-So Much for Clarity-
It’s NaPoWriMo! And I’m writing poems again, here’s my day one. — 00 Be the 1st to vote.Share...
Read More-See You Later, and Good Legs-
This year for National Poetry Writing Month, I’m taking a much more relaxed “at least one a week” approach rather than the poem-a-day frenzy. I am currently with frenzy-a-plenty elsewhere. So here’s my first one! Hope you enjoy. — -See You Later, and Good Legs- Adding abdomen to her words, she tells me “It’s just a figure of speech” as if having a silhouette and calves made diction innocent. I wonder if I put too much ankle in my “I understand.” Or if I was more speech than figure, with my hand and my elbow clangoring. One brown strand flagellates out from her hair, waving to static in the room. She says about the wine being well legged while my next sentence pulls on armpits and epidermal cells. Her eyewhites flash: be anywhere but...
Read More-Lady-
There is an elegance in saying “Lady.” I like pronouncing the word as if it were a chocolate ready to melt, gum your fingers, and chemically change your mood. Lady has a dignity, and it is allowed to eat ice cream in front of Matlock while sweats wearing if it wants to. Some people say the word “woman,” and they mean it like some lemon lozenge in your throat stopping you from coughing: *girlgirlgirl* Or sometimes woman is prescribed in italics: woman. It can be a migraine itself, woman. Said like “get behind me nurse.” Then there is “female.” That prickly-clean paper crumpling of the doctor’s chairbed creasing your thigh and that notcovering gown. Female is ready to see you now, It peers over a clipboard and looks about to give...
Read More-Autumn Without Family-
He sat, or rather, the bench held him while he curled like paint flakes and watched for the bus. Breath percolated out of his nose as if unsure. Short motes, and long ice trails. He briefly adjusted his woolmitts from folded to crossed with elbows. But the real cold was in the set of his face. That sat stronger than the rest of him, or even the bench. Dignity freshly siphoned from his shoulders. His grey pant-legs quaked above his shoes. Shivering shins tapping out an argument between being old and being free. Where he was going was not home. And where he left was just as empty. The bus curchunked, and swung its grimeglass doors. There was a grateful air in the way it swallowed him. 00 Be the 1st to vote.Share...
Read More-Repeat Minus the Lather-
As if it were bricklaying or an onion we could dice and caramelize with olive oil we imagine it facebook-eventable but peace is a memory problem. It fades. We repeat it to ourselves, we repeat it charbroiled. Already it slipped my mind how my stomach goes hydroelectric at the top of a swing chainrust squeezed into my palms rubber seat arching. Zoom in on sky, ground pans out. And I have to hear peace again when later I’m impaling at my keyboard. That cursor blinks, like a crow molting. Blankness in its feathers. I go off to smite against a wall. Come back incorporeal, and peace is whispering something slow and tree sap and I miss it. Preoccupied by the branches and rootwars the concrete on the curb cracking upward. Peace, even carved lavishly in constipated rage...
Read More-Word Choice and Meaning-
She said he had an infectious smile as if the take-over were the only importance. Sure, we all turned up our maws, but did we fester? Invade? Did we swell and pustulate? I wonder if he really had a six courses antibiotics smile. I don’t tell her how leavened bread might not corrode her face. It wouldn’t hurt to have a jingle you hum to the widening fog while washing the dishes smile. He might be more worth her while if his grin was a chocolate craving. You could say his simpers open a six pack and put briquets on the grill. It’s the headwaters of a spring burbling away a swelter in August. Or simply a woosh. But she has already moved on to jumping about pancakes and hair follicles. The infectious smile creepnumbing my heels for amputation. +10 Share...
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