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BARE: Uncensored Poetry
30/30 Project Day #14: Glitter In My Teacup
Glitter in My Teacup
No certainty other than
The glitter in my teacup.
Work/life, personal/political
Life with diverse faces
Betrays the war within.
Flitting, floating …
I glide.
All oneself. All one life.
Decades lost chasing golden circles.
Always just beyond.
Struggling to surpass
Ladies who lunch, or
Mothers who bake.
Not quite a bitch, but always a witch
At home, in sterile hallways and crowded boardrooms
24/7, everyday
Phone on:
Beep beep, beep, beep.
Square peg in a round hole
Grey suits didn’t fit.
“And different”, but not different enough
The world tumbled
on a wash cycle.
Drip drying,
I rise
Free from
The prison within.
Deep breath, sweet oxygen
Seeing beyond my sight
Sun-filled days endlessly circle
A singular grain of sand.
Now, I own my certainty
The glitter in my teacup.
WHAT IS BARE: UNCENSORED POETRY AND THE 30/30 Project?
In February 2024, I wrote and published a poem daily with Tupelo Press, a not-for-profit publisher in the United States of America. The sting in the tail was that the published piece had to be an unedited first draft.
By peeling back the curtains on how poetry is created, barriers were removed, highlighting the iterative nature of the process. By publishing drafts that are, at best, sketches of what a final piece might be like, readers and writers are encouraged to lean into the iterative process.
