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Ann Bracken

Ann Bracken

Aug 01, 2014

Ann Bracken is the consummate artist. She is a poet, visual artist, and the most creative teacher you will ever find. She brings the arts together wherever she walks; and whether writing a book of poems, or designing and sewing a new fashion, it is all the same. The muses fly around her chanting and chanting, go on, go on. We believe in you. And so we present poems because we believe in her too. -Grace Cavalieri

Ann Bracken is an educator and writer whose poetry, essays, and interviews have appeared in the Little Patuxent Review, Reckless Writing Anthology: Emerging Poets of the 21st Century, Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence, Life in Me Like Grass on Fire: Love Poems, Praxilla, New Verse News, Scribble, The Museletter, and The Gunpowder Review. Ann’s poem, “Mrs. S” was nominated for a 2014 Pushcart Prize. In addition to teaching professional writing at the University of Maryland, College Park and working as a poet in the schools, Ann serves as a contributing editor for Little Patuxent Review and presents frequently at writing and creativity conferences, including Mindcamp of Toronto, Florida Creativity, the Maryland Writers’ Association, the Association of Independent Maryland Schools, and The Creative Problem Solving Institute.


Mrs. S

by Ann Bracken
Nominated for the 2014 Pushcart Prize
 
No one ever tells the story
of Mrs. Sisyphus
perhaps because she
endures at the bottom
of the hill
with all the little boulders
tumbling from above.
In between the spinning of cloth
and the baking of bread,
she rolls the children out the door
to play and rolls the food
home from the market.
Day after day
she jostles the water jugs
from well to domicile
and back.
 
She nudges and cajoles the
bigger boulders of animals
from pasture to barn
and finally to slaughter.
Preparing feasts
for all the Baby Sisiphi
who gather around the table
whining, When is Daddy coming home?
 

Published in Reckless Writing Anthology: The Modernization of Poetry by Emerging Writers of the 21st Century


Value Added Teachers

She feels frustrated
As she rumbles around in cramped offices
with all the people shouting
Words don’t matter.
Especially when she hears graduates
of the university
referred to as output.
 
When people become output
there is no need for nurture.
Sewage pipes have output,
as do factories that churn out row after row
of standardized parts.
 
In cramped classrooms and windowless lecture halls
teachers are gauged by their productivity
here every human complexity is reduced
to a series of data points, quantified and measured
Success or failure—positive or negative output.
 
These days she no longer relishes
seeing joy or surprise or the flash
of an ah-ha moment on her students’ faces.
Instead of planning for a field-trip to the meadow
for a sensory experience,
she spends time trying to quantify
commitment, measure amazement
and determine a cut score for
how much inspiration one needs
for a journey into the unknown.

More Rock Than Bach

She’s more rock than Bach
Gives her age as the right side of 50,
still cruises to “Satisfaction,”
and grooves to “My Girl” and “Fun, Fun, Fun.”
 
Knows her music trivia---
toddling around on the day the music died,
learned to twist before she could multiply,
still knows every song on the Beatle’s White Album.
 
“Jumpin’ Jack Flash” got her up and ready for school
had a boyfriend who went to Woodstock—What’s that?
she said, and then climbed
into the backseat of a ’68 Mustang,
and made out to “Light My Fire.”
 
She left her plaid skirt and saddle shoes
somewhere between “Close to You”
and “Instant Karma” then started college—
dazed and confused—“One Toke Over the Line”
in the midst of a worldwide “Revolution.”
 
She was a kid who knew about Bull Connor,
Civil Rights, assassinations, Kent State killings,
Napalm, and Buddhist immolations. A witness
to society’s “Evil Ways” --- knows “You Can’t Always
Get What You Want.”
 
Haunted by history, and “Time in a Bottle,”
she’s still more rock than Bach,
wakes up to “Good Vibrations”
finds herself wishing “Give Me Just a Little More Time.”
 

Ann Bracken, June, 2012


Based on an article in Spiegel Online ?Dreams in Infrared? by Nicola Abe

A Day in the Life of a Drone Pilot

He works in a windowless, air-conditioned container somewhere in New Mexico.
The pilot and his co-workers sit in front of fourteen computer monitors
and four keyboards.
Drone pilots at work.
 
The container is the cockpit where no one flies. They sit at controls
watching the Predator drone circle in figure eights
high above Afghanistan,
6,250 miles away.
 
The pilot sees a house made of mud
and a shed used to house goats comes into focus in the crosshairs.
He receives an order to fire and presses the button with his left hand.
Then he marks the roof with a laser.
 
The pilot next to him
pulls the trigger.
Releases a hellfire missile.
Sixteen seconds to impact.
 
The moments freeze, ticking by in slow motion.
The pilot can still divert the missile.
No one is on the ground. Three seconds to impact.
 
A child walks around the corner of the goat shed.
 
Second zero.The pilot’s digital world collides with the village
between Baghan and Mazar-e-Sharif.
The pilot sees a flash on the screen.
The explosion
the building collapses
the child disappears.
 
The pilot’s stomach plunges.
Did we just kill a kid? he asks the pilot next to him.
Yes, I guess it was a kid.
“Was it a kid?” they write in a computer chat window.
 
Someone they don’t know answers.
Someone sitting in a military command center.
Someone far away who observed the attack.
“No, that was a dog.”

In the Second Chance Café

In the Second Chance Café
the reedy blues of Benny Goodman’s “Just in Time”
stream from the glowing Wurlitzer.
Candle flames like couriers of loss
conjure specters.
 
Mark, brown fedora shading his eyes,
stares into an amber Manhattan
longing to resurrect a lost lover
who carved her initials
in the side car of his heart.
 
Helen in faded rose silk
sifts through memories, a soundless rhapsody.
She hears footsteps,
imagines her man’s hand warm on the small of her back.
 
Icebergs of pain dissolve
as Mark crosses the ghost ship of a dance floor
smiles at Helen, offers his hand.
Ready to risk again.
 
Helen remembers the shimmer
of the possible. She moves easily into his arms
as they foxtrot backwards
step, step, quick step
one more dance.

© Ann Bracken, all rights reserved

 

Comments

Thu, 07/12/2018 - 10:23

You really know how to take us there--to a teacher's cramped office, to a drone pilot's screen. Thank you.

Fri, 07/13/2018 - 09:44

Thanks, Ann. I appreciate your feedback! Be well.

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