Purrfectly Pleasant Unless Provoked

Author's Note: This is a Cento (a collage poem), which is a poetic form composed entirely of lines from poems by other poets. I only use one line per author and have given them credit at the bottom, in the order that their line appears here. The only change I make is to add or delete a comma or period at the end of a line where needed, to help my poem flow in the manner that I need it to. Enjoy!


If It's Any Consolation...

I was not aware of the moment when
Forever ends. Never a moment holds
before a casket with a princess motif.
Having found the water behind a thousand mirages,
A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more
In your lifetime. A rush
to come and sit on a torn old abandoned chair
and sailing in the graying zenith of woe,
where the sleepless claim the stars talk.

He pushes on with right good will,
Patting goodbye, doubtless they told the lad
those final hours she couldn't speak,
but no one really expects us to solve anything
and here there is sleeping a buxom young girl
A spirit, though with human eyes,
your daughter's likeness must now remain.
For now, for guilty, for guiltless, no matter, the world offers neither
when she offered me as consolation.


(c) LJB 2025
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Stanza one credits: Rabindranath Tagore; Ishion Hutchinson; Kim Addonizio; Khaled Mattawa; John Keats; Katharine Coles; P. K.; Garrett Hongo; Chad Davidson.

Stanza two credits: Robert Louis Stevenson; Wilfred Owen; Michael Ryan; John Surowiecki; Johannes V. Jensen; George Parsons Lathrop; Richard Howard; Jeffrey Schultz; Hélder Faife.

For the past year and a half, in my spare time I have been employed by a small-but-mighty press as one of their copy editors. To date, I have edited about forty short stories (there are approximately ten stories per anthology) plus three juvenile boys adventure novels. This is work that I very much enjoy doing. My husband likes to say that I’ve been editing him for thirty years, and his writing for two.

He’s not wrong. To our credit, he has had over fifteen short stories published within that timeframe.

Copy editing is something I was born to do. Like it or not, I’m the sort that tends to notice every stinkin’ typo in every email I receive. I’m nice enough not to point them out, of course, but they do make me cringe a little. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure I often type too fast and make errors of my own, but I do try to at least read what I’ve typed before hitting send, so I will catch most of my typos a majority of the time.

In addition to checking stories for the obvious spelling errors, typos, and grammar, I will also notice correctly spelled words that are, in point of fact, incorrect. One of the most memorable that I caught was for an anthology with a coffee theme. The author of the story meant to write that the character steepled his fingers. What he actually typed was that he steeped his fingers. Ouch!!

Another error that I found more recently in one of the novels was with a youthful spaceship captain who was speaking with one of his passengers. She inquired what sort of dangers he had to face in interstellar space. The author wrote something to the gist of “it was barely above zero out there.” Uh, no. Buzzz! What he should have said, and what I edited in, was that “it was barely above absolute zero out there.” That’s a HUGE difference, since absolute zero is -459.67 degrees Fahrenheit!

A good copy editor cares—or at least, should care—as much about correct spelling and proper punctuation as they do about making sure the author’s voice and story are clear. Mistakes affect the clarity of the work, as well as being a distraction to the reader, and that impacts the overall quality.

Don’t get me wrong—all the stories and novels that I’ve worked on have been quality works to start with, or they wouldn’t have been selected for publication. My job is to ensure that nothing distracts the reader from enjoying the highest quality possible. I hope I’ve succeeded.

Thanks for reading!