Free Write, Week 13

This started out as a collection of phrases from the blog Engrish Funny, which features a myriad of mistranslations:

-Please do not accompany the elevator door
-Beware of your hands
-You don't bird me. I don't bird you.
-Do not use on unexplained calf
-This machine chooses to use the transformer of power
-irony barbecue
-Please don't flash the octopus

And then ended up as this:

Your unexplained calf, wary hands
in an unaccompanied elevator door.
You bird me, smack against my window
every morning in a bloom of brown feathers. I
bird for you, stuffing frustrated straw into the nook
of some elm branch. This machine,

your feathered breath, chooses
barbecued irony. I birds-eye you,
I flash octopi to make them change
color and squeeze into the nook
of some coral branch. Beware of your hands.
They bloom on my waist, unexplained.

Free Write, Week 12

An edit of a previous poem:

 

How to Show Your Mother She Raised You Right

1—Be Well Read

Make sure she sees you

with a hardback once a week (try

some moony Whitman or savory Cervantes)

and hide Fabio-embossed

dust jackets. Know who Emily Post is.

Read Country Gardens and Vogue. Rattle

off the two species of Gallberry and identify

the stitch of a real Chanel. Translate

poems into languages her mouth can't handle—

Urdu or something sub-Saharan.

Study the obstinacy of kiwi bristles

and avoid the scowl of a lemon wedge. Always

have the intimacy of banana curves

at your fingertips. Know her birthday. Forget her age.

2—Be Clean and Neat

Exfoliate. Don't suck down your Evian

like Gatorade. Agree

that wicker furniture isn’t ugly. Agree

that the neighbor with her oversized dogs

and chicken-fried-chicken odor

is white trash, but don't describe

the smell of her nephew’s trailer hazy with spent

menthols, or the taste of Van Gogh

Vodka from his heated mouth in the torn

backseat of a Honda Accord. Wear floral prints,

A-line skirts. Agree that you won't talk

to the gardener while he’s working.

3—Converse Well

Call about her everyday

minutiae. Don’t tell her that she repeats

stories like writing lines in detention.

Don’t interrupt. Answer questions vaguely. Tell her

about a man hitting passengers on the bus

with dirty pink flip-flop heels,

sagging in his ragged airbrushed

t-shirt. Don’t mention that you bought

him a meal. Drink Moscato with dinner.

Listen to her mascara shade lectures.

Speak badly about your father, reaffirm

what a terrible choice she made, that he’s

got his fifth floozy already hanging

on every arm he sticks out.

Junkyard Quotes, Week 12

There's a wrench in wrong
-Catherine Wing

My grandmother thirsted for white hair
-me

Benedictive mumbling
-A Rolling Stones review