MY KENNEDY CENTER (1982-2026)

by Robin Stevens Payes

Alvin Ailey Dancers * American Ballet Theatre * Beautiful * Book of Mormon * Cabaret * Cyrano de Bergerac * Dear Evan Hansen * Placido Domingo * Suzanne Farrell * Anthony Fauci * Renee Fleming * Ben Folds * Hair * Hamilton * Les Misérables * Long Day’s Journey Into Night * Millennium Stage * Moulin Rouge * National Symphony Orchestra * Noises Off * On Your Toes * Ragtime * REACH * Shear Madness * Side Show * You Can’t Take It with You 

I DREAMED A DREAM

the dance

the plays

the musicals

the orchestras

the opera

our brains on music

 

the costumes, the scenery, the makeup, the props, the audience  that lifts you when you’re down

the rising talent, since 1997, free at 5 p.m. on the Millennium Stage

Not a REACH: Revelations

Come to the Cabaret, 

old chum, in The 

Room Where It Happens

Hello, you’re gonna die someday!

You Can’t Take It with You, they say. The KENNEDY CENTER canceled before our eyes. 

Shear Madness!

OPENING SOON: the madcap whodunnit you will definitely want to miss: 

DEMOLITION ON THE POTOMAC 

Author’s note: Having lived in the DMV since 1982, the survival of this treasured cultural institution feels personal to me and my family. I hope we can keep alive—in person and in print—the tragedy of what is happening there. Noted in the poem are KenCen highlights our family has experienced over the years.

Robin Stevens Payes is a Pushcart Prize–nominated poet, storyteller, and cultural steward whose work braids ancestral memory, science, myth, and moral imagination. She is the author of the YA time-travel adventure series Edge of Yesterday and creator of [re]member the world, a multi-genre project retrieving and reweaving the silenced history of her grandmother’s flight from Ukraine’s Pale of Settlement. Her poetry has appeared in The New Verse News, Dawn Horizons, East Sea Bards, Maryland Bards Poetry Reviews, and Reflections. As the ancestor telling a new story so her grandchildren and theirs may thrive, she writes about memory—what is lost, what survives, and what we must carry forward—on her Substack, Releasing Memory.

THE SIREN SONG OF TRUTH

by Robin Stevens Payes

Believe women. Believe girls.

The women, the girls know.
Our story ancient. Our voices new.

They make us believe
The crime is our fault.
Men take our bodies,
Unable to resist the siren
Song of our bodies.

The song of our bodies
Does not belong to us.
Girls whom men called sirens,
Children wounded into silence,
Sing their bodies.

Sing their truths aloud.
Strongmen claim they are victims
Of the song of our bodies.
Weak men whose bodies
Are out of control.

Bodies anatomically ungoverned.
Bluster out of control.
Vanquishing other bodies—
Seas, straits, oil fields,
Mines, minds.

Strap yourselves tighter to the mast.
Now the bindings break.
Your strength offers no protection
Against the siren song of Truth.
The women. The girls. Know.

Mother Earth sings Her body,
Raped by weak men
Whose strength is measured
In violence. Did their mothers
Teach them this was fair game?

We sing our truths aloud,
Sirens flashing red:
Pull over now. Stop raping
Our minds, our bodies,
Our mothers, our daughters.

Ourselves. Loudly we sing
Our bodies to wholeness.
Weak men are broken,
No fault of ours.
Blame your wounds, not our anatomy.

Our siren song strengthens.
Our story ancient.
Our voices new.

Believe us.

Robin Stevens Payes is a Pushcart Prize–nominated poet, storyteller, and cultural steward whose work braids ancestral memory, science, myth, and moral imagination. She is the author of the YA time-travel adventure series Edge of Yesterday and creator of [re]member the world, a multi-genre project retrieving and reweaving the silenced history of her grandmother’s flight from Ukraine’s Pale of Settlement. Her poetry has appeared in The New Verse News, Dawn Horizons, East Sea Bards, Maryland Bards, Poetry Reviews, and Reflections. She writes about creative ethics, generational healing, and cultural repair on her Substack, Releasing Memory. 

A HOLY TIME OUT

by Robin Stevens Payes

The perfect Christmas for those of us who do not celebrate

has always been a matinee followed by egg rolls and

 

stale fortune cookies cracking open to commemorate 

this year of the wood snake; instead we take up a new tradition

 

setting out on a sunny holy day for cragels and lox

with everything and a heated debate about prediction markets 

substituting for insurance (count me not a fan)

followed by a hike with son and daughter-in-law

 

Me scaling a tree for the first time in maybe five decades—my son guiding 

each foothold, bark scratching palms, dogs barking beneath bare limbs

 

Son practicing shaky handstands on the hilltop’s brown and pebbled dirt—

we three for a time feeling as free as our tail-wagging dogs running along the lake 

 

No one needing insurance this once—predictive or otherwise—

thank God or Spirit the Sun the Son or Mary or whoever you pray to

 

to stay healthy young-at-heart and carefree—we claimed it as

a joyous moment to celebrate family and love on this beautiful Earth

 

A sacred break beneath the promising glint of a star—our own 

taking a Holy Time Out from the existential dread of being alive in 2025

Robin Stevens Payes is a Pushcart Prize–nominated poet, storyteller, and cultural steward whose work braids ancestral memory, science, myth, and moral imagination. She is the author of the YA time-travel adventure series Edge of Yesterday and creator of [re]member the world, a multi-genre project retrieving and reweaving the silenced history of her grandmother’s flight from Ukraine’s Pale of Settlement. Her poetry has appeared in The New Verse News, Dawn Horizons, East Sea Bards, Maryland Bards Poetry Reviews, and Reflections. She writes about creative ethics, generational healing, and cultural repair on her Substack, Releasing Memory.

JUST ANOTHER DAY IN TRUMPMERICA… IS IT JUST ME?

by Robin Stevens Payes

Art by Adam Bissonnette at Michael Moore Substack

Tired, headachy, lethargic. Is it just me? Perhaps it’s the weather—80 degrees and sunny one day; 50 and foggy the next. The air is close, closing in. Maybe it’s not the weather. The world is closing in. Tariffs, abductions, mass firings. Check your feed. War, threats of war, trading wars. I’m stunned it’s only taken 73 days to destroy US, America the Beautiful. 250 years to build a never-perfect, ever-striving union. Less than a quarter of one to tear it down. Is it just me? Everything looks the same; people keep saying so. I must see for myself. I’m sitting in Panera over a chai tea latte. Frivolous purchase, I know. We are a beautiful hodgepodge of America here: women, men white, black, immigrant, young, old. People smiling and holding open doors for each other. Pleases and thank yous. Chess game in the corner. Regular kaffeeklatsch arguing over who knows what. Friends schmoozing. Babies cooing. Liberation Day. Is it just me? Liberating US from prosperity. Trade wars with friends. Who needs friends? Or lumber, paper, car parts. Semiconductors stranded. Champagne uncorked. Hurray, it’s Liberation Day, who’s rallying? Is it just me?  Domestic pain. Prices rise. Kentucky bourbon for US alone. Chickens no longer laying. Check your feed! Factory cows bellowing in pain for wont of milking. Grain rotting across the fruited plain. What’s a rally in reverse? Markets tumbling. Panicked 401k holders. Is it just me? Temporary, they say. The trumpists trumpet prosperity. Our full faith and credit: In Who We Trust? We have met the gangster and it is US. Oops, roped up the wrong bad guy. Tattoos—you know; they all look alike. All deportations final: no returns. Sorry, not sorry. This is the plan, they keep saying. Breaking news. Breaking US. Check our feed. A blizzard of factless, faceless counterfactuals blowing, billowing, burying US in unreason. Ah, but yes, there are faces. Starring Trump, Musk. Musk, Trump. Bit parts for SecDef, HHS, ICE. IRS, Treasury, because, billionaires. State, misstated. Walk-offs for WWE, monkeys in the GOP. Have you memorized your lines? Get your cues down! NEVER disagree.  Enemies gain. Deus ex machina Putin putting in appearances. Begin bombing. Erdogan saving Syria for Russia. China selling TikTok; keeping the algorithms. Keeping US in its cheap Big Data net. Digitize US. Creators creating AI fear it’s surpassed us. Why would Nero fiddle when AI’s mastered music from every composer ever? Better, cheaper, quicker. They’ve lost control. Just another day in Trumpmerica. We are a beautiful hodgepodge of America here: women, men white, black, immigrant, young, old. US. We the People must not loose our reign. Tired, headachy, lethargic. Rally on! I won’t lose control. Is it just me?

 

Robin Stevens Payes is a time traveler who reasons that time and space are just inconvenient rules that other people decided the world must follow. After decades of trying to fit some notion of “normal” she chose to dive deeper into the offbeat, allowing verse to fill a poetic void. She is author of the YA-time travel adventure book series, Edge of Yesterday. Her poetry has appeared in The New Verse News, Dawn Horizons, East Sea Bards, Maryland Bards Poetry Reviews, and Reflections. She is time traveling to retrieve fragments of her grandmother Sophie’s story in [re]member the world, weaving together poetry, memoir, history and science. She writes about the process of weaving memory into a tapestry on her Substack https://remembertheworld.substack.com/