When you can’t read anymore or go to one more support group meeting, sometimes art can help inspire you. Here are some suggestions and we welcome yours, too.
If there is some piece of art that has substantially lifted your spirits around this addiction, we’d love to know about it!
However, please know that while all art will be looked at, we do have space limitations so we will use our discretion, and responsibility to others, as to what we will share with other visitors here.
Photography:
My dear friend Brad Oliphant who is a world-class photographer has donated his uplifting nature and wildlife photography to adorn our site because he so believes in our vision here at PoSARC. He sees himself as wanting to help heal those who are hurting, through his incredibly inspiring art. You will see that the evocative emotional tone of the images resonate with our PoSA experiences. bradoliphantphotography.com
Poetry:
After I Found the Emails
by Tania Rochelle
Published in The World’s Last Bone
AFTER I FOUND THE EMAILS
my breasts were never good enough.
His assistant was a big girl—
a Daytona Beach blond
with a tongue ring—strange stuff.
I was small and spent,
like lunch money, where she
was a full piggy bank.
He called her Missy
and she called him
Greggy, a disappointment—
Maybe you should buy me
something sexy, hers read.
Let’s go to Frederick’s, his said,
and I pictured them fingering
crotchless panties
the way he and I lingered
over pansies at Pike’s.
I surfed online for plastic
surgeons, someone
who could make me bob
where I flowed; I figured
my husband owed me that.
I don’t know why
I didn’t fault my lips or eyes,
the wilting flowers
of my lids, my tiny change-purse
mouth. Or I could have pinned
it on my un-holey tongue.
Breasts seemed more practical
than piercing. Besides,
my gag reflex was in rare high gear.
Naturally, I talked myself out of it.
Nothing would make me feel better.
Parts of Speech
by Terre
Painfully (adverb) awash in rage
at an addict man
who hurt me and
then refused to
empathize with my agony.
He (pronoun) seemed, in fact,
to relish my sobbing and
my selling myself out
over and over again
in my desperation to stay
connected with him.
For (preposition) all my clutching,
I got only armsfull
of his addiction.
Until my empty heart broke,
no longer sacred.
Rage (noun) runs dripping
from my fingertips,
filling the room with
a stench, much like the
smell of his cruelty.
And (conjunction) then I
remembered that he, too,
suffered hideous traumas.
Compassion
rarely found its way to him.
Damn! (interjection) Just damn.
He survived soul-murder
and his wounds now reek addiction.
Compassion (verb), I realized
that I must compassion
and compassion and compassion
and it will take
every ounce of effort
I can muster.
Until I am strong enough
to live compassion as a noun—
compassion is a verb,
compassion is a verb,
compassion is a verb.
Literature
Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
Something about the cause-and-effect justice of The Inferno was pretty delicious.