Where Are the Love Warriors
epitaphs seeking orison
all manner of Lives and unknown unrecorded Deaths
one died mysteriously in police custody
one died sleeping in the right apartment
for the wrong reason
one died in madness shocked and chained
cardiac arrest
(well Some kind of arrest anyway!)
another died in an alley naked and alone
robbed of her humanity just a commodity
hunger like the beak of a terrible bird peck peck pecking at the vitals
marking the emptiness stitching the belly shut with pain
words stolen from the mouths of the long dead
forgotten anonymous

Their words made whole again
Live again
Resounding in the world like Clarion
like Deep Gong
shivering night air 
shimmering sun-bleached moments hazy summer daylight
Words of Women Long Dead
Layers of Stories Reclaimed from the Void
Black Hole of the Nothing
Eater Consumer Excreter of All that’s of Value
rendering a strange and sudden destruction
burning into consciousness
trails of Fire and slow roll of lava
incendiary heart
blackened crust encasing red orange glow yellow heat

one spoke of Freedom while kneeling scrubbing floors
one spoke of Love to children born of rape
transformed the lives they were given
into small legends
the Stuff myths are made of
not the myths themselves but the ground
the soil from which Myth springs

PAMELA TWINING has traveled the US with her partner, poet Andy Clausen, performing her work in California, Colorado, New York City, Michigan, Wisconsin and places in between. Her work has appeared in Big Scream, Big Hammer, PoetryBay, The Café Review, Napalm Health Spa, and Heyday!, among others. With Andy Clausen, she is co-curator of “The Invisible Empires of Beatitude” page at The Museum of American Poetics (www.poetspath.com) and for several years, she co-produced the Janine Pommy Vega Poetry Festival in Woodstock, NY, where she and Clausen reside. She is author of four chapbooks, “i have been a river…”(2011), “utopians & madmen” (2012), “A Thousand Years of Wanting; the Erotic Poetry of Pamela Twining” (2013) and “Renegade Boots” (2019).A book of Selected Poems will be published in Fall 2020 by Endpaper Press.

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