Junkyard, Feb 11

You can't kill someone to acoustic guitar.
-Hari Kondabolu

Junkyard, February 9

"It's the mooniest thing I ever saw!"
-Peep, Peep and the Big Wide World

Junkyard, February 8

"Bless you and your beautiful gift of squeaking bird."
-Rebecca

Comment on Erickson's "Free Entry Week 4"

This draft wavers between being interesting and falling flat. I think that the biggest problem with this is a pretty common one--it's an attempt to take on a gigantic subject with deep historical and personal roots and put it all into one poem. The refrain/title is intriguing. You have some nice images ("towering mosques of Timbuktu", "ornate mud palaces", "Black as Cain") but they tend to get overshadowed by abstractions like "soul", "life's challenges", or "the atrocities of history". It also tends to use a few cliched terms toward the end ("brighter than a thousand suns / Burning through the sands of time / Shedding light on the atrocities of history"). The draft gets a little melodramatic in lines 10-12. There are so many better ways to express this trauma, and I think they could easily be better fleshed out and nuanced. Overall, I think that this draft has a lot of potential if you put plenty of work into it.

Comment on Mackenzie's "Free Write Week 4"

I really like a lot of the images in this (e.g., "face like a Michigan / icicle", "skin / draped across the bones like a circus tent"). I think the last line can be cut out, though--it includes the abstraction of "brave" and can be communicated with the present imagery. I would love to see a little more detail put into the "tiny city inside, abandoned / by the poachers." This draft has a great narrative to it, but I think that it can maybe be trimmed down a little bit.

Junkyard, February 7

She lives on the edge of Asscrackistan.
-Isaac

Junkyard, February 6

"Reagan was a bellicose peacenik"
-Alex Seitz-Wald, in an article on Ronald Reagan

"Improv"-ing on Dan Albergotti's "Book of the Father"

Book of the Father

¹Abraham is with us again. Yeah Abraham, with your God and your son and your rough bone knife. Yeah Abraham, Geographic cover boy, father of the three faiths, with your Belfast and your Beirut and your Promised Land. ²Yeah Abram to Abraham, patriarch with an extra ha dropped in your name. Yeah God's laughter. Yeah Sarah's laughter. Yeah Sarai to Sarah, faux sister to wife. Yeah primal fucking. ³Yeah Abraham, with your needling questions of the Lord. Yeah Abraham, with the questions and questions for Lot, but none for Isaac. Yeah knife man. Yeah Abraham, hearing God's voice and turning a murderous eye to a child. Yeah paranoid schizophrenia. ⁴Yeah Abraham, begetting and setting off begetting. Yeah generations of Abraham. Yeah Ibrahim to Ishmael, Abraham to Isaac. Yeah covenant and submission. ⁵Yeah contradictions, one true faith and one true faith. Yeah Abraham, ubiquitous Abraham, everywhere always. In the tank with Ariel Sharon,in the studio with Jerry Falwell, in the cockpit with Mohammed Atta. Yeah Abraham and the small dark fear. Yeah Sodom. Yeah Babel. Yeah down low. ⁶Yeah Abraham and your literal origins. The father is high. Yeah the father is high. Yeah Abraham, just like a father, just like a father with a knife. Yeah patriarch, making us all we are. Yeah Abraham. yeah heavenly father. Yeah testing, loving God. ⁷Yeah.


Delilah cried. Yeah Delilah
with your hair and your tits and your wine-stained
tongue. Yeah Delilah, sellout centerfold,
mired in your Sorek wadi with a longhair
Nazirite. Oh delicate Delilah,
de-lilah, not a lilac, not alike. Not like the saffron grinders,
the linen pounders. Not like the pinch-cheeked sisters
lingering by unsold sacks of lentils.

Yeah Delilah with your wheeling and dealing and wheedling.
Yeah Delilah with your pockets
full of bowstrings and new rope and scissors. Hey
Delilah, the hair's the thing--that mass of
unkempt follicle growth. Yeah rip it out. Mutter
Mata Hari's merci monsieur.