Jama Rattigan has been celebrating all things peanut butter this November. I am excited and honored to be in good peanut buttery company on the finale of this celebration at Jama's Alphabet Soup. Go read mine along with the peanut butter spread of poems by Linda Baie, Cathy Ballou Mealey, Mary Lee Hahn Renée LaTulippe and J. Patrick Lewis.
And Finally...
Teaching Authors is sharing the roundup of Thanku today. You can find mine and many other haiku that share a thankful theme.
The tone of my poem today is a bit less peanut butter, a little bit thankful and mostly a memory.
Not a Condiment
I have this bag.
We called it my mayo bag.
Mayo, but not for mayonnaise.
Rather, Mayo, the clinic.
When preparing
to go to THE clinic, you prepare a bag.
You prepare every documentable symptom.
You want every moment to be clear
and you want to look serious
smart and worth hearing.
When I look at the bag now I just see
a bag
expanded by fear.
I was so afraid.
That bag
had a hold of me.
Parts of me want to open it
take out the binder and file folders
the timeline of those years in my life.
I want to relive it through the documents
because I think it might make me
feel more grateful.
But I can’t do it.
Because I don’t want to relive it.
And I can’t get rid of it because
that bag
has a hold of me.
So it sits on a shelf in my basement.
So full it can’t be closed
only concealed by a large flap with dangling clips.
I glance at the bag,
breathe and walk past.
A part of my past that will remain
but is detained.
