Alice Severin

I’ve stopped typing as much. Or at all. I think I’ve stopped talking as well. I say platitudes. I am anesthetized with social media and watching war tragedy on a small screen. I see women abused. Children neglected. And again I know in two days I will hear “happy Monday” like a lollypop given after an injection. Does it feel sometimes like no one is honest? Yes. Or that drops of honesty have…

Bloom or unbloom There would be a picture of a lettuce seedling here but the new default seems to be to let artificially intelligent create one, so… It’s been about two weeks since I tried to write something that could be said to be for a wider audience, however small. That was about the time where many sentient creatures, although not animals, did not know yet what sort of apocalypse the…

Renee Nicole Good. Fox non-news called her a “self-proclaimed poet.” We are trained to listen to those with money, to those who are paid money by those with money to speak, to those who have been approved by those with money and given the right to publish words and earn money. Money equals audience. In many ways, money is our audience. We fight for its approval. Self-proclaimed the equivalent…

Say it again. Today I woke up thinking about war. Again. And I wondered if I had any other thoughts left. Reaching for beauty when the world offers nothing but ugliness. War. What is it good for? Like the song – absolutely nothing, say it again. It’s good for erasing all the thoughts in my head. Better that, I tell myself, than weeping for a dead… No. Even the mention makes disaster…

In the woods, hoping the earth will be saved How to begin. Always a question, now made more difficult by everything that has happened. So many words written about so many awful actions, people, events, kidnappings, murders. A list of unthinkable acts, and listing them is the banality of evil at its best. Or the headlines that place a heavy thumb on the both sides have good people version of…

In the midst of nightmares This morning, I woke up from a nightmare.   I was screaming at a bus driver. The doors of the bus were open and the bus itself was plain, rectangular. White, unmarked, like one of those buses that take you to the plane if the plane must be unloaded away from the terminal, or if some operational issue or risk has arisen. An ordinary bus, yet out of place. Stationed in…

From the Cambridge Dictionary – Girl – noun, a female child or young woman Can also mean Old-fashioned, usually plural A woman worker, especially when seen as one of a group – Shop/office girls From the Alice Severin dictionary – Apron Girl – noun – a woman who cringes when her fellow co-workers, having been upgraded from secretaries to executive assistants, call each other “ladies” when…

How far in the future do we need to be to look back I wasn’t going to write about protesting anymore but… Then someone told me that my diary of sorts, my record of protesting in late winter and spring meant something to them. I don’t know whether to believe it or not. But it reminded me that writing my thoughts about the experience of standing in the road, holding a sign, waving at care – that…

Already, a new month.  I wake up with strange dreams and things I want to say. I go through self doubt and remember or recreate horrible times. And when I get to the page, there is nothing. It all seems pointless. Who am I speaking to anyway? No one cares, not really.  It’s too easy to say that. I can’t see everything. And whatever trials people are going through, asking people to care about…

the opposite of mowing down Saturday, I drove past the protesters, honking and waving. There are still quite a few people, there are new signs to match the new indignities that we are being dragged through. Waving as you drive by takes almost no effort, yet it still felt good. I am in the midst of packing. My house resembles the chaos of my mind, decades left out to be washed, old bills, the…

one grain helps make a pearl It hasn’t even been six months of going out to protest, and I am wondering what is the point of it all. The country slides further towards dictatorship, and people say they are tired of thinking about it. My guess is that the market research showed that it would be thus, and so here we are. Do I carry on writing, observing – or slip into the stream of the masses,…

Fighting for, not against Sometimes, the best protesting you can do is in favor of your own life. Why is it so hard to say what one wants, or decide what to do with the life that you have been gifted? Last weekend, I paddled in the ocean. No seals, but red jellyfish, and sailboats, and seagulls and terns diving for fish. I startled a school of silver fish – mackerel? – hovering by the rocks,…

“There once was a note, pure and easy…” What to say about protesting today? Endless. Elephants who have been abused and overworked go to sanctuaries, if they are lucky. Sorry creatures, who have had their tusks ripped out, their bones bruised, skin scabbed and sore. They are exhausted and fearful. There, people are kind to them. The battered animals, who deserve to be wild and regal, free to…

What do we believe Background, history built by fragments.  Belief systems. “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”― Audre…

Pull a knife through the masterpiece, or army dreamers All the turmoil… is there a word for the self-inflicted insanity and danger some egomaniacs have put us all in? They won’t pay a price for it. They’ll go on TV and lie about it, and say half-truths, and claim victories, either pyrrhic or false, and say how great everything is. The alcoholic in charge of the military nearly said that War was…

Turning point The turning point of the year. Someone said to me – I don’t want to think about the days growing shorter.  I was very similar in my youth. In fullness and beauty, I could only think of decay. Now – that tendency I can recognize as a bad mental habit, but it still plagues me.  Now – I can try to fight against that modern word – catastrophizing.  This is not what I wanted to write…

Be quiet. A preamble to protesting. I wanted to write something that expressed my mood, before I took myself off to the local No Kings protest. But I only glanced at some blogs, avoided main news. Perhaps I should have looked harder. But at the time, there seemed no reason for immediate alarm, and I didn’t want to be rendered immobile by the fear of nuclear conflict in the Middle East. What…