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

Calisthenics: Resurrecting the Classics

Antigone Going

I am impatient for these men
to roll their stone over my tomb. Their wives
made it cozy, or tried, with stacks of pita, cheap amphoras
filled with wine, olives. They didn't leave room for late-night cravings. That's

fine, just as well. I sit and pick my fingernails clean.
The dirt falls on my feet. I count the inches
of light the stone is carving away. These
are their inches, I do not need the inches of men more,
more than I need a half-inch of dirt over my brother.

I pick the dirt out of my thumbnail and sprinkle it on my foot.
The men grunt above me, behind me, somewhere between
my legs and ears, as they and their stone whittle away
my grief from their cows, wars, dependable wives.
That's fine. Just as well. I see a sliver of foot.

It disappears. They have finished. They will not
kill me, can not satisfy me like that. I can not
hear the rasp of their relief as they wipe foreheads
clean of my sweaty solemnity. I rip my own dress
and braid it like a daughter's hair--it's too white, too
dirty, smells too much like a rotting brother,
but I twist it, wring it into a beautiful noose.

Sign Inventory, B. H. Fairchild's "Madonna and Child"

• In the beginning, the baby seems violent as its crying "[rips] through the store like a weed cutter," then turns divine as it becomes "the harangue of the gods." Once she begins nursing, the baby's characterization evolves to be more calm but still voracious with what Fairchild calls "the great suck of the infinite." By the end of the poem, however, the child seems angelic, "asleep, lips / on breast, drops of milk trickling down."
• Fairchild juxtaposes the overwhelming force of the baby with the speaker's "grievous / late-night stupor and post-marijuana hunger" and their "sad little plastic baskets full of crap."
• The poem includes dialogue in both English and Spanish, but only the Spanish is direct dialogue
• The baby is compared to a boat twice--in line 24 ("riding her knee like a little boat") and in lines 28-29 ("plump cheeks / pumping, billowing sails of the Santa Maria").

Junkyard Quotes, Week 11

Kisses fiddle with my mind
-Rockie

I'd live on the moon probably except I think I'd miss the moonlight
-Richard Siken

Free Write, Week 11

Notes on Chairs

Each city doles out spare seats: folding
chair theatres, dollar cinemas, outdated
booths in kitsch restaurants with catchy ads.

Benches squat on corners like tired whores,
sagging under bus riders and pinch-faced mothers.

Stools, though backless, are paradigms
of correct posture. They must stay stolid
under creaking weights of drunks and dunces.

Recliners, like the one my grandmother lived
and died in with its torn vinyl and cat piss
and spiderwebs of cotton spilling out, always
mouth remotes to imagine the taste of Animal
Planet or Jersey Shore.

"Improv"-ing on Amy Pence's "8th Grade Locker Combination"

8th Grade Locker Combination

If you remember the numbers now,
maybe the rest of your life will click open
on easy street: a winning lottery ticket.

Even then, when it didn't jam,
you considered yourself lucky. Saved
from humiliation, from the dreaded flicker of girls' eyes that meant something--.

Yet you didn't think then
that the locker would open
to all these riches: these woods,
this love, this child, even the deaths--
how they come to you in many forms:

wingspans radial, the heron,
the hummingbird: the whir metallic--
approaching, receding again.

7th Grade Suede Covered Journal

If you find it in the bookcase next to your half-
collection of The Babysitters Club, the rest
of your passion might crease open from
an eternal tropical themed birthday party.

Even then, when you scribbled down gossip
scraps it was guarded, discarded with a pen scratch. You can't say
whose eyes blink in the margins, changing
from green to black to blue to another blue
(your star-eyed scrawl says "periwinkle") each shining with some meaning--
 
When you turn the gel-penned pages
you didn't think that you would need
all these sketchy inkblots over those square dance
lessons, that sprained wrist, this pressed azalea petal,
even the solitude in so many forms:

linoleum echoes, the bread slice,
the fingerprint: your swirls inked--
un-hopscotched, blotched.

Calisthenics: Sonic Translation

Per each seat, vain cities dole out,
for me, Shiva never sent colored letters.
Perms, if gone, try per duty, gentle.
Geosticking moss ills my alto fatigue:
for shimmy divvying pedestals,
winsome sap in Zales prime amore.
Dining a mean fury costs Cree tea.
Seen turning, better not Duracell.
Lash late cogs nests, walking nitrates.

---------------------

Each city doled out seats.
She never sent colored letters or
postcards of gentle perms.
Her altitude fatigue stuck like the ill
color of moss. She was a winsome sap
for Cree tea and Zales prime amore in
velvet boxes. Wasps nests seemed filled
with cogs turning in twitching Duracell ekes.

Free Write, Week 10

Girl Talk

I lie in the bunk, listening.
They share chatter like childhood
toys: XL hoodies and their boyish smells,
soap operas, country singers' hometowns,
always stories heated over in the microwave.

My shirt drips outside with lake water.
My shoes are breaking, holing up
in strange places. Tucking into my sheets,
I avoid a whiff of coconut passion. Mike
is carved into my bedpost with Lauren
Loves Davie. The firewood still burns
under my fingernails, sticky like smores.

Calsisthenics: Odd Job

The Scrappler

I hang on with the last tailgaters, streetlamps glaring impatiently off our Ford F-whatevers.
The subject will come up soon enough with the shatter of my third-to-last Bud: Whatchya do ennyway?
My answer's always the same. I stir stews of pig guts. Aortas, gallbladders, glottises. That's it.

I smell the bubbling spleens and livers even when I pick out Hot Pockets or try
not to step on the Bible molding on the floor of my cousin's pickup. I'm always pulling
the lever that shoots pork slosh down the chutes. The backs of my eyelids
have been stamped with the curling edges of intestines.

Junkyard Quotes

There are characters in the background of Mary Worth strips that are more important than me.
-Fry, Futurama

The maiden voyage on yesterday's newspapers
-Adam on Mythbusters

Stories and smores by the microwave
-Kayla

Stick with me and you'll be sleeping through caviar!
-The Nanny

Calisthenics: Eliminating Redundancies and Cleaning House

1. The colorless windows stared into the sizzling asphalt.
2. Our Eureka couldn't bring itself to snort your spilled coffee grounds.
3. He sifted the aftertastes of their drinks over the room with his piano.
4. This bird's mango feathers were a much better sight than the holiness of hymn books or the false smiles of housewives.
5. This scotch, he knew, would trickle into his stomach and tip him away from tipsy.

1. The sparrows kept to their business.
2. The sparrow's dusty feathers left me unexcited.
3. Shopping for school supplies sucked the beach trips, loungy days, and tall glasses of something from her eyes.

1. We leaned solemnly on the fence around the flamingos' pond.
2. The shrimp-feathered flamingos scooped into the barrels of algae, skimming off the impossibly thick layer.
3. Each slippery swallow settled in my mind with a happy plop.

1. Daily, the purple martin catches mosquitoes.
2. We now slip their nests into the tree, letting the martins laze into spring without the bother of construction.
3. The razor wings of our martins efface the sky.

Free Write, March 20

This is an edit of a previous improv:

Grandpa chewed and swished
gray squirrel slowly in
a toothless mouth, sneaking
a mouthful of cheap gin and leaning
against the side of his acid-green Ranger
with a willow switch on the dash
and the dogeared Bible in the glovebox, and I saw
his lips crackle open like thin, boring
paper around a gift: the argyle socks buried
silently under pine leaves.
 
He was late that year, and we shut out
winter sun with Venetian blinds.

He was driven batshit crazy
by kids and BGH and welding
asbestos, wedding his best toes
to rough boots.

Every lunch, he read Outdoor Life
to learn intimately the glint of dogs' teeth on
Muscovy wings, the depth of walleyes,
the melancholy of fading fawn spots. I would like to fish
for words that rhyme with perch, shoot
pool or photos or for the moon, cast
a reel into the algaed water and pull out
the bass wriggling into a treble clef.

"improv"-ing on Catherine Bowman's "I Want to be Your Shoebox"

I Want to Be Your Shoebox

Memphis Minnie’s classic blues line “I want to be your chauffer” was miscopied in an early Folkways recording song transcription as “I want to be your shoebox.”

I want to be your shoebox
I want to be your Fort Knox
I want to be your equinox

I want to be your paradox
I want to be your pair of socks
I want to be your paradise

I want to be your pack of lies
I want to be your snake eyes
I want to be your Mac with fries

I want to be your moonlit estuary
I want to be your day missing in February
I want to be your floating dock dairy

I want to be your pocket handkerchief
I want to be your mischief
I want to be your slow pitch

I want to be your fable without a moral
Under a table of black elm I want to be your Indiana morel
Casserole. Your drum roll. Your trompe l'oeil

I want to be your biscuits
I want to be your business
I want to be your beeswax

I want to be your milk money
I want to be your Texas Apiary honey
I want to be your Texas. Honey

I want to be your cheap hotel
I want to be your lipstick by Chanel
I want to be your secret passage

All written in Braille. I want to be
All the words you can't spell
I want to be your International

House of Pancakes. I want to be your reel after reel
Of rough takes. I want to be your Ouija board
I want to be your slum-lord. Hell

I want to be your made-to-order smorgasbord
I want to be your autobahn
I want to be your Audubon

I want to be your Chinese bug radical
I want to be your brand new set of radials
I want to be your old-time radio

I want to be your pro and your con
I want to be your Sunday morning ritual
(Demons be gone!) Your constitutional

Your habitual—
I want to be your Tinkertoy
Man, I want to be your best boy

I want to be your chauffeur
I want to be your chauf-
feur, your shofar, I want to be your go for

Your go far, your offer, your counter-offer
your two-by-four
I want to be your out and in door

I want to be your song: daily, nocturnal—
I want to be your nightingale
I want to be your dog's tail


The Other Woman

I want to be the ceiling fan that rattles
above your bedroom while
your wife watches Cheaters in silence.

I want to be your baby
carrot, I want to be the car
that you drive out of Rob's Used Autos.

I'll be your new headlights,
the head lice sorting
your hair into unseen rows.

I want to be a show, a shot,
the pot for your stew, the gum
in gumbo. I want to be okra


buried beneath the fishsticks in
your freezer. I'll be a fall breeze, the bee's
knees all rouged with ragweed

pollen. I'll call in your
prescriptions, favors. I want to. I
want to. I want to be the last

grains of yellow rice, crumbs
of yellow cake that you
will mash in with potatoes,

hoping for a nuclear explosion
that will carry off this whole family
picnic in a mushroom cloud.

I'll be the truffles you dig
for, the music you dug twenty
years ago, your Thirty Years War,

I want to be your armoire,
the half-empty glass of water
on your one nightstand.

Junkyard, March 2

She's so good at lying, she could make the pope doubt his big hat!
-Kim

Sign Inventory,Kate Northrop's "Aspens"

• Each stanza is separated into four lines.
• Rhyme scheme AABB CACC DAEF GHHI
• Uses repetition heavily in the first two stanzas ("they are white / they are not white," "sound" is repeated three times in the second stanza)
• creates tension through contradiction early in the poem
• In the last stanza, the imagery moves into the domestic space "As if on a back stair / Or here at the window") briefly before ending with a "meadow"

Junkyard, Feb 27

"My greatest strength is putting 'bro' in things."
-Passing conversation

"Improv"-ing on Angie Estes' "Gloss"

Gloss
My mother said that Uncle Fred had a purple
heart, the right side of his body
blown off in Italy in  World War II,
and I saw reddish blue figs
dropping from the hole
in his chest, the violet litter
of the jacaranda, heard the sentence
buckle, unbuckle like a belt
before opening the way
a feed sack opens all
at once when the string is pulled
in just the right place:
the water in the corn pot
boils, someone is slapped, and summer
rain splatters as you go out
to slop the hogs. We drove home
over the Potomac while the lights spread
their tails across the water, comets
leaving comments on a blackboard
sky like the powdered sugar
medieval physicians blew
into patients' eyes to cure
their blindness. At dusk,
fish rise, their new moons
etching the water like Venn Diagrams
for Robert's Rules of Order
surfaced at last, and I would like to
make a motion, move
to amend: point of information, point
of order. I move to amend
the amendment and want
to call the question, table
the discussion, bed
some roses, and roof the exclamation
of the Great Blue heron sliding
overhead, its feet following flight
the way a period haunts
a sentence: she said that
on the mountain where they grew
up, there were two kinds
of cherries--red heart and black heart--both of them
sweet.

Improv
Grandpa ate gray
squirrel, chewing and swishing
without teeth, leaning
against the scratched
side of his acid-green Ranger
with a willow switch
on the dash and the dogeared
Bible in the glovebox, and I saw
his lips open, unopen like thin,
boring paper around a gift
you thought you'd never get:
the argyle socks buried
silently under pine leaves,
someone is late, and winter sun
is shut out with vertical blinds. He was driven
batshit crazy with kids and
welding asbestos, wedding his best toes
to rough boots: day in, day out.
At lunch, he read Outdoor Life to learn
intimately the glint of dogs' teeth on
duck wings, the depth of salmon eyes,
the melancholy of fawn spots. I
would like to fish
for words that rhyme with perch, shoot
pool or photos or for the moon, cast
a reel into the algaed water and pull out
the bass wriggling into a treble clef: Granny
said her paintbrushes were made with either
horsehair or squirrel hair.

Junkyard, Feb 24

that word, adore, you shouldn't have opened
-from a Leigh Anne Couch poem. I think it may have been "a door" in text, but either way I love the pun on adore/a door