Locked In
Your secrets are locked in
behind your airbrushed skin
Like when you bullied girls at 6
when you lost at pickup sticks
like when you kicked your teacher at 16
when you thought she was being mean
like, when at 26, you lied to men in bars
about your degree, so as not to scare
them away, and decades later now
with creases in your brow
more secrets, still locked
in beneath your mottled skin.
Filmmaker and photographer Carla Schwartz’s poems have appeared in The Practicing Poet (Diane Lockward, Ed) and in her collections “Signs of Marriage,” “Mother, One More Thing,” and “Intimacy with the Wind.” Learn more at carlapoet.com, or wakewiththesun.blogspot.com or find her on Twitter (https://twitter.com/cb99videos), YouTube (https://youtube.com/cb99videos), Threads (https://threads.net/@cb99videos), BlueSky:( https://bsky.app/profile/cb99videos.bsky.social) or Instagram (https://instagram.com/cb99videos). Recent curations include Banyan Review, The Ear, Channel, Cutthroat, great weather for MEDIA, Inquisitive Eater, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New-Verse News, One Art, Paterson Literary Review, Poetry SuperHighway, Remington Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Silver Birch Press, Triggerfish, The MacGuffin, Verse-Virtual, Worcester Review, and Leon. Carla Schwartz is a 2023 recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant. Her poem, “Pat Schroeder Was Our Mother,” won the 2023 New England Poetry Club E.E. Cummings Prize.
Pulsebeat Poetry Journal 