Poetry by Millicent Borges Accardi

                          Kaoru CC



Broken Pieces

All was if and maybe and meanwhile. The chorus
sang full of weed, a reflection on the acoustics
in the church, and--when does it ever seem all right--
When will that be again? The empirical
wish of a stupid requirement for happiness. Was that
what it was? And, they lived happily ever after is the phrase
perhaps you were looking for, a timid cool minute inside
your head when you used to believe otherwise, back in the slow
when time when it was not the new normal and, man, 
it is not just us; it is global and inflated and then you know 
it is terrifying,  Did they take a census this year? 2020. 
America, I seem to remember ten years ago 
the government wanted to know our household income,
and what we did for a living.
This year? The form was all about age and race 
and you could fill in whatever “other” you wanted.  
Like a weakness, a mere description of how it was not
supposed to be.

​



Inside me Waiting a Long Time  
From a line by  RUSTY MORRISON
 

We were off to the races,
hope and madness, lost
compartments of helplessness
where my wrist are pins and needles
and I cannot think of where to look next,
the body yelling back and forth like
A see-saw in a playground,
where someone keeps jumping
on and laughing, high in the air, screaming.

It was push pull and out of sorts,
That I find myself explaining
Justifying and unliving memories
to someone I saw 3 times in the past
20 years. This is how it is now, these days

in which we are like summer bugs,
trapped in a screen door.

Reinforce this anger of anxiety
Filled with no more conversations.  Everything 
Is a moral code. The day fills with

predators, trying to find weaknesses,
a bet, a metal slide, the rocket into a pile of sand.

We are free and we
and we are cutting through our thick distance
like youth.

​
​

Millicent Borges Accardi, a Portuguese-American writer, is the author of two poetry books, most recently Only More So (Salmon Poetry). Her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Fulbright, CantoMundo, Creative Capacity, the California Arts Council, The Corporation of Yaddo, Fundação Luso-Americana, and arbara Deming Foundation.
She’s led poetry workshops at Keystone College, Nimrod Writers Conference, The Muse in Norfolk, Virginia, and University of Texas, Austin. Her non-fiction can be found in The Writers Chronicle, Poets Quarterly, and the Portuguese American Journal. Recent readings at Brown University, Rutgers, UMass Dartmouth, Rhode Island College and the Carr Reading Series at the University of Illinois. She lives in Topanga (canyon) CA.

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