WORD GHETTO
Moonflowers, like some poems, worship darkness. They open and flourish with white beauty in the palm of night. See how they smother themselves with the moon’s pallid smile. When day is awake in its fullness, those plants snub the sun and close like sealed envelopes. Rejection pricks like their hard porcupine seeds. It scrapes layers beneath what can’t be seen. I know rejection’s pain, the swelling in tender places. But here I am carving sentences, banishing them to dwell among other discarded lexicons. Anger, apple blossoms, white cotton socks, joy, tears, turbulence are treated like derelict words. They are dumped for not fitting into the suburbia of my shiny polished poem. I left them abandoned, struggling to survive where hope is dependent on the economics of convenience and memory. I pit them against each other like angry dogs. The survivor’s bone is my pen. Does this talk of struggle and abandonment depress you? You want a pink smile? I can’t give you one today. See how the sun flashes its amber teeth after two days of hard gray rain? My smile will shine like that when I find a way to liberate each rejected syllable breathing between the pages of my word ghetto. - Loretta Diane Walker Published in Word Ghetto |