I am experimenting with a new poetry style. The following poem is the result of running lines off the page (hence the indentions under the first line of each stanza). For lack of a formal style name, Stephen Bagley and I are calling it "flood poetry" because of the flood of words on the page. Let me know what you think.
Somewhere
in the Middle
She
stands on the front porch shrieking at me while God-knows-what works its way
into a brain already half-rotted while one sister weeps in the house with
Mother and I flinch in the front yard when she spews sanctimonious at me and I am even though she is breaking my heart
falling apart
She
sits on a bench in the back yard sobbing I’m
sorry into my neck while her brain careens against her skull a mind we no
longer recognize because things like this don’t happen to people like us but here
we are waiting for strangers to save her life again
She
lies in the back of a silent ambulance prostrate with life her mind knocked
unconscious like an old boxer who couldn’t be talked into quitting while I ride
in the front with my jaw clenched in anger at how dare she abandon her family abandon
me until somewhere in the middle the ambulance turns into a screaming banshee
turns anger into fear turns sanctimonious into a howling prayer
She
struggles on a narrow gurney pulling at tubes and her emptied stomach frees her
mind to zoom inside her skull to peer out of ice blue eyes to pour out of a grinning
mouth in shotgun chatter dressed appropriately for a cocktail party while we
watch nothing change watch bits of our baby sister fall off scattering across
the emergency room floor
