Crazy Broken Thing (Alicia Bayer Poetry)

Rural Minnesota poet here. 👋

Latest work.
#poetry #readersky #blueskypoets #poetrycommunity #mentalhealth #RuralLife #motherhood #survivors #MidwestPoet #MinnesotaPoet #MinnesotaWriter

Tell me that T-shirt, the skin tight leather pants and that grin don't say it all for Erika Kirk.

I've been taking a picture straight up at the sky every morning when I walk the dog for over 4 months. It's become a lovely ritual & I love seeing the patterns over time (like the sky is much bluer in April & you can the wildfire smoke effect in June). #naturelover #mindfulness #photoprompt #skies

#poetry #readersky #blueskypoets #poetrycommunity #bpd #mentalhealth #mentalillness #mooddisorder #bipolar #recovery

#blueskypoets #poetry #poetrycommunity #CronesOfAnarchy #CoA #mindfulness #naturelover

Watching videos of #gabbypetito I remember that feeling.
To anyone still living this -- reach out for help, make a safety plan, and get away.

#poetry #survivor #domesticviolence #awareness #readersky #DomesticViolence #Abuse #DomesticAbuse #DVSupport #Narcissist #Gaslighting

today
I woke up
and decided
to dress in
stillness

#tanka #poetry

#SenseWrds 94

I've declared today a couch day
To rest my injured hip or heart
(Also injured, but whose isn't?)
But still I am at my desk, peering down
At the weathered road
That I love for its emptiness
And still I hear my grandmothers:
No rest. Just guilt. Do more.
I bear the sin of stillness.

From Flower Girls (Floral Feminist Poems)

This activity was funded in part with a grant from Southwest Minnesota Arts Council made possible by the voters of Minnesota, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts & cultural heritage fund.
#blueskypoets #poetry #foraging #wildfoods #rewild

YouTube video by Cancel Me, Daddy - Media & Politics Podcast We Debunked the New York Times Anti-Trans Podcast (ft. Sandy Allen)

ICYMI: In last week's CMD episode we debunked the New York Times' podcast about gender affirming care for trans youth. www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCrL...

Image description -- freehand drawing of an iris with leaves like serrated knives and dark droplets at the top of them, on a purple watercolor background. Text: Grandma Iris She had words like broadswords, So jagged and unbending For someone who carried Such delicate beauty. All my life she took turns Stabbing and forgiving me. ~ Alicia Bayer @crazybrokenthing (Artwork in this piece by Alicia Bayer) ** This activity is funded in part with a grant from Southwest Minnesota Arts Council made possible by the voters of Minnesota, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.

One of the pieces in Flower Girls (Floral Feminist Poems & Artwork). I did the art for this one, freehand with a mouse, which is surprisingly difficult. ;) afflink: amzn.to/4ez3Las

#selfcare #mindfulness #dumpsterfire #keepongoing

It has never been about anything but hate and scapegoating.

A group of young children stands inside a secured room with their backs turned. Their hands are cuffed behind them and they stand near a closed metal door. One child wears a striped shirt, another carries a small backpack. A uniformed officer in a dark cap and jacket stands nearby watching them.

ICE are terrorists and traitors to the constitution.

I grew up in a working-class family. I’m running for Congress by day and waiting tables by night. I know what working families need because I’ve lived it — and I’ll fight for policies that work for us, not the wealthy and well-connected.

#blueskypoets #poetry #poetrycommunity #LetThemEatCake #RiseUp #SpeakOut #DoSomething #BlueCrew #CronesOfAnarchy #CoA #NotMyPresident #EatTheRich #SocialJustice

They plan to roll back green energy investments. That will spike our utility bills while warming our planet. A double hit only the GOP could conjure.

🦊 Written this week.....

#WomensPoetry #WomensWriting #blueskypoets #poetry #poetrycommunity

Love the start of this one and "useless sack." :)

Love this!

My mother and her sisters had a very complicated relationship with religion, in part because of time they spent in an abusive Catholic orphanage in the 1940's after my aunt was in a terrible accident. I wrote this poem years ago about my Aunt Leslie and the ways all three girls responded to the abuse they survived there. From Crazy Broken Thing in the Poems from the Attic series (afflink: https://amzn.to/4l4j7GC) THE ENTRANCE OF GOD When she was a girl, my Aunt Leslie sat straight down on a wrought-iron spike. The forbidden church and the angry priest become nothing. She woke to white, to her two sisters packed away in a Catholic orphanage, to her mother pulling her hair out, one blade at a time, crying I cannot be a mother, to her mother with no man to stitch her up, sending the stitched-up Leslie to the orphanage too. And for some months the three girls sat with the nuns, with the orphans, with God sending them to bed with no supper. My Aunt Linda had God beaten into her. My mother had God beaten out of her. And Leslie, poor Leslie, just sat among the black and the white-- with the nuns, with the prayers, with a wrought-iron hole through which God came and went. ~Alicia Bayer @CrazyBrokenThing

My mother & aunts had a complicated relationship with religion, partly because of time they spent in a Catholic orphanage in the 1940's.

From Crazy Broken Thing (Poems from the Attic Book 1) (afflink: amzn.to/4l4j7GC)

#WomensPoetry #WomensWriting #blueskypoets #atheism #poetry #poetrycommunity

Wonderful poem. That keeps me going, too. <3

Tough, whip-smart and selfless: Melissa Hortman, ‘singular force for democracy’, remembered Colleagues speak of Hortman’s legislative accomplishments, a ‘steely negotiator’ who went into politics ‘to do something, not to be something’

This makes me weep. "Hortman told MinnPost she decided when she was 10 years old she would be the first female president, while watching the 1980 presidential campaign." #melissahortman #feminism

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

TW: allusions to s* assault. Bloodroot Forty springs have brought beauty and beginnings to that hillside but still the bloodroot bursts every March remembering the stain on dark soil and the sound of no being buried in black earth. And really, how few of us don’t have that story? Bloodroot is a native plant for every woman. ~ Alicia Bayer @crazybrokenthing From the newly published Flower Girls (floral feminist poems). Artwork by Daryl Hrdlicka. Out now on Amazon https://amzn.to/4je3Tyi (afflink) ** This activity is funded in part with a grant from Southwest Minnesota Arts Council made possible by the voters of Minnesota, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.

Bloodroot, from my book Flower Girls, artwork by Daryl Hrdlicka in pencil and wild mushroom ink

#afflink -- amzn.to/4je3Tyi

#WomensPoetry #WomensWriting #blueskypoets #poems #writingcommunity #poem #poetrycommunity #feminism #survivors #triggerwarning

This is awesome!