Lights . . . camera . . . aaak-zyun!
I can detect from these children’s faces
their desire to finish their studies.
It’s painful for me to experience violence.
(translation, poetry)
Tag: Bastienne Schmidt
On Maui a whole town catches fire in a great wind and burns to the ground in two hours. The iron center of the earth grows weary of devastation
(poetry)
Lamb’s ears plucked where
the stairs are, prairie
grass, steeple here, and
dandelion bends,
(poetry)
I give her kisses, I wrap her up in my arms, and she relaxes a bit. I tell her how her hair falls just like mine. I know what it needs, I have spent years learning what it needs. I have spent each waking moment learning how to nourish her. Must I spend a lifetime proving that I can?
(fiction)
We seven spent most of our days preparing ourselves for the war that we were sure we would soon see. Broomsticks became rifles and stones became grenades and we practiced clearing rooms of imagined enemies in the sanatorium.
(nonfiction/Ukraine)
Sometimes, silence is the way oppression learns to speak fluently in every language. When we were told to sit still, we didn’t just lose movement—we lost voice.
(nonfiction)
