Tuesday, September 15, 2009

BROKE

by Sheryl L. Nelms


is the hollow
echo of

no potatoes
in the

vegetable bin

the coin purse
full of blue
fuzz

sore calves
from the early morning

walk to work

the hopelessness
of window

shopping

the possibilities
in a packed
dumpster

the long drag
until pay
day


Sheryl L. Nelms has had over 4,500 poems, stories and articles published in magazines, anthologies and textbooks such as Readers’s Digest, Modern Maturity, Kaleidoscope, Capper’s, Grit, Country Woman, Poetry Now, Confrontation, Strings, This Delicious Day, The American Anthology, and Men Freeing Men. Fourteen collections of her poetry have been published including Their Combs Turn Red In The Spring, The Oketo Yahoos, Strawberries and Rhubarb, Rural America, Land of the Blue Paloverde, Friday Night Desperate, Aunt Emma Collected Teeth, Secrets of the Wind, Howling At the Gibbous Moon, Greatest Hits 1978-2003, and Bluebonnets, Boots and Buffalo Bones. She is currently the Fiction/Non-Fiction Editor of The Pen Woman Magazine. She makes a living as an insurance agent. She is also a painter, a weaver and an old dirt biker.
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