The Retouch

Hi! This year (2022), I've decided to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It's all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I'm scared about still include:

1. My spoken voice
2. My raw poems.

Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!

The Retouch They take me And blot away all the flaws. A sun spot becomes plain flesh. A wrinkle vanishes. The eraser moves over my whole image. Sometimes I wonder if there is any me left. In college, a poetry teacher insisted We could not write about baseball hats Or dolphins and I still wonder if manatees Are allowed, poems about commodity cheese, Trailers, dog farts. Or is still only proper subjects? Why is it that we all try to erase The deepest parts of our hidden centers, Hardnesses that refuse to be blurred out In image or word.

Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support. The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called "A Feather" and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.

While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!

https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection