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Traci Sims Oct 2019
The full moon suddenly emerged.
Silvery beams caress your porcelain skin and my throat swells against my collar as I sigh with anticipation.
Your face thrown into Yes-No shadows
pulls me further into your mystery,
I close my eyes,
I hold my breath...
I plunge.
Reworked. Would love a bit of feedback. I am trying to tighten up my poetry. Thanks in advance!
Traci Sims Sep 2019
A whistle blew
The orange squeezed cherries
Will orange-juice be made?
Cherries are one of the national fruits of the Ukraine
  Sep 2019 Traci Sims
Anais Nin
"Why one writes is a question I can never answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me – the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art.
...
"We also write to heighten our own awareness of life. We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely … When I don’t write, feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing."
('The New Woman', 1974)
Traci Sims Sep 2019
"Love is nothing but a biological transaction," you yelled at me and we fought anew over the perfidies of the male ***.
Initially dismayed, I soon understood that
As a girl, you saw your father break your mother,
Her will over the years fusing with his own
As she became shadow,
And then sickly ghost,
Her lucky marriage effectively erasing the stain of her Jewish birth--
As oh so Catholic Daddy
proudly told his friends and relatives.
And even though you tried to fight Daddy's self-importance,
He was always there behind you, squeezing you between his fists,
molding you, as he imitated his god creating Eve,
Casting you into his own perfect image of chaste and chastened womanhood.
And when your mother decided to permanently leave,
Daddy forbade you to miss her,
Celebrating, instead, his own resurrection with a new project and a new wife.
Twice.
You thought you could resist,
But Daddy's benevolent advice
about your plain face and lumpy body wormed into your fragile psyche and
cracked you in two, leaving you raving and disjointed.
Daddy eventually joined his sky-Father
And you wept, vowing to forget and remember his legacy.
And now you live, addled and alone,
A basket of pills on your dresser,
Fanatically frustrated yet terrified of a man's  touch,
Angry yet wishing Daddy was here to save you.
And as the years passed and your friends married and divorced, you
convinced yourself that you had
escaped a woman's fate , not
realizing that you had offered up your own heart and soul  years ago as a suitable offering to His eternal memory.

Yes, Daddy made ****** sure there would be no following act.
This is the story of a real person. Everything I wrote about her father is something she told me actually happened to her and her family. It is a modern American horror story.
Traci Sims Sep 2019
Someone once said
that if you stop clapping
the fairies will die,
and Neverland will grow barren,
the sylvan glades and parks
dried up and overrun
with Arizona tumbleweeds...
Swan men and swan women
will shrink into human form
and spend their lives toiling without end,
their troubled dreams filled with remembered places of evergreen-sheltered lakes and ponds
shimmering in a landscape
long ago and far away...
Climate change and Amazon come to Seattle. It is profound.
Traci Sims Jul 2018
tears sting the corners of my eyes
you wrote me a *****-slap
and wanted me to "get real"
well...here it is...

i speak in two languages daily
and learned how to negotiate the world of the absurd
you only needed to learn one to survive
and you obviously did that well
enough to feel that you have the god-given right to point your
snow-white fingers at the rest of us and shake your head in pity

*******.
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