a straightforward threefold effort for remembering and praising
Women’s History Month This Month
And we’ll see notices sliding by
As we move so fast
That is
Catching some of the words of others
And we could hold the words
And heed
The teaching
Of the cause and
Of the time
Which belong to everyone
And should out of interest meet
With
Honor attendant
Not for basic freedom
That all should breathe and without question
That in another age
Would wonder
Indeed
Why there was fuss over how we healthy
Live
To start with
Wonder Woman
There was some song about
Women and a pan
And a man
I don’t know
Hardly worth remembering
It seems to me
And then women roar
Something about
The floor
And that sounds
Sad
Since everyone should be there
Time to time
While everyone
Everyone
Should more often
Stand
Riveting Rosie
I understand there used to be debate
Over the model
And the right one
Should
Be noted
And also doesn’t everyone
All women who fought the storied
Aar at home
Both for the foreign
Fronts
And all the lines that
Took all patience everywhere
Welding
Hammering
Building the means and reason
To have home
To fight to keep that something to
Return to
Plus
The many
Many women over there
And who go
Now
To every front decided there
And here
C L Couch
Photo by Ari Shojaei on Unsplash
New Calling
(sci-fi)
She had quit the complex
A while ago
A lay sister
“Mother” to the order
And the last one
Left
She had found a robe
Left by someone
Who had doubted
And she took
It
Wrapped it around her frame
Tightened the rope from which
Knots dangled
Then
Began her wandering
She needed shelter
Now and then
Sometimes finding a cave
Or what was
Left
Of a town
Sometimes hunched behind
A piece of wall that stood
While around
Hot wind or cold wind
Depending on the mood of Earth
Blew by
There was food
Mostly she tried to find
In
Nature
But would go with preserved things
If she must
She was no
Diogenes
She had no lantern
Though now and then
There was
A flashlight
She could use while the charge
Held out
And then the tube was
Useless
Unless she should need an abnormal
Straw
Now and then
Which she didn’t
She could make fire
She wasn’t looking for
The honest man
Another
Woman
Maybe
Other sister
From an order like her own
Another refugee
From ancient sanctity
In modern
Costume
Though regarding habits
And pardoning the pun unto
Herself
She practiced
None
No daily prayer
No minding
Of the liturgies of the hours
That she had often
Missed
Anyway
Due to exigency while
Mothering
The abbey
And now
She chose to
Ignore such things become
Anachronistic in
A planetary
Moment
In terms of humans gone
Mostly
She blamed men
Women wouldn’t do this
She had concluded
She didn’t look for God
For God must be
Allowing
Having let the world
If the human part alone
Go so far as to
Ruin
Nearly everything
And remove all company
Meaning
Companionship
So far
C L Couch
Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash
notes
lay brothers and lay sisters could and can take over practical concerns within monastic communities, while maintaining faithful identities avowed of their own
“none” would be another pun, regarding prayers at hours
of course, this isn’t real and isn’t prophecy (the future-telling kind)—rather Happy Hallowe’en!
photograph of one who stands different
(flash fiction challenge--the photograph reacted to is at Melissa's site, link below)
she’d like to talk
I think
she has things to say
and has invested in earth colors
and a visible presence
in a crowd
inside a city
who might keep her from talking?
well
she’s surrounded by black forms
hoods
perhaps hijabs like hers
(though hers is kindly brown)
and on the other side
black uniforms
of police
who also wear
visors hard to see through
and though we cannot see them
there must be weapons
somewhere
she has no actual platform
for her platform
there is a sign close by
she might be holding it
ironically
it says
SILENCE IS VIOLENCE
because
well
it is
silence is violence
if the silence is words
frightened
or (otherwise) brutalized
away from utterance
out of consideration
for fear of weaponry
arrest
and isolation
which would
once again
be silence
and this is a message
to the rest
that keeping silent
is through indifference
or only taciturn
approval
a kind of violence
in and of itself
we let it happen
let the wrong things happen
or keep
the right words
the protest words
the revealing words
get out
it’s like the leave to vote
and then
not bothering
infantilizing values
of democracy
her mouth is covered
I don’t know if
from cultural requirement
protection
from infection
or to illustrate her point
she is not tall
which is to say
everyone is taller
all around her
though she (or whoever)
holds the sign high
higher than everyone
to make her point
and maybe find
an invitation
to speak out
from up higher
sometime
she is not subjugated
yet
she’s there
she’s standing
and the sign is standing
not to mention
that the line
of her suit jacket
sends a message
of some fashion
something lined
through razored words
through silence
after all
the eyes are windows
clearly open
though the message
of a moment
might need more
some exchange
some blinking
we could get
from being there
but she needs to talk
everyone there
everyone here
needs to hear
and heed
what she has to say
the need is ours
outside the frame
to find her
and the source of words
and more
in principle
and action
to take away
C L Couch
(for) Melissa’s Flash Fiction Challenge #249
https://melissalemay.wordpress.com/2024/01/01/melissas-fandango-flash-fiction-challenge-249/
(tag #FFFC)
Photo by Priscilla Gyamfi on Unsplash
Chalk writing on the street near the George Floyd memorial in Minneapolis. "Together we will change the world."
(x = space)
x
x
Passport
x
Then
There was the story of
The woman at the grocery’s
Who
Encountered
Someone new
Requesting an I-D
To
Accompany the check
x
And she brought out
Her passport
Maybe still
Shiny
With unuse
Except it jostled
‘Round
With all the other things
x
The purse inside
The purse
You know
Each with jostled things
x
Bypassing the license
For that
Passport
x
To indicate
To someone new
She might have been somewhere or will
Be going
Somewhere someday soon
x
C L Couch
x
x
This story did not happen and is based (fictively) on something the mother said in the movie Breaking Away, directed by Peter Yates and written by Steve Tesich. Set in Bloomington, it is a good movie for (about) the summer. The mother is portrayed by Barbara Barrie.
x
Photo by Library of Congress on Unsplash
x
(x = space)
x
x
No Woman Is an Island
x
I exhale a puff of air
Carbon dioxide
And yet that’s all right for kissing
And for lifting the lungs
Of someone who’s in trouble
And not breathing
The kiss of life, we call it
And it is
Both sides of air being good
The oxygen, the CO-2
Both give life all around
Our daily allies on the planet
Are the plants in our
Inhale-exhale
Symbiosis
All is relationship
No one goes alone
x
C L Couch
x
x
No Man Is an Island, a poem, a contemplation, a movie, a song
x
Photo by Kyle Wagner on Unsplash
Allan Gardens Children’s Conservatory, Toronto, Canada
the greenhouse
x
Kaptah
Not the thing
That proves to bloodless machines
We are, indeed, human
But a character in
A novel so sad
With beauty,
The sting, the agony of tragedy
He is not the hero
Not a villain
For a foil
He exists, and his motivation
Is self-interest,
Which is to say, he’s like us
A common man
Is he common woman?
Early on, he is a servant,
And he steals enough to keep his job
While his hiding places are secure
The protagonist forgets
About him in the midst of terror
And sadness for the state
And for one’s own
A common man
Is he a common woman?
One day, when few surprises remain,
Kaptah is found, fat and wealthy
Lording it over his own
All is otherwise destruction
And reimagined chaos
For certain things go on
Only on the next generation’s form
He doesn’t care
He has his own
Glamour, glitz, tastelessness of
Rococo (not rococo itself)
He is fashionably grotesque
(relation to the living is not
coincidental)
There is a promise that comes across
While reading as
Demon-mischief, say,
To those who want to co-create a better world
That Kaptah will endure
Enjoy the excesses of each day
To die in bed one day
Surrounded, if not
Barricaded,
By many wealthy status-things
He might know the illusion
And the lesson
Again, he will not care
For he is the common man
Is he the common woman,
I don’t know
C L Couch
The Egyptian by Mika Waltari
The Common Man by R K Laxman at Symbiosis Institute, Pune.
Hari Prasad Nadig – https://www.flickr.com/photos/hpnadig/5537675936, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38047206
If We Dance
(#InternationalWomensDay)
a circle and a cross
the symbol for Earth has the cross inside
but this is close enough
to know
the movement is planet-wide
there are things that
don’t need new reason
for dealing with the ancient one
there is gender
women number more
the feminine make up half at least
of who we are
one by one
and altogether
who are we without
we are not whole
we countermand creation
what other gaps cannot be filled
with sex, yes, and
decision
we are strong
and strength will out
muscle and what’s beneath
indifference energized
to charge the fight
for what should be evidential reason
someday a woman will preside
over the table
as a woman did, once
and long ago
inviting her will be
forgone
by then
let women rule
no let about it
women can and will
seek the alliance now
call it marriage
friendship
partnering or
of a presidency
in place and time
call it quits on
masculine oppression
give up the gate
that she has managed age
by age
the less-than-half survive
through what she does
the rest, the most
already know
let her in
before she keeps the rest away
celebrate the whole one
we can be
C L Couch
https://www.internationalwomensday.com/
#InternationalWomensDay
Banshee
She calls death one at a time
And only she can do this
How many of her kind
Might number all the realms
She does not know
She cannot
The grammar is of one, no
More
No more can exist at a
Time
There is no plural here, for only she
Can split the night
A responsibility of one, and then
Not even that
She folds into time until
Her nature is invoked again
To rend the cloth
To terrify even the somber parts
Of night
Dawn becomes mortality
All this is hers
C L Couch
Free for commercial use
No attribution required
(Pixabay)
Hospitalism
My sister tells me it’s a man thing
Not wanting to go to the
Hospital
It’s certainly true that I do not want to go
And that I thought this
A healthy inclination
Now I wonder if for those women who
Care so much
(In quantity and quality) if there is a
Kind of comfort there
Someone else to provide, to
Decide,
To break the news
And deal with it first
C L Couch
clcouch123 
Recent Comments