After a couple of weeks away from job, time is short, so here is a short, older poem from GOING ON SOMEWHERE (check it out!) posted for dVerse Poets Pub open link night.
Divorce
Starvation for love sands heart to sliver,
my daughter’s cheeks smell of her hours with the sitter:
too sweet.
Let me have a sip–
I am posting this (fresh off the brain and iPad 2) for Tess Kincaid’s Magpie Tales 94. Tess gives a weekly pictorial prompt; this week is a wonderful painting by George Tooker called Lunch, exhibited at the Columbus Museum of Art. (The above is my personal reproduction, which I’ve put up just because I enjoy doing my own and can fit it more to my own post. The beautiful original can be seen at Magpie Tales.)
1960‘s Lunch Painting (George Tooker)
Hunched over lunch
as square as
white bread on
processed cheese, each
in a napkin of his/her own–suit
jacket, collar, sleeves–but
what lurks in the hearts
of the beige people?
My guess–everything.
Don’t discount the
counter, fail to read
between the forehead
lines–rainbows
found even in the surface of
coffee regular; a darker face
sandwiched in, intent on the
same meal, not
alien, not, at least,
in this picture, a
painting.
PS- Please please please for Christmas and any purchasing period, check out my new comic teen mystery novel, called NOSE DIVE, on Amazon, written by Karin Gustafson, wonderfully illustrated by Jonathan Segal, available in print and soon on Kindle (for just 99 cents!) Also check out my poems, Going on Somewhere (illustrated by Diana Barco, cover by Jason Martin) and children’s picture book, 1 Mississippi (pictures and words by me. A great book if you like counting and elephants.)
Sand Currency?
First day on beach, bend to retrieve bleached disc. Amazing! Haven’t found one for ages, and its worn radius is barely graded. Central imprint–bifurcated–strikes me as unusual, but my luck-starved mind grasps for ‘rare!’ ‘modernistic’ and I handle with great care.
Takes me a dip in the cold sea to see….styrofoam.
DVerse Poets Pub has a prompt today by Gay Reiser Cannnon asking for poems that trade in image, simile, metaphor, allegory, figure. The poem below was based on an exercise that tended to force one into metaphor (though frankly almost any poem has some basis in these elements.) The picture, done on my iPad 2, was “filtered” on the Photogene App above. (Below is the unfiltered image.)
Family Finishes
I.
The perfectionist sands her offspring to her image, or
an image, filing away the
unsightly, the angry, the unspeakable.
Drills a face fit for a pageant, as
smooth as balsam, as modeled as
a keel; then (the child carved
to measure), she steps
down into that keel, careful
of any unseamed tar.
II.
A family levels itself to just folks with enough distance;
an occasional pageant – picnic or funeral – joins the blood,
a biennial application of glue,
occasions muddled with the stickiness of blood;
mother hammering the grandmother, son
nailing father, the family portrait gathering a rich patina.
III.
Steeped in the traditions of the portrait hall,
the young mother thought
to measure out love in spoonfuls,
smoothing away excess, screwing it into a tied-up sock.
Blasphemy to mount to ecstasy over your child. No.
Passion fit the furniture
like a bowl of tulips or tea set, shaped to
its interval. But the small white fist that gripped her finger
leveled training,
proper restraint transmuting aged wine to deep wellspring,
casks burst to loose a flow of sparkling clarity.
Here’s an older poem for dVerse Poets Pub Open Link night and Thursday4Poets Rally, apologies to those who’ve seen it before. (The drawing at least is new.)
In the Stairwell
Descending the building’s stairs, she tests her breast,
fumbling beneath her bra to get to skin,
palpating (as they say) but in a mess
of here and there and not all within
the confines of an organized exam.
Silly to do it here, not time or place,
someone else might come, have to move her hand,
and yet fear seems to justify the race,
as if by checking each time it crosses mind,
especially checking fast, she can avoid
ever finding anything of the kind
that should not be found. And so, devoid
of caution, but full of care nonetheless,
she steps slowly down the stairs, feeling her breast.
PS – A version of this and other poems can be found in my poetry book on Amazon called “Going on Somewhere.” But, for real fun, check out my new teen novel, NOSE DIVE (written by Karin Gustafson, illustrated by the wonderful Jonathan Segal.)
Here’s a piece for Magpie Tales 93, a writer’s blog hosted by Tess Kincaid, and also GooseberryGoesPoetic. I have made my version of Tess’s photographic prompt above. The first piece I did for the prompt was about “Hello Dolly!”, but then I started thinking of Novembers in years past, and ended up with the piece below.
When the Couch, at least, was Saved
It was a time in which couches were saved for company,
their cushions, if not under actual wraps, under threat of maternal bemoan.
It was an age of short white gloves for Sunday School, and
a brand new outfit at Easter–hats with brims if a child, a prim
round edge, if not.
It was a period when the National Anthem was played in movie theaters, and we would stand, conscious, in the projected ripple of stars and stripes on the screen and the echoing thrill in our chests, of the seats at the backs of our knees, the brush of velvet cushion, the chill of metal frame.
It was a day when we parked at McDonalds, its arches like a movie theater too, and from the radio of our white-finned Olds, heard the news about Jack Ruby and his sawed-off shotgun in Dallas.
It was a day we had spent much of standing, down at the Capital, in grieving awe at the jagged prance of the dark riderless horse, the turned-back polished boots.
The news of Ruby, Oswald dead, hit like a third anvil, an odd blank thud on the already crushed. My mother leaned from the car door as if sick, “what in God’s name is happening to this country?”
It was a whisper she would repeat several times over the next few years as we sat on the living room floor before the ultraviolet of aging TV, my mom in a kitchen chair (the couch still saved for company), praying for someone we had loved from afar not to have been shot, or at least, not to die, watching too the riderless wave of what came next and next and next, a velvet place in our aching chests more and more conscious of metal.
I’ve posted this for DVerse Poets Pub “poetics” prompt “wild” and Gooseberry Garden’s poetry picnic. It’s an older poem about the Indian Goddess, Kali. Kali is a Goddess of Destruction, often depicted in a fairly violent, i.e. wild form, but it is my understanding that this destructive force is also an energy that can be channeled in a protective manner–against obstacles! Blocks! Enemies! (She seems to me to be kind of like a life coach mother bear.) At any rate, here’s my effort and a new iPad drawing above.
Kali
Dear Kali, you are my favorite goddess.
It is your krazy hair,
and all those men that you wear
at your waist.
It is the way that you waste
them with your big mouth,
that you break them in two with your teeth,
that you bear down hard.
Dear Kali, you are my favorite goddess.
It is the way that you slit,
the way that you split,
the way that you pit
them against each other, heads against heads,
and that sharp spear that you hold
in your hand.
Dear Kali, you are my favorite goddess.
Make me your third eye.
Make me the clasp at your waist.
Give me the weight of fifty men, the hook of the chain.
Dear Kali, you are my favorite.
(PS the poem is in a collection of my work GOING ON SOMEWHERE available on Amazon.)
(PPS – I’m so sorry that I’ve not been in a good position to return comments the last few days. Thanks to all who’ve commented. I will get back to your work.)
Here’s another Flash 55. (55 words seems to be my limit these days.) (Tell it to the G-Man.)
An Angle of Sleep
Night spent in a hospital chair is a tired next day.
Though you are amazed as head shifts from hand to forearm, guard rail to startled and alert, that you have slept, and, as staff shifts too, that you don’t feel bad.
Of course, it also depends on how the person in the bed feels.
BLOOMBERG==Forget about Occupy Wall Street. What are you going to do about the rats?
And if you do nothing, how are we going to (a) walk around looking at Christmas lights, (b) doing midnight shopping?
Today, dVerse Poets Pub has a “form for all” challenge hosted by Gay Reiser Cannon and Beth Winter, to write a “staccato” poem. I had not heard of this form before, and although Gay and Beth give both a good explanation and great examples of it in their own poetry blogs, I’m not completely sold on it. (It involves two six line stanzas with a series of couplets and internal rhymes and certain emphatic repeated words.)
My own staccato poem came to mind in thinking belatedly of Armistice Day, the end of World War I.
I’m sorry, I’m afraid my iPad painting came out a bit more grisly than intended. That said, World War I seems to be almost as grisly a war as one can imagine.
World War I Veteran
She now speaks of her uncle’s mask with pride,
how she, her brother, each sniffed deep inside–
Yes! Yes!–they put their faces in–
(eyes bug’s), imagined traces in
the mustiness–of mustard’s scent and mud;
and yes, on khaki’s fade, the stain, old blood.
Knew only what they heard or read or guessed–
their uncle never spoke, not even yes
or no. (No! No!) Made tooled leather
wallets and small sacs to gather
coins. Though often he just sat in his old car,
not able to manage masks, no, anymore.
ManicDDaily 
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