Kathryn A. Cullen

We live in a violent society disguised as a peace-loving, carefree place to live. And although we can find our moments of solitude and maybe even outright fun, what life experiences we've lived that have involved violence and hateful words we carry around like a shroud. I'm not sure where the violence in my life—abusive, angry husband, boys in my youth who took both my pride and self-respect when I couldn't fight them off mentally or physically, the man in the toga who attacked my friend and I on Halloween night, the woman who died at my feet at the hand of a young man toting a sawed-off shotgun—ends and where my poetry begins. Because I find violence has its own music of staccato fists and angry shouts, I look at it—turn it around in my hand—and answer it with my own music—that of poems, and songs, and essays in my word-in my music...against violence. I know 'voice' is an answer to violence: collective voices, singular voices, baby voices, singing voices, poetic voices, voices who say no...to violence.

My offering to Art of Recovery is an essay about loss and recovery amidst violence titled "Thirty Seconds;" and a poem written one winter on a Greyhound when I was listening to my own conflicting voices in my head about the state of me and the world and my friend's, but at the same time I was listening to the sound of the people talking around me, the click click of tires on pavement, slushy now against metal bus. I learned a long time ago to use those sights and sounds and images to try and understand the world if even just a little bit.