Coping Strategies
Coping Strategy - #67
Lift the glass half-glued to the vegetable crisper by caramelized soy sauce spilled seven years ago and never cleaned because you had better things to do. Ease it gently into the soapy bath waiting in the sink. Carefully guard its sharp corners, knowing it shares your own fragility, is as likely to slice your tender layers as you are to chip or shatter its transparent soul. Massage the stains and debris from its face, slipping the sponge below the water’s surface to pull the suds up and over, delicate as a sacrament. Love again this small servant you had forgotten, ignored for so many years but who still covered, still crisped, never questioned or failed.
Coping Strategy - #218
A frightening, phallic, orange arrow from a to z like a smiling enticement, irresistible in its simplicity, calls me to the browser one day, to the app the next. Waking at night, my fingers tingle in response to its siren voice, beckoning, promising, seducing – Pick up where you left off or Keep shopping for or Buy Again rising from the screen like pretty billboards on the virtual path to bankruptcy. How many more pairs of yoga pants will end the pandemic? How many books? Will more closet organizers fix global warming? Will another pair of shoes make Black Lives Matter? Load the cart. Proceed to checkout.
Coping Strategy - #292
Scattered, covered, slovenly-smothered, grease-shined, delicious, not even nutritious, sauteed, baked, browned, and embellished; relished with cheese, with scallions, with joy, with sour cream, butter and bacon convoys; sliced paper thin, fried, scalloped or mashed, sliced into cubes, sliced into hash; loaded, exploded, dripping and messy, tongue-wet, thick, creamed before blessing; fondant, dumplinged, puffed, Romanoffed, cakes that send your palate aloft; rolled into gnocchi, crafted like wedges, Frenched like au gratin with rosemary hedges; garlic, savory, chard, curry or thyme; sublime spuds, coquettish croquettes or flirtatious frittatas; you say po-tay-to… and I say po-tah-tahs!
Coping Strategy - #346
Aside from the fact that her feet are a blundering ballet of bricks, she can tell she is drunk by the way every limb goes lax, loose. How her knees and elbows feel ungimbaled. She grows obsessed with the rise and fall of her diaphragm, the pulse of her heart beating a drama rabbit rumba in her lower lip. Away fall the aches and pains of 45 years, joints and tendons drift away, drop away. And she rotates her ankles and wrists, while the neck and spine of her life crack and pop, leaving only release. Liminal, she hangs between reality and all the dreams she left behind. Wonders if the smoke she smells is from the riots, the wildfires, or the heat of her own clutch-handed fear.
Kelly Vance attends Eastern Kentucky University's MFA program where she received the Emerging Writers Award for poetry. She is Chair of Kentucky State Poetry Society's Annual Student Poetry Contest. Vance completed the Conscious Feminine Leadership Academy affiliated with Women Writing for (a) Change and incorporates conscious leadership concepts into her writing, mentorship, and professional work as a psychiatrist.