Category: writer

Double Drabble

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I started hating my body at nine when my belly was a white biscuit between two slick navy blue bikini parts. I hated my body when my Dad said we should jog together and started calling my sisters and I the Bertha Butt sisters. My breasts were too small to offset a ribcage that towered over hip bones when I lay deformed on the beach. Later, my pregnant belly swelled and then deflated into two doughy parts on either side of a vertical C-section scar. I gained fifty pounds and lost only the weight of a ten pound baby.

At fifty-nine, I almost love my body, I certainly don’t hate her any longer. My legs are strong and my knees can bounce on a trampoline. My arms, though melasma mapped, can squeeze my grandchildren. My dimpled thighs droop like my breasts, which point southeast and southwest these days. Preschool children love to squish my upper arms. My soft stomach is the bodyguard who tells me when to take a break from sweets and rest my body. My hair sparkles with natural highlights and I still smile with my eyes. If I could just learn to love my neck. 

Goodnight, Maya

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There is no mourning here…

[a poem for his mother by Guy Johnson]

Sequined in the black velvet sky of night 

shines a star with

fiery hot fire possessed,

leading all those who wish to claim

what is right

to look within themselves and find their best.

Over my life shines this glorious beacon,

lighting my path through the dark shadowland.

With this as my guide,

I shall not weaken..

my striving to be a strong but gentle man. 

Others have been led by its incandescence

to be more than mere flesh and bone

to love and be loved is its true essence

for only the heart can change this world of stone.

Thus fortune graces me like none other

for this star, this nova

is my mother.

 

A beginning.

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Welcome to my blog.  I have no idea what I intend to blog about or who my intended audience will be, but I have a theme and a title, so here goes.  I guess I could begin by explaining the title of my blog– Soft Pink Center.  The other morning while driving to school, I came upon a bumper sticker on the car in front of me that appeared to read “soft pink center.”  I say appeared to read because, if you spend any amount of time around me, you know I don’t see as well as I used to and I don’t wear glasses as often as I probably should if I wanted to see things as they actually are.  Upon closer scrutiny, I determined that this bumper sticker actually read something closer to ‘south pine center.’  Too late, though, the phrase soft pink center was already in my head.  I thought this would be an intriguing title for a novel, a story, or a collection of stories, so when I got to school, I jotted it down in the little journal I carry around in my purse.  I thought about multiple meanings of this phrase and how it could be descriptive.  What kinds of things have a soft pink center… women of course, steaks cooked medium, chocolate-dipped strawberry buttercreams… and quickly decided that a soft pink center implies something hidden and delicious, perhaps forbidden.  I knew I could do lots with that title, and it did have me thinking for days.  And so today, when I needed to give my blog a name, it came back to me and seemed perfect for this blog that might be shared only with a few and will hopefully be satisfying for some, or at least for me.