A Room of My Own: Aftermath Tanka

the aftermath

our first-and-last therapy:

she uncorked a drain

at the bottom of my heart

and let each secret spill out

FYI: This character tanka could be read as a sequel to the following:

I close my eyes

and slip into childhood ...

these ghostly thoughts

jostling one another

on the therapyist's couch

Shot Glass Journal, 41, 2023

Chen-ou Liu

And for more about character tanka, see To the Lighthouse: Character/Persona Tanka

Added:

my mother

loves her husband, my stepfather

more than me ...

in the dark, this nine-year-old

folds her abuse into silence

FYI: This tanka was inspired by Alice Munro’s daughter' sexual abuse story. 

Toronto Star, July 10: How did what happened to Alice Munro’s daughter stay quiet so long? Start with our uniquely Canadian devotion to silence

Andrea Skinner’s memoir amounts to a national horror story, a specifically Canadian conspiracy of silence, and evidence of a national pathology: It reveals so much of our desire not to tell stories.

Added:

eulogy to her father

the weight of what is left

unspoken

Added: Game Show, 2024, LX

written in response to The New Yorker's July 13 remark: an indelible portrait of our era of political crisis and conflict

with his fist raised

flanked by a giant flag 

bloodied and defiant

Donald Trump mouths to the crowd, fight...

the night gets louder and darker 

FYI: The New Yorker, July 14: A Nation Inflamed

After the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, who can heal a country so threatened by menace, violence, and division?

Robert F. Kennedy, spoke to the Cleveland City Club about the “mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives.”

Violence, whether it is carried out by one man or a gang, degrades an entire nation

Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire weapons and ammunition they desire. . . . Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear; violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleaning of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.