Week 11

How My Mothers Talk To Me

I'm not terribly pleased with this, but I'm trying.

1.

Dear Niece,

Please stay in college

so you don’t have to get as exciting a job as mine.

Today a DLOM, a dear little old man, for those of you not in the know,

called my desk and wanted me to read off the baseball listings from the newspaper.

And he’s not even a subscriber.

2.

Colleen. Please get off the table.

You and I both know the administration does not hold with that.

Yes. You really can write.

Yes. I believe in you.

No. That should not go in your mouth.

Yes. If you were orphaned in a tragic car wreck,

I would adopt you.

(you could milk my goats and write me poems)

3.

I Just Want You TO Know That I LOVE YOU REGARDLESS OF WHAT YOU DO

and JESUS LOVES you TOO.

Pray for the Second Coming OF CHRIST And Another Republican President.

I’ll send you some cookies I baked next week.

4.

Please shower more. And brush your hair more than once a week.

Are you taking the Vitamin D?

Be sure to send in the promissory note, it’s very important.

Are you sleeping enough?

Martha’s been watching me a lot.

Your furry Dad is off in the mountains somewhere.

Your sister’s off with the boyfriend.

I miss you.

Missed my first week

DAMN. I'll post two to make up for it, I promise. I was too bust having shenangins in San Francisco to retype the poem I wrote.

Nine

Ugh. Midterms. I should be doing them instead of posting this.


Cash Out and Get Out

Because sometimes I can hear the creek, but mostly I hear the freeway
Because my small and private pleasure are being marketed to focus groups
(and they aren’t testing well)-

I am cancelling the electricity, I am letting the dog run feral.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but I’m not saving you.
You know this, the poet rescues nothing

All poets feed on forests. We grow bloated
on the exact light of midmorning, the sensation of preemptive grief,
love’s tangled footpaths through the heart.

If you want much of anything, cut the oaks down,
cut your mother and St. Sebastian and the house down.
Mulch it into the pen and paper that will give you permission to say this:

i’ve always felt like that treasured childhood memory
could’ve used a little extra poignancy, a touch
of extra melancholy. let me add some.

Verse eat, verse lies.
For every Grecian vase, a grandmother,
for every Howl, a child

The Hebrews thought seven was holy, I don't know why

Some people you miss more than others. Goodbye Bill Kalenius, you did better than most.
http://www.columbian.com/article/20090929/SPORTS02/709299935/COMMUNITY+SPORTS++VLC+founder+made+a+lasting+impression

Dead Rower Villanelle

I don’t understand why after you, things just didn’t stop.
Nothing has to be like this, stroke
after stroke after deathless stroke. Things
were sharper with you
around. Now? Even air feels like water

without you.
All those early morning lessons, and all I can remember are your instructions on the water;
to not fight it, how to move it, that the wanting will come in waves, about ripples and patterns. Stop
this, please. This feels too much like your elegy and I wanted to remember you for your stroke. Before all this breakdown, I’d ask how you did it. You’d sigh. There are more important things.

Let’s talk about your stroke,
the catch is still late. Damn memory, and the awful things
we hold on to. I keep remembering the water
and how you never really understood that storms could hurt even imperious you.
Please stop.

You taught me well. Some things
break down. You?
Never. Sure as the water
that stopped
you breathless every day, sure as your stroke.

I miss your broke down baseball cap, the lake’s water
at six in the morning, how you never stop-
stopped, I mean. I keep coming back to the wrong things.
Tenses will trip you,
like a stutter in your stroke.

After you leave, little things will break me. Fragments of things; your healthy hand and your licorice, you and your licorice, your smooth stroke over the water in holy cycles, ripples and patterns.

Six geese a laying, out of season

This is my take on the anatomically correct trend that swept lit arts last year. Mostly for Nikki.



The Anatomically Correct Love Poem

And you tell me that my heart will beat two billion times in my life
each beat an event as surely as the day
that the first amphibian looked at land with some kind of hopeful aspiration
is a red letter day on some god’s calendar.
Think about it, you tell me.

lub
Your first breath is demarcated by the right atrium gasping for oxygen depleted blood.
Your mother cries with relief

dub
Your nineteenth custard that summer on the boardwalk in Atlanta, before it burned down.
The right ventricle exhales drowned blood into your lungs and you learned how to smoke
that summer.

lub
Your first cliff dive. The Illinois river. Your toes, the edge. The light, the blue.
Your surrender. The left atrium swallows blood.

dub
Your failure, the last time you try to remember your son’s name. Your synapses struggle
valiantly, like an old Lab struggling to stand. Your left ventricle releases blood, still hopeful.


Everything moves in cycles and systems, you tell me.
The smoking instructor made your son,
the blood that began in your bones moves your legs to break them.


The heart is a muscle the size of a fist, you tell me.
Keep on loving, keep on fighting.

Fivers

Wow, the clever numbered titles are starting to fail me. I can't wait till I get to like, 34. These were for a prompt about writing a political poem and a non-political poem. I like my political poems to be subtle, which I think is an underrated trait in writing.


Sometimes I Hear the Creek, But Mostly I Hear The Freeway
from my window, in the night.
They sing
and mutter
though I can never quite translate.
I wonder what this language sounded like one hundred years ago,
they told me there were salmon here
one hundred years ago.
　
　
My Pleasure are Small, and Private
the unbroken skin of apples. the old reds, the young greens.
the wool of the sweater of my father and how it collapses across my shoulders like a cat
the voice of the girl I nearly drowned with, her laugh
the rain on the pond. the turtle, watching reproachfully from under the lily pad.
I do not regret any of this, my world so small and shallow.
　

Four Everything

Oh, I haven't written one of these self-indulgent autobiographical poems in a while.


Poetry as Punches (More Genuine Enthusiasm, Less Sentiment)
Sugarbaby, honeydear obligated audience: here are the facts mapped as tidily as cobalt isotope tables and yellow fever charts:
I swear to Jesus, sometimes you can’t tell if they’re about to throw up or laugh
and I was never very good at telling the difference with disastrous results
and some people say I’m a series of disastrous results, but one time I caught a hummingbird and it burned in my hands like an ember and when I was younger I used to start fires outside my Presbyterian church
but now that I’m older I plan to start them on the inside
(and not to diss my home state but flannel ain’t much of an export) and
in the depths of the fullness of my heart I’m afraid I’m utterly unlovable, I used to want to be a nun
so someone would be obliged to be there when I start drooling into my Ovaltine.
You know what I’m saying?
You know what I’m saying.

Because postmodernism means getting to say here is the insides and the complications;
the pain laid out as sharp and as abstract as cubic zirconium and
all this glints like the light in the eyes of Medusa’s dead snakes.
I’m afraid but not ashamed, just afraid, because this poem goes ratatatat in all the wrong tempos and
I remember this violin recording where you could hear her breathing
but I can’t remember my mother’s mother.
Look.

I want the revolution but I also want things like modern dentistry and rubberized hair ties..
I don’t really like feminism. Does that make me a bad feminist?
I didn’t start liking music until Joe Strummer muttered to me that hardcore could use more handclaps and less handholding.
I don’t think that just because you’ve started cupping cigarettes in the curve of your hands and acting awful tough lately makes you a real adult.
I didn’t do any of those things they tell you I did, it’s all dirty lies, I’m respectable now.
I don’t wish harm on any of you, really. I just want what I want more than magnets want iron and more than the body desires resurrection, even from six feet under.
I didn’t use to believe in the Holy Spirit, until I felt her breath on my shoulders. It’s like four again, and August again.
I don’t regret coating the glass walls with love poems scotch taped up for you, you, you; only that you never bothered to read them.
I didn’t read the rest, but that didn’t stop Leaves of Grass from pissing me off for two weeks.
I don’t get me wrong. I believe in many beautiful things. I just don’t really want to talk about them. The truest things are inarticulate.
I didn’t go to the show because I didn’t want to spend eighty bucks and a Tuesday night on standing on concrete for the off chance I might touch Jon Bon Jovi’s thigh. That’s just not who I am.