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Poetry fans, I'm pleased to shine the spotlight, today, on Nurse Practitioner and accomplished writer, Christen Lee. Lines like, "She’s a dreamer, lucid waking, a crusader with armor disarmed" (Lady Demure) reflect the raw honesty in her work. Please enjoy these three poems. And, thank you, Christen, for sharing your words with SHINE international poetry series! Lady DemureShe’s a good girl. The quiet type. Poised and gracious, eager to serve. Hair coiffed, face softly powdered. She’s a lady demure. Respectable, articulate, hard working, humble and obeisant. She arrives 5 minutes early, is never in default, apologizes for your misdeeds. She’s a beauty, a keeper, a diamond, buffed and polished. The girl next door who aged well. She remembers birthdays, sends bouquets, bandages elbows, bakes a quiche at 8 am. Insists you take the best piece, the last piece, the one she wanted. She bows her head when praised, smiles sweetly, laughs quietly, speaks a lexicon of yes, please, thank you. She’s a woman who hides her sorrows. Bundles them in platitudes, buries them with gratitude. She’s thick-skinned yet soft, sensuous yet modest, character shaped by the sharp chisel of propriety. But what they don’t tell you is that a lady demure is a woman to be feared. She’s a flight risk, unstable, liable to burst into flame at any given moment. She’s a lady in coat sleeves who longs to bare all, show you scars, rippling ink blots of metaphor that refuse interpretation. She has visions of shedding her skin, bloodletting her shame, blotting the lifeline to her unyielding gods. She’s a dreamer, lucid waking, a crusader with armor disarmed, a constellation of compromises ad nauseam. She fans a litany of passions, longs to make love to the broken years, caress the exit wounds of the abandoned heart. She aches to reach inside and swaddle the quivering child. To cherish the most unlovable parts. If I were her, I’d tell the world my darkest secrets until all that’s left is the sound of honesty. Soft scraping of ink against pages of decorum. Lessons Learned in Mom’s Kitchen My mother never used a cookbook for baking. Every fall, the cool, dormant kitchen transformed into a warm melange of cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, clove, tables overflowing with pumpkin, pecan, mincemeat. In swift, deft motions, she cut flour with shortening, dusted the countertops with powdered hands. She flattened thick mounds of dough into discs, rolled thin, stretched taut across the tops of pie plates, edges trimmed and crimped. I watched as she commandeered the knives, oven racks, bowls and whisks, as in silence, I imagined blending cup after cup of bitterroot into sweet folds of pastry, buttered and flecked with aromatic cinnamon and brown sugar. And I sat this way for years, pressed beneath her shadow, as mom held a blade to the pinwheeled dough, generations of sadness exquisitely sliced into perfect parallels. OrdinaryEverything here is ordinary, you say. At 43, there is little that surprises you. The bright stars of years are sagging, slipping into a wrinkled sheet of dusky yellow. You come and go from the same ranch rambler with its cracked siding, wind blown shutters, bloomless azaleas. You gather scattered shards of happiness and arrange them in a vase. Memories like a lost Eden, sun bleached and held loosely within the peeling veneer of time. This is how it is with love. You think you own it, but then it slips away. And you pray to it, beg for its return. Bury your wilted heart in the cool damp dirt. Then after years, you unearth it. Hands like shovels, you cut through the hard strata of loneliness, mounds of bones, brittle, decomposed, digging deeper, all the while filling gaping holes, burying tracks, desperate to salvage your complacent life. Then it happens. You strike gold. You lift it to the blinding light, admire its fire, arcane aura. Enchanting, you say, clasping it inside your palm, its edges roughing your skin, cleaving a jagged cut through which you squeeze the life into your blood. A sliver of the sweet sharp furies of ages past. You carry a flame inside your steel veins. A metal of bravery. A vice grip of rebellion. A scar in a shape that only you can recognize.  Christen Lee is a family nurse practitioner in Cleveland, Ohio. Her writing has been featured in Dulcet Lit, Heartwood, The Write Launch, Querencia Press, Aurora, Sad Girls Club, Encephalon, In Parentheses, The Elevation Review, and Moot Point among others.
Friends, I'm delighted to shine the spotlight, today, on the talented Jessica Pratt! Today, Jessica brings us "Severed" along with three others. Please enjoy! Thank you, Jessica, for sharing your work with SHINE international poetry series. Severed Wildest grief grew inside falling outside of my sun soaked jelly eyes ribbons of tears weaving into maypole tethers flashing in the wind cracking into lightning pulsing into sandscapes rivers of glass rooting deep into the visceral violent umbilical snap of a severed timeline. Some DaysThe orange was a festering wound that day, not a sunflower nodding in the wind, not a plump koi mouthing for food or a ready sunrise rolling over the hill, but a weeping gash, an angry coal ready to spit, something visceral to crush as it explodes under a sharp boot and lays wasted under the sun. I prefer a mouth full of juice and zest and whimsy, but on some days, I am angry. You Weren't Therewhen the air cracked open. The thunder made children of us and the lights blinked out quietly like a haunting. The cottonwood tree caught fire, a faultless witch burning as the neighbors watched on and the fire department advanced. You’d have thought it was beautiful, the way our secrets went up in smoke like a prayer; the way life went on when they were gone, light suddenly pouring in through the front window. You Let the Stars Rustwhere once they spat fire, polished to a blaze, rang with a vengeance, set the world spinning on its fabled trajectory. Now crusted in red iron, a corrosive belt in the digestive tract of the universe, fading out like the last dying stub of a wick. Had I known I would have lent you the silky polish of a tangled jellyfish or a dizzy firefly, dug out the core of the earth myself, coaxed Yggdrasil from its ancient chamber to find you what you needed. You only had to ask.  Jessica Aure Pratt is an occupational therapist who lives in Utah, where she enjoys camping and hiking with her family and friends. Her poems often reflect experiences with parenting, nature, social issues, and many facets of spirituality. She has recently had poems accepted into Wildscape Lit Journal, Moss Puppy Mag, Arcana Poetry Press, Rituals, and Planted Journal. You can find more of her work on Instagram: @jessaure.poetry
Poetry lovers, today I'm honored to bring you one half of the "gut punch" poetry prompts team...Chris Kads! Please enjoy Chris' moving poems "Job Instructions for a Caretaker" and "Missing the Tide," which won second place in the 63rd Glendon & Kathryn Swarthout awards for undergraduate poetry (audio forthcoming from Arizona State University). Thank you, Chris, for sharing your gift for words with SHINE international poetry series! Job Instructions for a Caretaker Cut the chicken into bite-sized pieces. Slice the bread. Tear yourself in half. Tuck the rainbow pin in your apron pocket, your hair back in a bun. Watch the edges while you toast the ones of sourdough - his favorite. Resist the temptation to stick them in your shirt - to coat them in sweat. Remember I don’t have a lot of teeth anymore and the classic He was raised in a different time. Roll a delivery cart past a wall of ghosts, faces that were flushed not even two days prior. Stop at the door decorated in truck bumper stickers. Honk if you like honkers. Pretend the vinyl-covered wood is his flesh when your knuckles rap on it. Prepare for the spit as the animal opens his cage. Missing the Tide We strip down sea turtle paper, make a bathroom white again. I was twelve when I saw my first sea turtle. Twelve when I was told, He would’ve died in the wild and watched a being of the sea refuse to face a wall of glass. It’s easy to know the cause of death of people like the man behind the foggy window. The man with the yellowed curtains and the sea turtle wallpaper. There’s no need for an autopsy when you’ve tasted the coffee sugared with salt and you’ve heard “Rachel” called “Susan” and you’ve seen him cry into a plate of beige pink puree. It’s easy to know when you finger dust off frames of his strangers, when their new home is a plastic garbage bag, prepared to be laid in a Goodwill grave. Sometimes, when I clean these rooms, look at paper that becomes dust in my palm, I wonder if, when faced with a life in glass, it’s better to drown in the sea.  Chris Kads is a Barrett Honors student at Arizona State University majoring in literature with a certificate in writing. In and out of school she works on creating picture books, young adult short stories, poems, and novels. She has works upcoming in the Blood+Honey Magazine, the Canyon Voices Literary Magazine, and the Pillowtalk Magazine. Additionally, her poem "Missing the Tide" placed second in the 63rd Glendon and Kathryn Swarthout Awards. A previous retirement home worker, Chris strives to shed light on the complex and often difficult experiences workers and residents face. She hopes to make her family, boyfriend, friends, and two dogs proud with her literary pieces.
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SHINE - International Poetry Series
From the international poetry community, we have a "luxury of stars," as Sylvia Plath might say, and it is my honor to provide a home for their words through SHINE Poetry Series.
NOW IN PRINT!
Stars Over the Dordogne
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