Poetry, Michele Parker Randall

to all you even thought about 

doing as a child

a deluge 

Before the kids wake, I roll up the evening as one long

scroll.  

The morning sunlight enters thin as wax paper.

Your whole life replayed for me—your shame unearned. 

Thoughts intruded for years—guilt, conviction,

judgment—with no evidence or jury. 

The hours continue; your language bogs down as if in the

heat of full sun, like the wafting wave of vegetative

stench-rot Florida smells like for weeks after a

hurricane. 

You admit to horrors I couldn’t imagine your mind could

conjure. 

You seek a witness not forgiveness, beg for blessings,

benedictions; I am holding my own hands so you won’t

sense their shaking. 

What filibuster can save us?

What lie will end this night? 

Our children are asleep in their rooms, safe if you keep

talking. 

I keep you talking.

Michele Parker Randall is the author of Museum of Everyday Life and A Future Unmappable. Her works can also be found in Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Poetica Review, and elsewhere. She feels strongly that work about by and about the neurodivergent will help lessen the stigma surrounding mental illness.