“Every single day we sit down to eat, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and at our table we have food that was planted, picked, or harvested by a farm worker. Why is it that the people who do the most sacred work in our nation are the most oppressed, the most exploited?” – Dolores Huerta
“Let us remember: One book, one pen, one child, and one teacher can change the world.” – Malala Yousafzai
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/malala_yousafzai_569368
“Gods always behave like the people who make them.” – Zora Neale Hurston
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/zora_neale_hurston_399079
This one small thing/
golden throated song bird/
messenger of the badlands/
in the sun-warmed/
sage and sweetgrass/
sentient slow down/
hear the meadowlark/
hold your breath/
and pray for peace/
“Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers.” – May Sarton
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/may_sarton_100508
We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Elie Wiesel
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/elie_wiesel_163854
I can’t talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement. – Rose Schneiderman
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/rose_schneiderman_371750
Dedicated to the Kentucky teachers and state workers fighting for a just educational system.
If I’m going to sing like someone else, then I don’t need to sing at all. – Billie Holiday
Photograph by Carl Van Vecten – Library of Congress
I’ve been female for a long time now. I’d be stupid not to be on my own side. – Maya Angelou
There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm. -Willa Cather
I’m an optimist. Emma prefers pessimism. When I’m wrong reality is rough; when she’s wrong the news is not so bad.
I was planning to write about beneficial bats. Emma said, “Bats? Oh yeah, spring’s here. The bats will be coming out to harass people and cows.”
I was certain she was wrong. I consulted National Geographic.
“During the darkest part of the night, common vampire bats emerge to hunt. Sleeping cattle and horses are their usual victims, but they have been known to feed on people as well.”
Next, I’m writing optimistically about politics.
I’m not consulting Emma.
April 12: Flash Fiction Challenge
Yes, we are going to get batty this week.
April 12, 2018, prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story that includes a bat. You can use an association to the winged, cave-dwelling critter, or you can explore the word for other meanings. Bonus points for including a bat cave. Go where the prompt leads.
Try to be a rainbow in someone’s cloud. – Maya Angelou
There must always be a remedy for wrong and injustice, if only we can find it. – Ida B. Wells
Haven’t we all been waiting for a sign that things are going to take a turn for the better? Well, according to my squirrel friends, it is finally time to celebrate an end to winter in Kentucky. During the winter they come to our deck to selectively and rather quietly eat peanuts and steal seed from their bird neighbors. They eye each other warily, and sometimes give a quick warning to others to keep away. But this morning seven squirrels came for a rowdy visit. They ran after each other in circles, they ‘flew’ from deck railing to tree branch and back again. They ran up and down the trees, across branches, flying back onto the deck to chase each other some more, occasionally stopping for a seed or peanut, only to start the crazy chase again. One of them decided to get our attention by rattling the chain on the can I keep their food stored in, apparently trying to let me know he wanted a more extensive feast to celebrate the turning of the weather – or perhaps he was just making a bit of music as background for their party! This revelry is a sure sign that winter is leaving, the sun is coming back, and we are all about to feel a little better. I promise.
“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” – Alice Walker
“Life is a hard battle anyway. If we laugh and sing a little as we fight the good fight of freedom, it makes it all go easier. I will not allow my life’s light to be determined by the darkness around me.” – Sojourner Truth
Daredevil Bruce/
Sheriff Heil’s oldest son/
danced a boxer’s circle/
chanting/
sissy girl, sissy girl/
charming his posse/
of pubescent boys/
he stole a kiss on their dare/
A fog of years/
dims the details/
flush of his freckled face/
brush of his cold chapped lips/
tug of his determined fingers/
wound tight in my ponytail/
I squint at the blue-lit screen/
military records online/
Bruce Huppert Heil/
non-hostile casualty/
Vietnam/
accidental self destruction
pistol point blank to his brain/
finger determined on trigger/
circle of bedeviled boys/
a war weary double-dog-dare/
Today is not as new/
as it may seem/
ask the mother enslaved/
torn from her children/
Lost Bird suckling/
her massacred mother’s body/
the women of Salem/
or the Japanese interred/
ask insurgent coal miners/
coughing up pieces of lung/
or James Byrd chained/
dragged apart in Jasper/
Matthew Sheppard dying/
alone on a Laramie fence/
ask Nagasaki or Hiroshima/
Sand Creek or My Lai/
ask four year old workers/
dead in rich men’s factories/
for an inchoate explanation/
of how we ended here.
One sunny spring day and people get silly headed. Shorts, tees and flip-flops abound, snow and lingering frosty mornings be damned.
Cardinals too, graze solitary on our deck all winter, guarding their private culinary cache, aggressively chasing all competition.
Spring sun arrives and they share their precious seeds, feeding each other beak to beak, a love fest.
I rise above, not easily seduced silly by fickle sunshine.
I unpack the new tent and pitch it in our living room. “Time to get ready for summer camping” I tell my love. “Come in and check out our pretty vacation home.”
Carrot Ranch April 5 fast fiction challenge using 99 words: Sun Silly
Miss Jess was already her enemy, so perhaps she should have known better. The fact is, she did write a few lies into her story, but she would never admit that to the second grade teacher who despised her.
Her assignment had been to write about her recent Thanksgiving vacation. It was that simple. She could have stopped with the turkey, the cranberry sauce and the apple and pumpkin pies. She could have said she went to her grandmother’s house for the weekend and all her cousins were there. That was all true, but truth alone did not inspire her. She threw herself into the assignment with gusto.
Her grandmother’s house, an old farm house indeed, needed a farm to make it interesting. So she gave it fields of corn and beans. The old dilapidated barn was real, but she thought it would be better bright red, so she gave it a brilliant coat of paint. A nice red barn like that needed some animals to house. So she invented sheep and cows and goats and horses and a big pink squealing pig that needed to be fed by her and her cousins, one of whom had to fall into the pig pen for dramatic effect. She wrote in a tractor and a plow and parked them next to the barn borrowing those with no one’s permission from the real Corson farm down the road.
She handed in her story and waited for the accolades that were sure to follow.
Miss Jess peered at her over her giant coffee mug. She wiped her nasty wet lips with the back of her hand and began the interrogation.
“So you spent Thanksgiving with your grandparents?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Your grandparents on Route 9 in Seaville?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“You, Missy, are a liar!”
She noticed that Miss Jess had a face redder than the barn she had imagined into her story. She decided it would be best not to say anything more.
“Shame on you! Your grandparents do not have a farm. They do not have animals. They sell vegetables in a wooden stand outside their old house. I HAVE BEEN THERE!”
Miss Mess roared that last line so loud it probably scared all the animals on the farm. They were probably running for the barn right now so they could hide. The Little Liar stifled a giggle as she imagined her animals cowering in their stables.
The teacher was standing now, moving toward the Little Liar’s desk. To the delight of sundry class bullies the old ogre ripped to pieces the embellished story and tossed it at the little criminal who was now cringing at her desk, afraid she was about to be hit. She was sorry. She would not lie again.
Made to stay after school for detention that day the Little Liar wrote her assigned penance 500 times: “I will not tell a lie.” “I will not tell a lie….”
But – some offenders cannot be rehabilitated, no matter how humiliating the public excoriation, and how much pain her disgraced writing fingers suffered from all those remorseful scribbles. The Little Liar simply could not be saved.
Miss Jess left the school the next year. Rumors circulated that she gave up teaching to become a prison guard.
The Little Liar became a poet and a story weaver whose relationship to meticulous truth-telling remained tenuous for at least one hundred and eighty more years.
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Making literary art accessible 99 words at a time!
For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house - Audre Lourde
For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house - Audre Lourde
For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house - Audre Lourde
For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house - Audre Lourde
For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house - Audre Lourde
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