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.