he was a charged particle boy
who liked to scrape paint off your walls
lightning bolt through your house
make your healing crystals fall
off their shelves, shatter on your floor
he grew high-school tall with huge
streaks of fuzzy hair growing in all
directions making you wonder if he
had tested putting his metal toys
in your electric sockets just for fun
he sat calmly with his frizzled hair
in his holiday chair listening to all of us,
with our masters’ degrees concealed
under the table with our manners,
tell him he should go to college so he can
light up the world, amount to something
big and mighty, be worthy of his place
and in response, he opened up his switch
to calmly light our way, to tell us
he was on his way, all in, signed up
to be an electrician
he knew he had to find out how to
be with all the wild juices, go all out
at his red speed, to find a force worth taming
the one that hides behind our walls
the one that calls him to command
his stop and go
with all the flow within him
is a retired school psychologist who was raised in New York City, and now lives in a forest in Pennsylvania. Since third grade, she has been a poet. In the mid-1990s, she wrote poetry in her spare time, and had some poems accepted in Pudding, Plainsongs, The Pegasus Review, and others. While working with struggling children and families, Susan’s hobbies had to be gentle on her mind and heart, so she made quilts, jewelry, and rock sculptures. In some ways, she is still recovering from dealing with so much sadness for so long.
Since she returned to writing poetry last year, more than 100 of her poems have been accepted for publication by Across the Margin, The Avalon Literary Review, Ekstasis, Feminine Collective, Gastropoda, Invisible City, Litbreak Magazine, Military Experience & the Arts, Persimmon Tree, Vita Poetica, and others.
