Page 18 - WTP VOl. X #6
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BarBara sChweitzer
Inside a Life Sentence
We strive to be adjectives, to become
all sorts of fabulous attributes, but
maybe we are just sex-crazed nouns who can’t free ourselves enough from our quivering obsession with those sassy vibrating
verbs, effervescing like they do in their constant chemistry that make our knees weak, our chatter piqued, and voice boxes empty
of the assimilating power of truth,
so we invent gerunds to make us as proud
as a clutch of clattering nouns can be, verbalizing a storm of feathers for
our caps, eloquently enunciating
all known facts of our poor past tenses.
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Schweitzer is the author of 33 1/3: Soap Opera Sonnets, named a Favorite Book by The Providence Journal. A retired psychotherapist, she’s authored poems, plays, and flash fiction, and has received numerous awards, including fellowships from Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. Her publications include work in The Decadent Review, The Raven’s Perch, Crosswinds, Slab, and The Evening Street Review. Feeling Plankton, a ten-minute play, was produced by Culture*Park Theatre (on YouTube). She lives in upstate Rhode Island.
