit The Sunday Whirl.