Strange how we can take words and reduce them to
shadows of their former selves
Willfully diminishing
What casts a shadow
and the utter strength of light
His Holocaust Clothes
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Author Archives: Elea Lee
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Days before the Passover lamb, John the Baptist mends her long robe, pours oil over wounds with words which make sense only to the dead, faith the fire we warm our hands by,
Let me in, let me in says the moon and the wind, let me in to the stillness of everlasting, as even now the children begin to
Lay down their outer garments, their palm branches, as we all sing, hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.
We are close now, so close .
The Occasional Simile
Your love
is like
the mints I fish from the bottom of
my purse
Eulogizing Joe
Methuselah lived 969 years, which means that at just over 100, my grandfather was a spring chicken, as lifespans go. That notwithstanding he got a lot done. Married, participated in at least three wars, fathered children, buried some. Lost a wife, found another, called me his oldest unmarried granddaughter for as long as it applied.
I loved him in all his iterations, in all his familiar imperfections, but I know Someone who loves him more.
The One who is the Road
The All and Only
Road Home.
Psalm 116
The Face Recognition Game
Pretend for a moment that a woman who vaguely resembled Condoleezza Rice had once been in love with the spitting image of a youthful Bill Gates, what if they met years later, at a cafe, perhaps in a train station, people going from here to there in a hurry, what would they say to each other, would they recognize their former selves in the people they had become? Would she touch his face tenderly? Regret the years which came between them? Or would they just pass each other by, as though someone else’s face had been taped hastily across
All they had been together?
Locker Room Obscenities
Inside the camera frame men laugh about bartering girls as sex slaves.
Where are these men now?
Where are their victims?
Is there a Mendelian trait for “monster?”
It is easy to focus on the unfamiliarity of words
They use
For the blue or green eyes
of their victim
But locker rooms are locker rooms
everywhere because
the god of lust and violence has so many
F*cking clothes in his f*cking closet
My anger dog, my anger cat
This morning I contemplated creating (Galatea-style), a metaphorical anger mascot.
Something with breathable fake fur and big flappy hands.
But I realized I have real pets who fit the bill–
An anger dog, an anger cat.
She rolls on her belly so I can pet her, but barks mercilessly at her compatriot
He snuggles close, however briefly, attempts his most disingenuous
Resting cat face
But I know I cannot
Let them
Run free.
Unsparing Prose
Unsparing means “receives no mercy.”
But I prefer just unsparing prose which would be the writing equivalent of the clean kitchen I wish I had. No moldy bread, no stale potato chips, everything organized and wiped clean,
Bare.
If my prose is bare enough, then I can strip from it the insomnia and the anger and leave only the facts.
The truth without adjectives.
Simple, awful, but so far, still sparing,
Because we have so far, survived.
Writing about terrible things
I have known for some time that using the clipped, incisive, deliberate forms associated with poetry was one way to write about the devastation caused by my adopted son.
I started writing the poetry publicly when the prose seemed too difficult for people.
You could call this the “it’s too awful” syndrome, or you could call it the complicity principle. People either do not want to face the devastation and intimacy of sexual assault or they have their own story and do not really want to scrutinize how their story was handled. Notice the passive tense–change the passive tense–how they handled their story.
We have debilitating and unwarranted stigmata which we apply to the victims of sexual assault in a highly prejudicial and unscientific fashion.
All cases of sexual assault are woefully underreported, yet we claim to understand rape victims.
You cannot have a principled, scientific understanding of a condition if you force the sufferers of the condition into silence.
Nor can you ever separate the “symptoms” of victimhood out from the original crime or the subsequent, devastating consequences of enforced silence.
Every victim of a crime deserves relief, but in rape, the victim often faces subsequent harm.
They are told to be quiet or they will be marginalized.
That marginalization never stops. It can happen any time a victim shares their story.
I know because I just watched it happen again, and again, and again when my daughter wrote her college entrance essay on her rape story.
The Supine Condition
It helps me sometimes, to picture all of us in our sheep costumes, thin elastic chin straps, holding on our faces.
Helps me to remember
We are all sheep
If you don’t count the wolves among us
And all we, like sheep have gone astray
So you will not be the one to forgive my helpless anger
At all the lambs lost to slaughter
While the Shepherd was away.
Carrying Light 