Hope Rises From Coal

Black lung words

hung on daddy’s tongue

pulling me from coal

on the white wing hope

I’d see a better day.

He said the devil paints

rainbows with pills,

but lies stain your body blue

until brown dirt coffins your bones.

Son, I’ve been living gray shadows,

but tomorrow is bright yellow with sun.

Don’t be stuck where midnight owns

the valley… tie your shoelaces and run.

©Susie Clevenger 2019

Bits of Inspiration ~ The Colors In a Song

Poets & Storytellers United ~ Writer's Pantry#2

Mulier Tenaces

Seamstress
@catschappach

Born rebel with my own ribs I stitched

every truth I captured with my teeth

to my womb song of feminism.

Not every fang is poison or every scripture truth.

A serpent opened my eyes when words spoke blindness.

Scales weigh the lies on a tongue.

Spin me wild and wild I’ll be…Tenacity of Freedom…

©Susie Clevenger 2019

Real Toads ~ Art Flash/55

Flying Without Wings

Familiar hands press into my shoulders.

So many memories pulse through palms

warming my skin negating distance

with their intimacy…the calm before terror.

There’s euphoria in the free fall, the weightless

sense of air and sky mixing with adrenaline.

It’s where I’ll land that pulls screams from my throat.

Judgement, the patient bitch, steals the last rose

from my cheeks and pushes its thorns into my bones.

How many pieces of my shell can be glued into resurrection?

“Officer, I told him he shouldn’t sit on the ledge,

but he insisted. He wanted to recreate the photo

I took of him on our first date.”

©Susie Clevenger 2019

Real Toads ~ The Unreliable Narrator