Tag:

Poetry of Outliers

The Grants Game: Poetry by Fran Ransley

by Fran Ransley September 1, 2022

Proposal submitted,
funding requested for a program
that would coordinate services
to benefit substance-abusing
teenage mothers and their at-risk infants.
Money to train staff
to train volunteers
who will provide support
and model appropriate behavior,
parenting skills and problem-solving
techniques, provide child care
so young mothers can go to
job training and support groups.
Vouchers for gasoline
so she can attend classes,
but gasoline doesn’t help
because her car broke down
when her boyfriend borrowed it
and left it parked
on that rutted dirt street by the trailer
they used to live in
but got kicked out of because
he spent the rent on stuff.
A program director
hired to coordinate staff
to train the volunteers
and administer the program,
a master’s degree and five years
minimum experience in related fields,
ninety thousand plus benefits and retirement,
and the teenage junkie mother
gets a gas voucher.
The administrator has never met a junkie
and doesn’t want to;
the volunteers will handle that
with appropriate activities described
in flawless bureaucratese,
designed to enrich the environment
of the junkie mothers
and make sure they get to the baby clinic on time.
And the teenage substance-abusing mother
is eligible for a job-training program.
So, if she stays off the stuff
maybe she can get a clerical certificate,
or she can get on-the-job training
and get to be a Certified Nursing Assistant.
She gets child care so she can attend classes,
if Welfare approves it,
and if she can get the car fixed.
Her boyfriend said he and
his friend would go get the car
and fix it, but somebody
stripped it and smashed the windshield
and they came back with some stuff instead.
The baby is screaming
and she can’t handle that,
the stuff, it makes you forget
the social workers and the fuck-up
volunteers that try to pretend
they’re on your level.
Tell them whatever they want to hear,
they’re just spies for Welfare,
got a file on you bigger than the phone book.
The administrator drives
a silver Mercedes
and keeps the doors locked
when he parks downtown.
Her boyfriend spent the money on stuff
so they took the phone out,
the volunteers can’t call,
there’s no food in the house,
they’ll get kicked out pretty soon
but it doesn’t matter,
the stuff makes you not care
about the silver Mercedes
and all the other shit you’ll never have.

September 1, 2022

OUR VOICE

Mother’s Creatures, Flying Wonders: Poetry by Taneesh Kaur

by Taneesh Kaur September 9, 2021

written by Taneesh Kaur

A flock of black birds swoop by my window,
North, then West, as if circling my apartment
swooshing around the house, a tornado of playful joy.
Their shadows would dance on the carpet, captivate
in the morning light if it were morning
but it’s afternoon when the sun doesn’t reach in.
I am sitting across from the middle section
of the window. It’s a triptych, sectioning off the view to the East:
|   Road  ||  House  ||  Trees  |
A single black bird flies
toward me
it flies for me
in the middle
from above the house
plummeting
always in sight
always in the center
of the center section
of the triptych
it approaches the window.
Its last flaps until
with the momentum of a rollercoaster, all its intensity and thrill,
and the grace of a swan
though somehow not a swan, not a rollercoaster,
it shoots up
always in sight, always 
front and center.
Commands my attention with its purposeful glide
like a resolute gaze
until out of view.
Maybe up to the sky, maybe over the house.
My what a view.
I see stars.

September 9, 2021

OUR VOICE

ode to dead caterpillars: poetry by m.o. kng

by m.o. kng September 2, 2021

written by m.o. kng

(after “ode to rats” by Elizabeth Acevedo)

because you were the one that did not prove them wrong, did not
split the chrysalis in one try, did not emerge a fully-realized being:
the butterfly after the caterpillar,
the swan after the duckling,
the rainbow after the rain. because you had to grow up
without the glow-up. the lucky ones are all fluorescent, meaning that
their bodies can swallow black light and
spit it back out into sparkle - neon green, hot pink, firetruck red,
a pride of colors soaring through the June sky.
at this sight the little girl in the park screams with glee and
her dad burrows his frow, wonders out loud
i don’t have a problem with them
but i don’t get why they
need to be so in-our-face about this. from the shadows you
watch your brethren fly, wondering why it is that with each year you swallow
your body only grows heavier. what if they
lied to us? what if for you, it never gets better? or what if
you were made not to be a light fluttering thing but a
crater in the earth? this is what you know to do: to
see a pit and crawl for cover.
see a hole where a bullet-point body is supposed to go.
fill a cavity with the closest thing to bone because you know
some of our people did not survive long enough
to write this chapter of the story;
crushed under the crunch of a careless boot or
shrivelled under the watch of time. and still they ask you:
why don’t you fly, child?
how will you ever complete this life cycle
if you don’t shed this old skin and
fly? you don’t respond, but in your head
you think about how some caterpillars
choose not to hang by a silken thread but
to burrow deep below the ground before their
transformation. there’s your answer: to make your home
in the places people bury you
to die. to live on this earth,
this hostile earth,
this kind earth:
a blessing stuck sweaty to your skin,
a color worn on the inside of your ribcage.
you do not know how to fly yet
but you know
how to sit still,
how to stand guard,
how to pull every scrap of love so tight to your body
that there is now a black hole
where your heart used to be - you better
put gravity in its place, dead thing
suck the rain out of the air, dead thing
let your people fly
let them glow in the dark
and pray that in another life
another place
you too will join them
a cocoon unfurling
a new color
emerging.

ARTIST STATEMENT: This poem explores the topic of being queer in a non-affirming family. I do not have the same “coming out” story that many gay people have: I have taken most of my life to accept and love myself, and although I now have many friends and loved ones who accept me as I am, I struggle at home because my birth family holds very homophobic ideas and beliefs (I have never told them that I am queer). I am still proud of who I am, even if I can’t share it with everyone, and I want people to know that their journey and their identity are still important even if they can’t “come out” the same way other people can come out.

September 2, 2021

OUR VOICE

We Aren’t Really Outliers, You Are Just Afraid, So You Think We Are: Poetry by Mia Ruiz

by Mia Ruiz August 26, 2021

written by Mia Ruiz

She/Her/They/Them/It
She is the woman lost in the fog
whose face becomes indistinguishable from the wind
Her eyes, deep and dark, give you a place to rest
A place to remember what you left behind 
All of it, scattered in the stars
They/them all lost, all found
It is okay

POC and a 61 year old woman
Distinguished by the colors of the earth that are her skin
Once her hair was the color of the sky at midnight
She wrote poems and forgave your trespasses
Spit out her rages, cut and burned to see you
Today she is a person whose hair grows white and gray
Makes her invisible, so she can cast her spells
And utter the poems the stars bequeath to her

LGBTQIA+
She loves the lines on your face that create your smile
You, the woman to her woman, the woman to her many
The girls you were both imagining love indistinguishable from life
Oh the glory between your lips, your fingers, your thighs
The most exquisite joy as your bodies rode the starlight
To the edge of a spiral galaxy and leapt, oh, the ferocity!
No scars, just eyes burning in the night

Major Depression with Psychotic Features, PTSD


Her joy grows from impossible places as she pulls herself up
From quicksand, love like a vengeance sears her heart
She breathes out fire and flowers as she lives/loves her life
The voices in her head reverberate in her veins
distinguished by there erudite calls for her nothingness
Death her final temptation, as she is afflicted by nightmares
Or relives the past with merciless clarity
The only real thing
what the stars assure her of, is your love

August 26, 2021

OUR VOICE

Philomela in Idaho: Poetry by Hilary Brown

by Hilary Brown August 19, 2021

written by Hilary Brown

Every girl here is a nightingale, unbelieved
and weaving songs she cannot sing. 
We receive nothing in the end. An empty
inheritance, a handful of threats.
An empty field after harvest, weeds
burning in the ditch. Air filled with the scent 
and sting of smoke. Almost comfort, 
almost enough. If we are lucky, we leave. 
We are transformed and we find our flight away. 
…
The wilderness was desert, was farmland 
pockmarked with grain elevators, rusted metal, 
rusted out cars, abandoned sheds, barns, the old
school, the old garage, the line of buildings
piled high with old furniture, brick church, 
bonfire, backwoods, back alleys, backyards, 
garages, home.
And silence left no obvious scar. There was
never any proof to hold up, a withered stump
crying offense to the gods, crying offense to
the prophets and protectors and parents. No.
There was just crying in all its fruitlessness.
…
Silence is its own bleak thing. There is no 
metaphor for this. Knuckles scraped on rock
or brick. Leave it as it is. You cannot
bandage it. There is no healing without
the open wound in open air, the damage
there where everyone can see.

…


Good morning windswept dawnlight, farmland
growing more barren, decay, generations who 
have lived here, children who will not stay. 
I would like to write a lovesong to memory. 
I have forgotten the memory for which I would sing. 
It is all lost and gone. It is a hollow thing. 
The roots no longer run that deep.
This is a beautiful land. We have marked it 
and marred it, carved our initials into it, determined
we must not be forgotten. It is still a beautiful land.
Bury me in topsoil. Make me easy carrion. 
Give me away only then, don’t allow
me to be prey.
…
Somewhere the sun is rising in reverse. 
I cannot recognize it without the backdrop
of home, the slope of the mountains far
to the east and far to the west, the slope 
of my neighbor’s roof outside my window. 
In memory, my mother walks to the middle 
of the road, shades her eyes and watches 
the sunset, one hand on her hip.
I would like to write a lovesong 
to the lonely land where I grew, 
to imagine I flew over like a lonely 
bird, like an ordinary bird, to imagine 
I never got lost in these specifics.
…


The air has stilled and is filled with waiting.
Each bird has returned to her nest, each
rabbit to his burrow. We are instinctual, filled
with hiding. We know the sound of thunder
before it rumbles in our ears, the flash of lightning
before it fills our vision. Have you seen panic
in the eye of a horse? The rolling reveal of white?
The tremble and tense of muscle? The danger
is there at the base and the height of fear.
We are not taught that fear, neither the paired
sorrow, but we have learned. Every mile
on this highway is an ode to the evening news,
and it has been bad news for months. 
We drive on.

August 19, 2021