Junkyard, January 21

"I sing better with lipstick on."
- Anna Nalick, on Facebook

Calisthenics: Metaphor Substitutions

•  Sleeping like a log
• Grimacing like a log
• Sleeping like day-old tomato soup
• Sleeping like a log in a wildfire
•  Run like the wind
• Doubting like the wind
• Run like the stinking wind of the paper plant
• A heart of stone
• A heart of mint julep
• A liver of linoleum
• Music to my ears
• Music to my fingernails
• Yoga to my ears
• Zydeco to my ears
• Raining cats and dogs
• Gambling cats and dogs
• Raining cats and dogs along the wraparound porch
  

Junkyard, January 20

"She put lipstick on her forehead because she wanted to make up her mind."
-blonde joke

"An awkward audience scolder"
-from an article (I forget what it was about)

Free Write, January 19

Class Projects

I crouched with half-bored classmates around the pot
of carefully-tended grease, watching
the teacher poke around
floating sizzling dough. Later
I told my mother about making donuts and she replied
with beignet mix--a gift
silently rotting in the pantry since her ex-
husband's mother had disdainfully gifted it.

In absence of butterflies or even moths,
we learned to care for mealworms.
We watched them burrow into pine
shavings that reeked of nibbled apple slices and sour oatmeal.
When they pupated, we buried them in the garden
where I hoed out rows overzealously.

Junkyard, January 19

"The alien space commander is wearing an off-the-rack knight's jerkin"
-Caroline, on Plan Nine From Outer Space

"Improv"-ing on Amy Pence's "Haunting Marie Laveau"

"Haunting Marie Laveau"
Amy Pence

Three X's and the bones' rubble held aloft
on earth's marred and toxic surface. We lean in

to mark her monument--all three bracing
for different outcomes--a hex on the x,

agape. Hateship, friendship, courtship, loveship.
Voodoo happens though we lie awake nights,

undermined, breaking, coiled to our claws.
I fall into lurid dreams, roam among my wrecked

metaphors: the bruised hippie at the door,
an eyesore, shoving my ancestors' bones

back to make way for more. The past calls--
I crawl into the open maw of Marie Laveau.

Improv

We beeline for her double-D's blushing
under a see-through blouse. He didn't forgive her

breasts after all. Instead he let other
liquor-laden breaths ripple across the

ridges of her impolite stretch marks.
Virginity reeks elsewhere with busted

Madonnas that stand a tired guard on
Chalmatian steps.

Junkyard, January 16

I'm not really a waitress.
-OPI nail color

It's just a dinosaur!
-Toy Story 3

I need a real live loan shark.
-Tyler

Mama bear (grizzly) is in the Food Lion parking lot.
-Mom

Your breasts, however, I may never forgive.
-Jennifer

 Ambassador Elvis
-Captcha