Susanne Thomas reads, writes, parents, and teaches from the wild and windy west in Wyoming. Besides her five kids and husband, she loves fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction, poetry, children’s books, mythology, science, coffee, and puns. And socks. She really loves socks. That’s a lot of things to love, but luckily, there’s a lot of love in the world.

Disposable Life

Paper plates
Plastic straws
Tinfoil pans
Drive thru windows
Prepackaged food
            Two-day delivery
Magic for the stressed
busy
tired
But if books have taught me anything
Magic comes with a price
and the monkey paw will always win
for granting me an easier life
When will I notice enough
                                    (or care enough)
to stop spending my world away?

Chasing a Paragon

Our histories are open now
what we've said, what we've felt, how we grow
not to be unfolded and parceled out as gifts to friends who dig past the surface
but out there for everyone who’d wish to know
 
We are the sum of our words and writings and pictures and likes and follows
Even if we follow evil to watch it
Even if we like posts to see them later
Even if we have family who are awful but still family
 
We are flawed
 
But now our flaws are uncovered,
held in a lit room
and echoed about asking for judgments and affirming nods
 
They will not nod
 
They will look past and skim the thousands of pictures of our hiking trails, presents, and meals
our likes of cats, dogs, horses, and trains
They will skip over the "sames" and "this is mes"
and go right to that time when we said it wrong and did not delete our post
but rather left it
as a ring on our tree
 
It shows up in our flashback fridays and throw back thursdays
and we cringe, and look over at people who we once would have hurt, but now hold dear
We smile at our growth
Until someone else points at the scars
where we had to heal around our sickness and tie our skin back up better.
 
Then we're cut at the knees and shrunk down, made smaller by our past, made lesser by who we were, no matter who we have become.

Let the opportunities slip

Like water, we are rained on
Every day
With chances and situations
That we could jump on
 
Like a train out of the station
To take us elsewhere
 
And we move
Panicked
Hurried
Because the thought of missing that train
Of missing that chance
Is frozen in us
 
And Marshal Mather’s
Voice
Tells us that
We only get one shot
 
So, we rush and end up somewhere we never wanted to go
But time and life
Will tell you
That if you take a moment
To see where the train is going
 
You can wait a few minutes, hours, days, weeks, years
And another ride
Going where you always dreamed of being
Will arrive
 
And you will be ready
To leap from the platform
 

Utopia

In the deep dark
When the world is too loud
In its silence
I spin around
The dream
Of a world
Crafted in brilliance
 
Our needs are met
And there is no hunger
We are kind
And make boundaries and bridges
 
You are you
And I am I
And no one blinks an eye
When you do the things as you do
And I do the things as I do
 
The plurality of us all
Is embraced and we are woven
Into a cloth rich and thick and full and resplendent in its colors
 
Resplendent
And
Resilient