Category: Part and Poetry

{npm ’26 • 22}

by

April 22, 2026

1:33 pm

3 Comments on {npm ’26 • 22}

NPM, Part and Poetry, Soapbox

(NB:if you’re not in a good place mentally, please come visit tomorrow.)

Earlier this year, the local brew pub/movie theater in the next town over showed the Oscar-nominated short films. I didn’t check the listens carefully, merely going along with a friend (NEVER. AGAIN.), and we ended up seeing the year’s nominated documentary shorts. We went out expecting Pixar. We got inhumanity piled to infinity. Five films, but it took weeks to breathe past the shadow of their hollow grief.

One of the short films was called Were And Are Gone, about silent protestors in Tel Aviv protesting the genocide against Palestine by simply holding up the pictures of the twenty-five thousand children who had died with the words “Was And Is No More.” Though of course there was some thoughtful response, mostly it was brutal, to state it mildly, as the reality of the war was held up against the Tel-Avivian-on-the-street, whose indifference, abuse – psychological, verbal, and sometimes physical, as they were spit upon – and disgust at the protestors was…so hard to see. The film begins with the protestors working on posters, and then an air raid siren goes off, and still chit-chatting, they head casually to the cement reinforced stairwell of the apartment building. And there was just something so WWII about it – but something not. My temperament and my brain chemistry don’t allow me to stare into the Abyss frequently – it’s always looking back – but…sometimes I wonder how long. How long can we possibly go on like this. How long it will be allowed – by anyone.

Russia’s abuse of Ukraine has been going on, intermittently, since the Second World War, making it currently Europe’s longest running war. Israel has been trying to eradicate Palestine for nearly that long. Myanmar, Sudan, Pakistan, and now this foolish aggression against Iran. How. Freaking. Long.

Year…Fiftysomething of the War

Constantly
resounding,
the sirens

scream, “air raid!
disaster!”
At some point

panic palls.
The bombs fall
anyway.

{npm ’26 • 21}

by

April 21, 2026

3:42 pm

2 Comments on {npm ’26 • 21}

NPM, Part and Poetry, Sleeper Stories, Small Fictions


This morning in the bathroom, I realized that both the showers are glassed in, thus constituting “windows,” thus technically coming under my wholly arbitrary ‘windows’ poetry rule… And now you’ll be tormented with my “shower thoughts” for the rest of the month, you’re welcome.

So, I don’t know if it’s a Spring thing or if there’s some other denom-specific significant thing I’m missing, but the Presbyterians are having baby baptisms frequently these days. And each time a baby objects to the whole… thing, the parents look like they want to sink through the floor. And I just want to call down from the choir loft and say, “HEY! Tell them they’re doing great!” Because honestly? If a random smiley man said some stuff to me I didn’t understand and then caressed my nearly bald head with water which is probably at best tepid? You’d better believe I’d let him know my thoughts on the matter. Loudly.

(TANGENT: does anyone remember the water gun christenings and Easter …Holy Water spritzing of 2020? The babies were perhaps even more offended then [or just confused]). Mind you, I’m wholly and deliberately missing the point, but dang it, babies should react negatively at the wildly strange interaction that is infant baptism. It’s an important survival reflex. The kids are all right.

Early Displays of Common Sense

Prudently,
baptisms
involve tears.

An infant’s
instinctive
rejection:

NO STRANGERS
WITH WATER!!!
(Good job, kid.)

{npm ’26 • 20}

by

April 20, 2026

11:10 am

2 Comments on {npm ’26 • 20}

Mental Health, Mi Familia Loca, NPM, Part and Poetry, Sleeper Stories

This week we have arrived at the portion of the NPM celebration wherein I acknowledge that I will be so glad when it’s May. Not because I can’t write a daily poem – I can, and probably should. Not because I can’t draw a daily doodle, either, though these images are only just now becoming the shorter, quick-sketch thing they were meant to be from the beginning, with fewer attempts at a photo-realistic literal and more impressionistic and observational within a metaphorical window… but because I always (always, always) set myself some project expectation that I absolutely struggle to complete. While the poems are moving from externally observant and becoming more internal, I’m finding that the form is inhibiting me – though this was a deliberate choice. Tricubes are meant for brevity, after all, and this is a process to teach myself to lean into that – but it’s just… hard. Normally I use poetry to process. Often there’s more I want to say, but it feels like dwelling – and I’m not going to change forms, though I feel the desire. Additionally, I DO have other things to do…

swinging bridge

between now
and back then,
a crevasse:

dear parents,
leave something:
some kindness –

memories
of soft hands
as a bridge.

Poetic addendum: Saw family this weekend. People of color who experienced physical ‘correction’ have a number of people telling them that culturally this is ‘necessary’ or ‘just how it is,’ or any number nonsensical things. I think there’s a part of us that goes cold and doesn’t recover, and when the punishing parent is approaching their four-score and whatever, and you still don’t feel safe to be familiar with them… what has the ‘culture’ done? What have we normalized? What is the profit…?

hourglass
avalanche
forces hands –

we can’t hold
time’s passage:
sand’s slipping.

leave something –
in loving
memory.

I guess a double tricube could be a new form?

{npm ’26 • 18}

by

April 18, 2026

3:38 pm

2 Comments on {npm ’26 • 18}

NPM, Part and Poetry

I really adore the alligator lizards who, for whatever reason, really find a lot of enjoyment in hanging out looking at our windows… looking in and wondering how we can possibly spend so much time indoors, no doubt.

Mr. Darcy Returns

Revisit!
A small friend
came over –

Introduced
last summer,
he’s polite

mindfully
visiting
the neighbors.


{npm ’26 • 17}

by

April 17, 2026

10:58 am

2 Comments on {npm ’26 • 17}

NPM, Part and Poetry

Inevitable, that we begin to circle the idea of windows as having two sides – the ones we look out of, and the ones behind which we cannot see. I like how eyes are both useful to see things, and useful to see things from only the point of view of the watcher – a view defined and interpreted myriad ways.

look

called “windows
of the soul,”
perspective

imagines
internal
narratives –

life observed,
translated,
redefined.

{npm ’26 • 16}

by

April 16, 2026

1:08 pm

3 Comments on {npm ’26 • 16}

NPM, Part and Poetry, Sleeper Stories


We’ve reached the halfway point of the month, and the location of a new window that really isn’t a window, exactly. I mean, it’s a screen. We were always going to have to get to the screens.

As a person who lived through the moral panic of video games as a child and then a teacher, and who is living with everyone else through the genuine cause-and-effect panic that is the morally bankrupt application of uncontrolled AI, this too-much-this-or-that in terms of digital interaction has solidified into the realization that forevermore, It’s Always Going to Be Something. People will always be upset about that which doesn’t fit within their parameters of societal or personal behavior or expectation. Even before screens, and reading on screens, my father sought to eradicate my predilection towards bookishness – without his control over the characters in the books nor over my thoughts about their actions or words or what I was learning from them, the contents of my mind must have felt chaotic, untrammeled, and wholly out of his reach… just like an individual’s thoughts ought to be.

May we guard the freedom to read forever.

avoid, escape, iterate

what mattered
was distance:
diminished

consciousness
receding
present, past –

the future
replete with
evasions.

{npm ’26 • 14}

by

April 14, 2026

1:10 pm

3 Comments on {npm ’26 • 14}

NPM, Part and Poetry, Sleeper Stories

Heard the factoid this morning that Queen Elizabeth I’s courtiers blackened their teeth with soot to mimic her own genuinely decaying teeth, as in 1533 their monarch’s unrestrained love of sugar had left its mark and dentistry was not yet really A Thing. The podcast compared this to the myriad women who have gone under the knife to change their appearance and appeal to the putative head of this government in the year of our Lord twenty twenty-six. …And, I was thinking how we’re all grasping so frantically, even since primary school, for somewhere to belong, in the most galling fashion at times (see: Junior High). …and, how standing out and solitariness is not how most of us are naturally inclined, and how much effort it must take to stay true to oneself in that environment, and not even change your makeup routine to resemble the herd… And, how in two years or six months or less, the herd is going to look wholly different and even more ridiculous than it does now, and for those whose surgeries can’t be undone, then what? For whom are we changing our very bodies and selling our souls, with no reciprocity?

Collectively, We The People need Dr. Rudine’s windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors… and for heaven’s sake to maybe have a sit and a quiet think… Because beyond all of the other *waves hands* …murderous, callous, unethical, illegal, ungodly -ists and -isms, none of that “go along to get along” stuff is ever sustainable. Weren’t we all supposed to learn that in junior high?

transcendent

confidence
shouldn’t lie
in “prettiest.”

upending
privilege,
the wisest

transcend it.
Indifferent
assurance.

Hummingbirds (which I cannot draw) are the ultimate in assured indifference. Beautiful, but may or may not come to the feeder. Exquisite, but may merely give you a quick side-eye as they pass. Stunning, and could not care less what you’re all about. #goals.

{npm ’26 • 13}

by

April 13, 2026

10:10 am

2 Comments on {npm ’26 • 13}

Happenings, Musings on Extemporanea, NPM, Part and Poetry, Sleeper Stories


Washday

Consider
housekeeping:
constantly

applying
principles
of order.

(though laundry
demonstrates
entropy…)

(Since even my washing machines have windows, they seemed fair game for observation.)

Monday, November 13, 1620, the Mayflower came ashore. After they probably kissed the ground in gratitude for someplace solid to stand, the Pilgrim-esses hauled out the wash… because it was Monday, after all, and that’s what one did on Monday.

Every time I manage to do laundry on a Monday I feel some sort of bizarre kinship with hundreds-of-years-ago Englishwomen, who started this, and all who came after… Just trying to impose order on chaos, tying the days of the week to some sort of recognizable pattern, trying to make meaning of drudgery. Good luck to all of us who keep trying…