POETRY FOR THE PEOPLE! Submit up to 3 poems about today's world in flux totaling no more than 150 lines each by emailing donkingfishercampbell@gmail.com by 11:59pm, May 30th. Culmination reading will be held on Saturday, May 31st, 3 to 5 pm ON ZOOM ONLY (link to reading will be provided to every published poet).

Saturday, April 19, 2025

Peggy Castro


Mommy Dearest 


There was no other way 

The poison was too lethal 

The antidote had to be a similar poison 

Altered a bit 

In the crazed mind of my mother 

The product of a lunatic Finn

And a compromised Dane


Lethal from day one 

Yet just enough love to keep 

From delivering the final blow 


Spending the last 20 years of her life 

Able only to say I love you 

Which I rejected because it was 

So tainted with the poison 


Living among cockroaches 

In a slum apartment on the beach 

With a red geranium for company

Never complaining 

Seeing me through my

Own dance into darkness 

Through Alzheimer’s with her

Crippled body 

Refusing to let go

Even in a coma 

Until that final sunset 

In a private room 

At Huntington Hospital 

After seven days of my private farewell 


I pulled the plug 

A trusted minister’s arms around me 

A nurse standing by




Watching


I said I was going to take a vacation 

I lied

Old man and the sea I cried clutching my pearls 

Facing the cyber maniacs and their endless eyes 

My life in tatters 

Sharks having shredded my Great White Hope which turned out to be another shark 

All those years of my lonely and harsh efforts 

Reduced to a single eye embedded somewhere in my solitary room 

Watching 




It is here


that reptilian monster scuttling around in my brain

through millennia and past lives

he has broken free

and is now staring at me

eyeball to eyeball

what to do

what to do

the monster is screaming extinction

all I have are a couple of numbers from corporate law firms I used to work for

I understand they now represent the nightmare clown of our dreams whom they helped elect president

they also represent my sociopathic ex husband from San Salvador

Perhaps prayer…

Is god listening?


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