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handful of cherry tomatoes - Nora Pellegrino
ReplyDeleteat night my tongue loosens
unwinding from its rusted spool
i taste iron pooling at the top of my throat
i have a tin man jaw
slick with oil and chomping
under the glowing of the sky’s
slight orange belly
the nearing of dark.
i spit up my mother’s undercooked sharpness
her mother’s birdlike tendencies
pouring out both our mouths
nails and sharp objects
i correct you
my jokes aren’t joking
the whip in my mouth cracks
and you quiet
it’s not words so much as
razor edged shards
dark metal spilling from my mouth
i would rather have diamonds or thorny roses
than this industrial mess
my cheeks torn and leaking
i would give all my sips of water and
every crumb of bread
to stop this calling up of so many women
through my lips after
10 o'clock at night
i spit out a record needle
the edge of a chipped tooth that
crystallizes in my palm
a piece of string tied to a small anchor from
a saltwater fish tank
there’s a lot of scraping
i grow tired of this evicting
too bloody to be a vessel
of history tonight
i beg to go to bed.
you cough up a small gem
in solidarity
and acquiesce.
Question and Answer
ReplyDeleteby Ruth Dandrea
This is a test.
This is only a test.
If this had been a true
educational
experience
you would have been instructed
to open a real book
rather than an examination manual;
you might have been allowed to talk,
discuss, argue or simply
delight in the beauty
of words on paper;
you could’ve had time,
taken time, time
and time
again, to reread, look
out the window
figure
how the robin on the maple
branch figures
into the bigger
scheme of things,
seen circles larger
that didn't require
filling in
with a number
two pencil,
fully; you’d have been
allowed to leave
stray marks
and fail to erase
completely,
pentimento, every
artist
knows adds a depth
worth
waiting for. But
this is only
a test, which
makes you subject
(or is it object)
not reader
and certainly not
writer.
And when the test
is in the room,
I am no longer
teacher, just proctor,
or, later, test
grader,
when a woman who knows
none of us
will drop her six-
inch binder
of training
materials (this
is not hyperbole,
I measured
with my eyes)
to prepare me
to read.
But the best
will be
the student
(excuse me,
test taker)
who
ran out of time
(we all run out of time)
who
didn’t know how to spell
the character’s
name
Morgan,
and so who
responded to
“Why did Morgan…?”
with
“Because,
Moron…”
This is the best
the test
can offer.
This is what
this test
deserves.
This is the kid
I will vote for
for president, or
at the very least
commissioner
of education.
Funny
ReplyDeleteby Cecily Schuler
In order to write something funny, first
be upset. Find something on fire that’s crawling
up the inside of your torso like one too many
bong hits put you to sleep with the candles left burning,
wake up to the cat crying, panic tinged, unsure. Wait –
this isn’t funny.
In order to write something funny, remember
the last time you were mad. So mad
there was only one thing left to do:
laugh about it. And when laughter crumpled the damning
and gravity pulled the fury out through the tiny viaducts
on either side of the bridge spanning your reflection,
and you swore you could break that mirror with all the weight
spilling from every empty space inside, you tried, in fact, but wait –
this isn’t funny.
In order to write something funny, quit trying
so hard. Amuse yourself by acknowledging how
funny you really are, how people are always laughing
as you perform, as you are always performing, how they
all love your performance, and as you say to yourself, silly
people, what do they know about me? Laugh.
This isn’t funny.
Oops, I posted my poem under "Week One: Cherry Tomatoes..." I'll repost here, just in case.
ReplyDeleteMy Dolly Parton
Sprawled in front of her lit vanity, Auntie proclaims, Prince is
half-Filipino. She’s trying to help. We sit at her feet, our dirty
fingernails scratch at black letters spelling out “Our Multicultural Community”
(“I’m proud to be _____!”), while she lines her lips in Deep Coral,
rats her hair out to cover her crowning bald spot.
And so is Janet Jackson.
A shock of Extra Hold Vidal Sassoon falls over us like lenten baptism
(“Do you reject Satan? I do.”). But she can’t claim Dolly
even as we stuff Auntie’s bras with Kleenex, still warm from her night
shift at AC Transit. Even as we blow dust off from Real Love:
Dolly and Kenny and belt Just because I’m blonde doesn’t mean
I’m dumb and shake our tissue tits into a shower. She snatches
my limp ponytail, blacker than penciled-in eyebrows, then points
at each fallen sheet and growls,
save it for the real tears.
Week 2 Poem
ReplyDeletemary grace
dove? isola ellis
io qui america
tre bambino, si
marito, non qui
i gia america
vado a gli
from the belly of the big ship we are spit into the maze and i try to find my way
i cannot speak, do not understand, my little ones tug on my tobacco-stained fingers
and cry for a home they do not know was already gone before we left
pietrelcina, san angelo a cupola, green fields and dry winds and no money only
hungry family and cosimo already gone come he writes on the winds come he
calls on the waves and someone comes a friend the padrone and puts us on a
wagon to napoli and puts us on the boat and puts us out to endless seas that are
not blue, did they tell you this, too, they are green darkening to gray, ebony at
night never blue long days wander the maze into crazy cradle-rocking nights and
the babies cry and the little one suckles me dry and my fingers brown from the
factory rolling rolling rolling tobacco like these waves which are sometimes also
brown sometimes stealing one for cosimo who when he can’t smoke sucks my
stained fingers instead says it is almost as good maybe better and it tickles not
the wet finger but inside my belly where the babies grow cosimo’s mouth hot
and wet and wanting more than my fingers can give so when he asks me yes
andiamo? yes i will tell him anything when my fingers and belly where the babies
grow throb like cocoons waiting to split fisted into blood red geraniums in a pot
by a window lining the dusty road of the maze i follow and follow but which
leads nowhere fast and always forgetting something lost behind that i really need
really need to go back and get but i’m already too late and lost and the babies
tug on my dry brown fingers which are twigs and break off in their hands and
now the babies are lost and i am really alone and need to find find everyone
again and like marquez’s general look for a ladder to climb out of this labyrinth
i am the cause of the dream nipote the reason for the maze my journey is your
journey we wander wind the bone of aloneness seeking lost suns of ancient soils
it all winds down to you granddaughter sitting on the stoop in your father’s my
son’s black rocking chair rocking and rocking not going out but in swallowing
memories his mind has let go even those he never knew he knew just felt in the
bone dirt formed on another continent light and wine i am the dull-colored
pigeon gurgling in the street lost in the maze, hazy and speaking a language
nobody knows but what they tell you is true witchwoman that i was are you
carried over water winding not finding the way until the rocking chair cries like a
lost child and now i am the black crow of the raucous call that called your green
eyes, like the sea deepening to dark, your dirt stained fingers brown and crying
to be sucked your belly where the babies grow empty now and wondering i will
fill it you find you in the maze all it takes is water and three drops of oil in a bowl
and though the windings never end and we stay in the maze forever the thing
they forgot to tell you granddaughter the blood that winds the maze of veins
bulges in hot weather over the knuckles of your reaching fingers is one i wove
before you were born because i knew i’d never know you and i knew you’d need
to know the way there is no way out of the labyrinth labor though you may
you are the cause of the dream nipote but i am the way red blood rocking hail
maria full of grazia blessed is the fruit, red and ripe, womb-granddaughter fly