2020 Starts with a Roar: Kelliane Parker Features

1/6/2020 Kelliane Parker hosted by Elaine Brown

Kelliane Parker is a Bay Area poet and co host of My Word Open Mic. Her work has been featured  in local anthologies and she has performed around the Bay Area and. Her work gives voice to survivors of sexual abuse and other violent trauma to heal and break the cycle.

While the world sleeps

By Kelliane Parker

While the world sleeps, I negotiate and wrestle

I let go and become. The night person, sleepless.

Untamed and improper, irreverent and unmanageable,

Unpredictable and uncooperative. I unearth secrets

And deconstruct stories, stories carefully crafted and rehearsed

By the entire cast in the role of a lifetime

For a lifetime…a life sentence, really.

And I nurture and embrace The Survivor

The one who faced down monsters from untold fairy tales

Where the outside world finds most of us unworthy

Of be saved or believed. So again we save ourselves,

Unless we don’t. And then the body count is uncounted,

By the unspeakable cancer called shame.

And another is lost

And, another…is… lost

So, tell me your secrets, the ones you don’t even tell yourself

What could you lose to tell another unworthy, the familiar tale.

Only the cast member names are different, but the story is the same

So we share the secret handshake, to acknowledge our membership

Only this time, it is different, we are the majority

And the light no longer stings our eyes, or maybe it just makes us feel alive

To feel something, anything even pain is beautifully real

You, my sisters, count

I see you, I hear you

I will remember your name

And I, I believe you