Patchwork Prose and Verse
Drinking Coffee in Tulsa, Oklahoma
a certain photo
scrolls past
on our digital frame
and I swipe back
to see it once more
study it
Tulsa, Oklahoma
Tuesday, June 27, 2023
9:02 a.m.
eating breakfast
in the Corner Cafe
along Route 66
that summer
in the heart of
his birth city
giving thanks today
on the day of his birth
that he moved to Georgia
and that God brought
us together
he’s not contagious
(according to his feelings)
he’s just taking meds
We’ve managed to avoid the germs – up until now. My husband came home with some symptoms – a headache, eye pressure, and a scratchy throat. We’re knee deep in Chick Fil A Chicken Soup for supper – and an ample supply of DayQuil and NyQuil to treat the symptoms– and we’ll call it an early-to-bed night for sure. Birthday plans (he’s turning a landmark year) for Saturday are hanging by a thread, and we’ll see how he feels tomorrow…..
and so I tell him: if he’s right about easily-treated symptoms not related to a specific sickness such as Covid, Flu A, or RSV, he’ll be up and ready for an adventure first thing Saturday morning!
I’ve never considered that a named illness could be parsed out as circumstantial symptoms, and I see this in the men in my life who refuse to slow down and acknowledge that they are sick. It brings back a few regrets with my father, who was not forthcoming about any of his medical issues that piled up (Colon Cancer, Prostate Cancer, Pulmonary Fibrosis, SVT heart condition to name four of his co-morbidities). When my aunt and uncle were visiting, they forced his hand to go to the doctor for a Covid test when he was experiencing every sign of having it. He emerged from the exam room and informed my aunt that he had “a mild case of Covid,” downplaying things as he always did and refusing to stay home and keep his distance from others. I’ve never been able to control my mouth, and that was one time I got particularly mad and popped off, “Yes, I hear those can lead to mild cases of death.”
And things between us, already agitated with my tendency to tell the truth, as he properly diagnosed me, were never the same.
Onward.
I enjoy finding poems. They lurk in the pages of print and mostly go unnoticed – until they’re “found,” and some can take the form of Blackout poetry. Here is one from the pages of Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt.
Hazardous Situation
hazardous situation sucks ~
a stepladder
snipped-off stems
purple flowers
ladder
snakes
gloves……
…..there’s your answer:
not even
the thought of booze
(this poem was found on page 30 of Shelby Van Pelt’s Remarkably Bright Creatures)
If I had a freeway billboard, it would say If you haven’t had pizza for dinner at Frank’s Filling Station on the backside of nowhere in the rural Georgia Countryside off Highway 362 in Hollonville, you haven’t fully lived, ‘specially if you didn’t split a Little Debbie Double Oatmeal Cream Pie with your sweetie for dessert.
dinner wasn’t planned
we just ended up hungry
looking for some food
I was delivering a Facebook Marketplace sale of the last of my Longaberger collection from the 1990s ~ a lidded piece of Christmas pottery. I sold all but one of my baskets a couple of years ago in the sweeping house cleanout, but the pottery popped up needing a better home, and some man in a small silver sportscar pulled up next to us as we waited at Frank’s Filling Station, the designated meeting spot to do the business. I handed him the dish, and he handed me the cash.
The next obvious question at that time of the day was what was for dinner – a common conversation for two tired full-time working folks. We went down the list of possibilities, but nothing was appealing much to either of our appetites.
Wouldn’t it be fun to see if we can each eat dinner on five bucks? I asked my husband, eyeing the filling station and wondering whether they might have a little cafe inside. The place had just been redone a year ago, and neither of us had been inside since. I’d just picked up an easy ten dollars, and I sure didn’t mind splitting it with the love of my life to feed us both. It would be a fun challenge to see if we could stay within budget.
He took me up on it.
I eyed the boiled peanuts. They have regular and Cajun in there, and I do love the spicy ones. Probably not the best choice that close to bedtime, though. I scanned the cooler of local beef from Caldwell Farms and made a mental note to come back for some another time when I planned to cook at home. We spied the barrel tables next to the window and took a look at the food options – cheeseburgers, fries, pizza, chicken wings, hot dogs, and even a fried bologna sandwich. That’s how you know you’re in the country is when you see a fried bologna sandwich.
We settled on the pizza and two bottled drinks, and sat at a table to eat and watch the people coming and going – and that is a lot of excitement on a weeknight for the place where we live. My back was to the door, but when the last two pizzas walked out in the arms of a young man, my husband whispered that he was glad we got ours when we did. It wasn’t fabulous pizza, but it was decent, and that was good enough for a Tuesday night.
Did we stay under budget? Nope. We went over by $1.80 before adding the Oatmeal Cream Pie. We’d already blown the bank, so we splurged on a $2.00 deluxe dessert we could split, and we were grateful for the sustenance.
So if you’ve never had dinner at Frank’s Filling Station in Hollonville, Georgia, add it to your list of things to do if you’re ever an hour south of the Atlanta airport. They also have Hollonville, Georgia t-shirts in there, and those are as rare as hen’s teeth and would make great conversation starters for traveling. Keep a lookout for us ~ we might just be at a barrel table by the window.
Sometimes I like to open the book I’m currently reading to a random page and find a poem hidden there in the pages, peeking around the corners of other words, just waiting to be discovered. It reminds me of Augusten Burroughs’ Running With Scissors, where he and his friends did what they called a “Bible Dip” anytime they needed scriptural guidance. They’d open the Bible and drop their finger onto the page and read the verse to see what wise answers pertained to whatever the matter at hand.
Right now, I’m reading Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt, and I can’t stop turning the pages. It is humorous and heartwarming, and all at once I can go from one breath with tears welling and one to full laughter, the kind where you’re alone in a room in your favorite chair and you know if anyone is watching, they will think you’ve finally gone over the edge. It would pair well with Sy Montgomery’s Soul of an Octopus, and already I’m wondering whether I need a box of tissues like I did at the end of that one after I’d bonded with Octavia and found myself overcome with sorrow upon learning her fate. I can feel the faucet of tears coming on now just thinking about it, so I’m shifting gears and doing a Poetry Dip to find some words and phrases on two of Van Pelt’s pages (20-21) and weave them into a poem.
Words are funny like that. They will find you where you are and walk alongside you, knocking on your mind as you sit in thought, demanding attention. My own One Little Word for 2026 continues to salt and pepper moments as I think of all the ways I need to heed its urging and all the ways I can bring its nuances into my own writing. I’ve tried to show the onward movement in today’s poem, navigating the currents of the stages of grief.
Tentacles
tragedies ~
rawness,
despair
clustered,
soaked through
grief
~ cascaded,
etched,
blurred
into a sea
of sunshine
over the crest
The last day of my winter break before going back to work this morning was not a morning of sleeping in or relaxing. There were things to do that could not seem to wait on a Sunday morning. Perhaps 2026 will be a lot like this ~ getting things done with some sense of urgency. It is already Monday, and we are back at it, both of us, off to work and back into the grind of the routine. I’m holding on tight for the ride.
our Sunday wake-up call came early
on brand-new sheets
not even yet washed
we usually get
a warning: (the wretching)
not this time ~ there it was
between us
regurgitated orange dogfood
Ollie stiff-stepping off the bed
clearly the sick one
6:55 a.m. and on the way
to the sink I saw it in the floor:
he couldn’t hold it, either
to add to the madness
Boo Radley quivered
like Michael Flatley’s feet
hugging my ankles like
a furry shadow
I picked him up
(he never wants to be picked up)
heard the chirp of the smoke detector
and it all came clear: terrors
from his former life
abandonment
in a fly-infested duplex
a smoke detector that drove
him over the edge
like Chinese water torture
with sound
I soothed him
changed our fitted sheet (again)
Briar, meanwhile, thumbed
through his deluxe battery
organizer, changing every
smoke detector 9-volt in the house
Ollie brought me his ball
wanting to play
one toss didn’t hurt
Briar trudged down the stairs
t-shirt and underwear
carrying a vintage step stool
I whispered to Boo:
your daddy’s slain four dragons
singlehandedly just now
and our bed is ready
the dogs and I stepped outside
just off the porch
into the cool, misty fog
suddenly
through the silence
gunfire
I offered a silent prayer
for the deer family
summoned the boys
back indoors
into silence
and clean sheets
7:10 a.m…….(but who can sleep now?)
If I were giving
you a gift basket
I’d go with ticketing
in all this icy blue!
…you’d receive
aquarium tickets
to soothe the stress of winter blah
movie tickets
to take you
and a tub of buttery popcorn
to another world
and ice hockey tickets
to remind you that
if you can’t beat ’em,
you can smash ’em with a stick!
The book that is currently sweeping me off my feet is The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. I’ve created a found poem from words and phrases on page 132. A found poem is one that is created by using words from any existing print ~ road signs, cereal boxes, church bulletins, or other poems and books.
The Air Trembles
I remember
his
mouth moving
saying something
he
really believed
deep down
I can see him
the day he left
wearing his denim
and leather loafers
I remember
A shadorma poem is one with six lines, in this syllable sequence: 3/5/3/3/7/5. My One Little Word (OLW) of 2026 is Onward!
Onward!
what we bring
into this new year
depends on
what is worth
keeping ~ and having the strength
to let the rest go
Years ago, Ali Edwards challenged a growing following of folks to choose ONE LITTLE WORD to take with them through the year as a sort of guiding light or inspiration. 2026 will be my fifth year of choosing a word to walk through the year with me. In 2022, my One Little Word was listen. I learned so much that year holding that one word that for 2023, I kept the same word again – listen. In 2024, I chose pray. In 2025, I chose enough – and life has had its way of showing me some ironic twists on that word.
There is power in words – a strange magic. There is killing and healing and nurturing and reassurance and hope. There are dreams and hard realities, wishes and escapes and triumphs and failures. What I’ve learned by choosing my One Little Word is to choose it carefully – because it has its way of revealing its truths and meaning in ways I never expected. This is not just some flippant exercise where people string some letters together and leash them like a stray dog to drag into a new year, hoping the mystery of the universe will reveal itself. I had no way of knowing last year at this time, as I had finished cleaning out a house and barn in 2024 with the dream of getting our belongings down to just “enough,” that Dad would die smack-dab in the middle of 2025, leaving a lot of loose ends untied, including a house and seven storage rooms filled with a lifetime of more than enough. Since June, the weight of these things and their encumbrance has felt anchoring – and not in a healthy or freeing way. There is still much to be done in the two-steps-forward, one-step-back dance of getting rid of things…..and of letting things go (and there is a difference). It takes time, but the important thing is getting through it. Thank God for my brother and sister-in-law, who have saddled the horse and taken the reins. No pun intended.
How does anyone choose a word? Do I choose a word I need to do, like listen or pray? Do I choose a word I want to do, like read or travel? I believe in verbs. They’re actionable.
Enough was another story, though. This word functions as adjective (enough food), adverb (tall enough), pronoun (have you had enough?), noun (there is enough for everyone), and even as an interjection (Enough!). It all depends on the placement of the word in the sentence. But enough does not function as a verb. It’s the most passive word I’ve chosen as a One Little Word (OLW).
So how? How do I pick one word? Am I overthinking all of this? I need to pray, to listen, to do, to plan, to act, to forgive, to express, to read, to write, to diet, to focus, to breathe, to rest, to exercise, to clean, to laugh, to cry, to grieve and to smile. I want just enough, not too much, and not too little. I feel like a character in a cartoon on a journey standing at one of those signs with a thousand arrows in all directions, not sure of which way to go but feeling packed and ready, map of possibilities in full color in the side of my bag, but there is this ball and chain around my ankle. I simply need to get in motion. To amble, to saunter, to skip, to run, to perambulate, to jump, to not sit still, to not stand by, to take action on movement, to leap, to walk. To go in some direction. Onward.
Onward.
Here’s a word to get me through days, through meetings, through books, through situations, through decisions. Momentum to keep turning the pages, to forge ahead into new experiences and new chapters.
Onward.
It’s an adjective, an adverb, and can be an interjection. It keeps moving in a direction, not standing still or getting stagnant, pressing on but not missing the important moments, either – just not getting bogged down and feeling like my wheels are stuck in the mud.
Onward.
Not necessarily forward or backward, upward or downward but whichever direction seems best to choose. Like bedward at 9:00 p.m. Onward, toward or at a point ahead in time or space.
Onward.
For the last six months of 2025, I’ve felt anchored by the weight of belongings and random antiques and collectibles that were not my acquisitions. I’ve felt handcuffed in the anger and sadness of grief. It’s time to cut it loose…..to let it go…..to move….
Onward.
Common Threads 