Tag Archives: poem

The Kitchen I – Poem

Posted on by
4

The Kitchen I

I am one year closer to death.
On my birthday my father tells me this,
as we connect the pieces of track
to a super-raceway set, as we click together
each smooth strip to form a figure eight
that swirls across the kitchen floor.
He helps me guide the matchbox racer
through its twisting over linoleum,
its geometric mess some murky hell
into which we might flip. We study
for hours the speeding and slowing,
the skid and the spin, the restless gambling
with God. My father is like a god,
his grip on the joystick leaning in
to the inevitable, the slick swish past
the previously traveled, the one-more mile,
the one-last second. My father and I,
motoring one year closer to death.

Over the Tracks – New Videopoem

Posted on by
3

Over the Tracks

In summer we’d pitch our wishes to the tracks,
toss pennies between the ties and wait for trains
to come and lift them off like bells snagged
to the bumpers of wedding cars, engineers waving
like lonely grooms. Fenced behind chain-link and weeds
they trumbled past, the faded words SOUTHERN PACIFIC LINES
and carman markings, fat chalk letters that crawled
over metal like hungry slugs. They didn’t stop
when you were sleeping, they kept coming, the hooking
and unhooking, the banging together, the scraping apart,
the coupling and uncoupling like desperate lovers.
They shook us awake, pronounced arrivals into air,
departures etched like fading smoke against sad sky.
Some days we’d climb the fence, find pennies splayed out
among the blades or tucked into gravel, knicked from the force
of their journey, melted from heat. It would happen
to our souls, too – once we were old enough
to know it just kept coming, old enough to understand
the trip to a line’s end on a Texas summer night.

Notes: The footage in the video is spliced together from various sources from the Prelinger Archives – promotional videos about rail lines, newsreels, and home movies. This started out with over three hours of possible footage to use, so the most daunting part of the task was sifting through it and deciding what to use. Once that was done I ran it through Movie Maker, downloaded the train sounds from iTunes, recorded my voice into my iPhone, and transferred it to my computer. I’m curious if other people record the poem first, or create the visuals before recording the reading. I’ve found it works better for me to create the video first, with the poem in mind of course, and with me playing the video back and reading the poem to myself for timing’s sake. But when it comes to putting it all together, I like to record my voice while viewing the actual, completed video. So for this one, I just played the video while I read the poem and timed myself accordingly.

dead of winter – poem

Posted on by
10

dead of winter

the most january day
i have ever seen
stiffened over me in the grey
of afternoon, thick
as old mittens stitched
together, and i was nothing

but a slow pulse
beneath the floe
of an impenetrable heaven,
and every hope was a god
out icefishing, his lure
descending from a thin cylinder
of light, and the sky

grew cloudy
with the breath of old souls
who took the bait,
their grave faces pressed
against the icy underbelly
of the most january day
i have ever seen

Rewitched – Poem

Posted on by
18

Rewitched

Tell Derwood to fuck off. Leave him
to his billboards, let him write
the words. Let the stove overflow
with smoke and lift your broomstick
from the floor, put it back
where it belongs (where he does not
belong) and fly away again
with Mother. Let the warlocks do
the dirty work. Let them take care
of their feebler selves. Kick off
your sharp toed patent leather pumps
and teach Tabitha to turn red-headed boys
into toads. Teach her to conjure swamps
and leave the toads in. He hates

what makes you woman, not witch,
the breasts you funnel into cups,
the blonded spell of your sex, your super-
nature, all your gendered tricks.
He didn’t see the blood
when you gave birth, just chewed
the wet cigar. He knew you could create
a thousand devils in a day
without the need for pain. You mop
the ground he walks on, cook & serve
his courage, wash & dry his success, but this –

is just a phase. They’ll dim the stage
before his time to age, before
the contrast shows: your husband in a rocker
with a blanket across his lap. A woman
should not live to see her husband die
but you will. Then it’s out
of Technicolor houses, off to Africa
with Doctor Bombay to heal the sick
and starved. Shake your hair
in Paris fountains. Take your shirt off
on the beach. Make love with life
and strangers. One day

you’ll forgive them. One day
you’ll come back
and reclaim the moon.

The prompt at We Write Poems this week was to create some fabulous version of yourself, then project that fabulous alter-ego into a familiar situation, such as that from a TV sitcom. I chose to be the saucy sister of Samantha from Bewitched – Sabrina. But she’s even saucier when she’s me (And in my version, witches are immortal, cause I want them to be).

diary – Poem

Posted on by
20

diary

frantic scribbling
into story, a plea
for words. soon

i will unpad
the lock, twist out
its heart, spread ink

across pages, dry
as a gourd, white
as a scar. here
i will try

not to lie. i carry
you with me, never push
you out
into the world,
never give birth
to these small miseries.

For One Single Impression’s prompt, Notebook.

Snails – Poem

Posted on by
7

Snails

Annie Dillard wrote
about them once, how they followed
a circular trail of slime
for weeks without changing
direction, their reluctance to alter
course almost killing them off,
the need of sustenance reaching the critical
before any would deviate,
even the slightest, to survive.
I know how that feels — a process
ancestral, intestinal, ingrained;
fleshy and dense as a slow organ
producing its juices, leaving a scrawl
across my front porch thick
and tremulous as an old widow’s signature
on a bad check, or a trail of relatives
honing in for Christmas dinner.

Week 93 – New Poem

Posted on by
20

I actually managed to write to a prompt for the second time ever. And, I only had about an hour to write this the day before it was “due.” It was late, I’d interned all day, and I was tired, but I wrote it anyway. This is new for me, people. I used to believe I needed oodles of time & energy to write poetry. Now, to write good poetry, that’s probably true. But I managed to write something while tired, and under time constraint, that I don’t totally hate. So yay for me.

Week 93*

– Sunday

No money
in the offering. No one’s
offering. I pass
along.

– Monday

Offering a service
that no one
is buying. No more
a few dollars & I
am that number, a minus,
a blunder. Remainder of
subtraction
after subtraction

– Tuesday

In the refrigerator:
sauce
& garnish. Nothing
substantial. Zero
nutritional value. The making
of something from nothing

– Wednesday

The fuel gage E
like a three-
pronged fork
on its side, defeated
& stabbing at air.

– Thursday

The paper costs
money. Paper
for paper. Ink
for the printer. To
sadden the paper
with past. Smalled
to one page. Résumé.
Resume. Refused.

Refuse
in a cornered heap
of Others.

– Friday

The mailbox key
is stuck. Like a needle
on E. Envelopes stuffed
like yellow lettuce leaves
in a Styrofoam box. In-
sufficient.

– Saturday

Everything’s done. The phone
doesn’t ring. No one’s
offering. Cut
off. No more
extensions. I’ve been
disconnected

*93 weeks is the maximum allotment of unemployment assistance.

For the We Write Poems weekly prompt.

Cockroach Poem – Poem (obviously)

Posted on by
4

Cockroach Poem

I am not afraid of obvious dangers; can appreciate
the snake, his contractions and curls, the calligraphic language
of his body in motion. Or the spider and her radial body,
her windowpane webs gathering gnats and beading the dew.
But you, what purpose do you serve besides ugliness,
lurking in lightless places, surviving my appointments
with the exterminator, my daily cleanings, my commitment not
to attract your kind. Last night I heard you whispering
through the air filter in my bedroom, the soft
and unmistakable grating of your wings like skin peeling,
like an unfolding letter of condolence, the black
almond of your head poking through a white slat,
just for a moment, then disappearing, continuing to scratch
inside the air shaft long after I went to bed.
In the morning I pulled the filter out of its frame,
found your crisp and iridescent body wedged into thick lint
and filter fibers. Radiation studies may negate
survival as what separates you and I, but it doesn’t matter.
I imagine you everywhere dark and unacceptable,
a raisin shell skittering over towels and spoons, like a haunt
across a grave, dragging your dark armor of indifference.

Shot Dog – Poem

Posted on by
2

Shot Dog

Before the 187th Airborne Regiment dropped down
at Sunchon without incident and took the town, his division

was ordered to Nevada, where atomic bombs glittered
over the desert. Six miles out from ground zero, they dug trenches

and camped for days. When Shot Dog went off at 1,400 feet
and the soldiers curved themselves against the trench

like babies in a womb and covered their eyes, he saw the bones
of his hands through his flesh and the flash of light. When static

from the control room ordered them to stand and witness
the cloud, the heat waved across the desert and knocked him

on his back, then knocked him forward on his stomach
after he stood up again as the air was sucked back in.

His helmet and one army boot were gone; the roily spectrum
of the mushroom spread above him, not black like a thundercloud

but churning with light, red and red and orange and blue
like colored water inked across the sky. He tried not to think

it was, but it was beautiful. Before they got their orders to march out
for maneuvers, an officer strapped a film badge to his chest to test

the levels of exposure on his skin, and then he boarded a truck
filled with soldiers. As they neared the heart of the explosion,

he saw sand burned to glass, Sherman tanks submerged into earth,
and structures of steel and concrete vaporized into jagged remains.

But the dogs were still alive. Half-burned, blinded, skin and hind-
quarters missing, the bars of their cages bent and smoking

against their bones, lying on their sides, unmoving, not even the eyes,
except for their tremors of breath. When he saw the dogs he thought:

of course. Of course there would be dogs, he accepted this as readily
as he accepted his own dog-march into war, and yet, he stopped.

As he reached out and laid his hands down against their heated flesh,
the breath of the dogs slowed in expectation of release, but the veterinarian
in the control room with his euthanistic needle would wait another day
for the radiation levels to die down before he did his work. Most of the dogs

would be dead soon anyway, dead from the toxins, dead from the burns,
but animal need is futureless, immediate, inapplicable to science or war.

As he stood up and moved forward to follow his ordered path
across the drop zone, the pathetic wail of dogs rose up behind him,

desperate, incredulous, insistent that the broken bond of skin against skin
be unforgotten, and by the time he made it out to the perimeter where an officer

waved a Geiger counter over his fatigues and professed him clean,
he had come to hate those dogs, and he continued to hate them

as he showered off in the makeshift latrines of Desert Rock, and he hated them
while he vomited for three days after the explosion, and he hated them

while his nose and gums continued to bleed for months after that,
and he hated them while he shipped out for Korea, and he heard

the wail of dogs in the rushes of rain while he lay in the rice fields,
and he heard the wail of dogs in the mournful marches of civilians

on dirt roads, in the windblast of a cargo door opening over Munson-ni,
in the graze of a bullet against his ear before it pierced the helmet

of another soldier, and as the fallout from Shot Dog continued its journey
eastward over North America on drifts of wind, and Iodine-131 rained down

on farmlands from the thunderclouds for months after the blast, he learned
that in the absence of mercy, he would always hear the wailing of dogs.

Sharkie – Poem

Posted on by
16

Sharkie (a somewhat true story)

My brother had a fish that would leap out of its tank. He’d come home each day and check
behind glass, search and crawl on hands and knees, fingers cast into seas of blue shag.
We found a piece of screen to cover water and prevent escape, but the fish would batter
his silver body against its mesh like hard rain until it slipped enough for him to fit.

(One day my mother found him with her foot, half-dead again and flopping, the wire screen
nudged over, the tank still bubbling with colored rocks and plastic sea-divers, and she said: enough already. Left him there, didn’t pick him up until he was still.)

I kinda told the truth in this poem, and I kinda followed We Write Poems‘ Wednesday prompt requiring parentheticals. My brother did have a fish named Sharkie that used to leap out of its tank on a regular basis, and Sharkie did occasionally get stepped on. My mother, however, never tired of putting Sharkie back in his tank, and while I’m not sure how he died, I’m fairly certain it was not from one of his out-of-tank experiences. On, and the prompt required three lines, with a fourth line in parenthesis.