July Gift Basket for the Bad Ass Book Club

This month, I’m sharing some of Dad’s conversations in his final days, and in one of them that you can hear at the bottom of this post, he revealed a surprising thought about how we feel about folks from time to time. His revelation reminded me of a poem that I wrote recently for a small group of women in one of my writing circles.

My Stafford Challenge group meets the first Monday of each month by Zoom to chat and write together, and we’re a group of women who enjoy reading as much as writing. I’ve been writing a form each month called Gift Basket writing, where I choose three things I’d give a person in a gift basket for that month. This one is dedicated especially to my Stafford Writing Group sisters – Barb Edler of Iowa, Glenda Funk of Idaho, and Denise Krebs of California. At the time I wrote this, I’d recently stumbled across a book club I’d love to join, even for the name alone, and there is actually a summer camp in Maine for its readers – this is a real thing. My dream summer is going to this book club’s summer camp, and I’ve added it to the bucket list.

Bad Bitch Book Club

if I were giving you

a gift basket

I’d make it a

Bad Bitch gift basket

to welcome the storms

of the world~

you’d receive

a t-shirt that says

BAD BITCH BOOK CLUB

complete with

a membership to

the Bad Bitch Book Club

(yes ~ it’s a real thing

with its own dot com)

and a mirror

so you’ll always

see the

baddest of the kick-ass bad

right in the palm of your hand~

knowing your Bad Bitch sisters

have your back!

It’s okay to have a BB attitude sometimes……even my preacher Dad in his final days confessed that there are times we are all a little bit badass. You can listen here:

February Open Write Day 5: Characters We’ve Loved

Photo by Dan K Joseph on Pexels.com

Seana Hurd Wright of Los Angeles is our host today for the fifth and final day of the February Open Write at http://www.ethicalela.com. You can read Seana’s full prompt and the poems of others here. Today, Seana inspires us to write poems about the favorite characters we’ve had over the years.

Christopher Robin for President

I

wore the

shirts growing

up, emblazoned

with Winnie the Pooh

Sears Catalog clothing

of the Hundred Acre Wood

where Christopher Robin’s friends

diverse as they were, got along

and I want to start a shirt movement:

let’s all move to the Hundred Acre Wood

(which doesn’t need to be made great again)

because it never lost its friendship

nor its caring for others, nor

its giving more than it it took

you see, those characters

had embracing hearts

who knew how to

keep focus

on what

lasts