The first thing to purge is plot. Poetry is not why you feel but how you feel, how mother wore a flower-print dress and stood at the back screen door, while you hammered pegs into plastic, seated on the kitchen floor, and didn't see what surely must have been tears streaming, and didn't hear what surely must have been gasping sobs, all you knew was the pounding, pounding, the hammering, hammering, trying to shatter plastic pegs with the plastic hammer, hard as his calloused hands.
W. Barrett Munn is a graduate of The Institute of Children’s Literature. His adult poetry has been published in San Antonio Review, Awakenings Review, Copperfield Review Quarterly, Sequoia Speaks, Book of Matches, and many others. He lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
