Verdict

coffee smoke
however fetching
doesn’t make anything
more bearable

I don’t understand
cheerful people
what are they hiding?

my cat is more empathic
and certainly more honest
than most of you

when he bites me
it sort of makes sense

what am I so angry about
how long do I have
underlying reducible to
nonsense gaslit spinals

don’t take yourself so
seriously isn’t what gets
said to the perp
even when he’s dead

these days the
cat gallops after a
robust dump

invert the gloaming
loop supine

he scratches vertically
rising out of his tail
a dorsal fin flush

try and stop me
if you like

Published by:

Diane R. Wiener

Diane R. Wiener (she/they) is the author of The Golem Verses (Nine Mile Press, 2018), Flashes & Specks (Finishing Line Press, 2021), and The Golem Returns (swallow::tale press, 2022). Her poems also appear in Nine Mile Magazine, Wordgathering, Tammy, Queerly, The South Carolina Review, Welcome to the Resistance: Poetry as Protest, Diagrams Sketched on the Wind, Jason’s Connection, the Kalonopia Collective’s 2021 Disability Pride Anthology, and elsewhere. Diane’s creative nonfiction appears in Stone Canoe, Mollyhouse, The Abstract Elephant Magazine, and Pop the Culture Pill. Her flash fiction appears in Ordinary Madness; short fiction is published in A Coup of Owls. She has poetry and creative nonfiction forthcoming in eMerge. Diane has published widely on disability, pedagogy, and empowerment, among other subjects. She blogged for the Huffington Post between May 2016 and January 2018. Diane served as Nine Mile Literary Magazine’s Assistant Editor after being Guest Editor for the Fall 2019 Special Double Issue on Neurodivergent, Disability, Deaf, Mad, and Crip poetics. Since January 2020, Diane has been the Editor-in-Chief of Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature, housed at Syracuse University.

Tags 3 Comments

3 thoughts on “Verdict”

  1. Provocative.  I especially like the stanza about cheerful people.  My question: what are they ignoring?  Love you, f 
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