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• Annual Literary Reviews • available at all events |
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All rights revert to the individuals published. These works may not be reproduced without permission of the author. These pages may not be reproduced without the express written permission of Performance Poets Association, and may not be stored in any electronic data retrieval system. |
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PPA Staff |
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WE ARE EACH OTHER’S ANGELS
It was a phone call, the distress in her voice, her fragility travels through the wires, she confides her diagnosis, breast cancer.
I respond too rapidly, pour myself out in a minute, open up the bottle I keep tightly closed on a subject I want on the back shelf
gathering dust, put aside, buried, forgotten with the other fears that keep managing to fall off into my dreams, caught weak and vulnerable.
I hear the beat of my mortality, it flows under the river of words, shock, time, surgery, chemo, radiation. My bottled fears spill out over the receiver
but I do not talk of infections, blood clots, I do not talk of spending a year preparing to die, I do not philosophize the need to live each day as a gift,
like others, I have no right to feel confident, no privilege to the Book of Life and what it contains. She hangs up uncomforted because mine is a success story, one among many.
I leave the window of hope open she leaves her fears on my shoulders.
Paula Camacho |
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IT WAS HIS WHOLE LIFE For Dennis Kim
You do not have to explain why you emptied your pockets, ripped off your shoes, dived into seventy-five feet of water. Why a sense of panic preceded your plunge into the wet hands of the Hudson River, hands that did not want to let you go. We have felt the panic, the misplacement of a poem, a manuscript somewhere near but lost, the rummaging and rustling of papers hours into days, one piece of paper, the accumulation of minutes and seconds, the words we have been searching for, the words that fall majestically on a blank page like rain on dry earth until the paper fills with the river of our lives, our emotions, our souls
You do not have to explain your loss to fellow poets who mourn you for jumping in the waters at St. Christopher’s pier for the bag that held all your writings, your poems, for screaming before the leap “I can’t let this stuff go.” We wish it had been otherwise, we wish that the confidence you had in retrieving the treasure would have carried you beyond the pull of the river’s grasping hands and into the career you so desired. We wish your writing life would have started at twenty-two instead of ended. We wish this poem need not be written. We wish we could tell you that there would be more years of writing to let the river take your words. We wish our wishes were answered prayers.
Paula Camacho Poetry workshop leader, many awards won, many publishing credits, one book published |
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SALT WATER TAFFY
Did you ever have the taffy they sell along the shores where seagulls swoop at bits
of crumbs fallen from food like water drops off the sides of rocks; the taffy that is
pulled and stretched in shades of colored flavors, each sticky rope drawn towards infinity,
its sugar crystals like stars in the swirl of an universe ever expanding
the big bang stretched and pulled inside your mouth, until taffy goo implodes into sweetness?
Paula Camacho |
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Performance Poets Association® |