Week Two

WEEK TWO: If you are lucky, you often wake up remembering your dreams. Most people only catch small moments. Sometimes they don’t remember them until a spark of one is ignited by something in the waking life. Dreams are rarely linear. I have even known people who claim to never dream. Which is a scary thought for me, a thirsty poet. I am always looking for a new image or word combo that will inspire my readers into an emotion or action or idea. Today’s prompt is going to have a word/image pool you can mine from. This is one of my most useful tools when wanting to write. My word and image pools take years to build. I mine through books, poems, song lyrics, conversations, Google imaged paintings (Magritte, Basquiat and Dali always inspire) and try to build new images or phrases or word combos that help add depth to an “ordinary” moment or feeling. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, in poetry, language should be lawless. Create new words. Invent! The poets I chose for this week have a gift. They all are masters of the economy of language and they all clearly have a style. I am not asking you to attempt to emulate theirs, but to discover your own. The more you practice finding new ways to present love, loss and everything in between, the more it will come naturally when you sit down to right. Today, all I ask is that you make every word count. This isn’t about keeping your lines short, but making every word earn its existence within your art. Words are the color of language. Images have to match the tone. The atmosphere. The emotions. One of my favorite moments in “The Elements of Style” is when E.B. White writes of how qualifiers weaken language, explaining that they are “the leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words.” WEEK TWO READING:  

JOSHUA MARIE WILKINSON

from A Moth in the Projector Light 

I called your name twice & a boy

with your name showed up 

with all the animals from the road.

from Selenography 

cuttings

shoveled

up into a fortress

hiding behind where

the dead

woman bakes lemon

& mincemeat pies

we live inside the

seam of the wind the

breaker's froth the

swarm's

sleepy landing

a pond divided

by an upside-down horizon more

animals learn to hollow

grow wary

& withhold their math from us

Arkansas Cat Houses & the Murphy Bed 

The door handle is missing, though he wants to be good, 

he just can’t focus or grasp the way her body flattens out 

over the bed.  Her bored preening.  A hockey puck bruise 

under the stubble of her armpit. & the woman, Donna, says 

nothing, which is almost the worst part.  At sixteen, my dad 

used to drive out of dry counties in Arkansas to get a crate 

of liquor for his best friend’s father, Leo.  A tin man who 

couldn’t get out of bed without first lighting a cigarette.  

Raspy hacking, his Goddamn cops are swine & Goddamn 

this trick knee.  His gentle way of singing, undressing 

& crawling into the unmade Murphy bed each morning, 

like a blind man, feeling his way, too inebriated to barter 

with the aluminum hawkers who’d ruin him before the smoke 

or cirrhosis could.  Green ashtray at the knot of her elbow 

filled with menthol butts, Donna, nixed, finally just gets up 

& does it for him, her gapped teeth & cracked red lipstick 

at his collar, she can see him looking & not looking.  Dead 

room, a kicked dent in the wall, & every two or three minutes 

another John walks by & my young father, unbuckling his belt, 

can hear the false giggling of the woman, the man’s wheezing 

chuckle following her in.

  

untitled

I do your voice

and lone trees garble up the moon

from bird eyes. no image comes 

from evidence, a longstanding wish

to be fucked with over a fortnight, say. 

You’re better at everything ever done

for starters. And scars chink from dumb 

planets spun too close to our cold skin.

Virus, like a meadow in the spine. Slow drift

of hill heat given the city a quarter to ration,

rocket swamp with our bad unlisted looking.

BONUS:  http://vimeo.com/42874997

LUCY ANDERTON

On the Bus

That silky

hair black

and guided 

into a slim

river down

her back was

all he could

see—won

dering if she

liked to have it

pulled back

hard and then

her head

when she

was being 

fucked—she, turn

ing to look up

at his face

skin tight

around his

mouth eyes

glistening

with something

ancient. Something

battered and

so ordinary.

Loss

—Untranslatable!—you

whispered. Untrans-

latable: That shove

off course—like ink

into milk. Like dementia 

in the cold

shoes of soldiers. Now: hack

off a scrap of

lightening—string

it about your ankle

bone: You say: Under

ground level we are

all the click of knuckle

loosened to wood—ready

for the crush

of night—the fall, yes,

the falling and then

the push—that gasp

will catch us

too late: You say: To say 

Despair is thin—

this said while we watch

that pigeon

stepping, stepping

in the road

a circle round her 

soft dying mate.                       

A Servant. A Hanging. A Paper House.

I rose like a flannel

throat in a fire 

of fog. Once an apple

biter—now gumming 

ghost leavings. Wisps

of chambermaid keys blinking 

through my lips. Entreat

the door knob—Silent, 

but overused in the upstairs

sky. Fingerprints rushing 

the wood. Jack hammer

wrists splintered & paralyzed. 

Crack—& the tin pops

open—flooding out scarlet 

seminary ribbons. Pausing

to notate a pregnant 

wing. In the center

of a glittering scream 

hangs an egg. Icy

& blue—left and that 

is to say, I love you

and could you please 

return to me

my tongue.

Not Something To Be Captured, Did You See the Signs? 

As if I know what

            I'm doing—he marries

me. Did you hear that,

            yes, the line of dolls

hung up on the bush

            is too obvious? Rather

better: the spoon

            full of milk left alone

in the broken palm—the ghost

            song skidding out

the pane—in his arms I am

            still—but is still the best

way to beat this heart in-

            to ticking? My ring

finger aches—we know it

            is just winter knocking—and the swallows

agree that this hour is

            a fine one for freezing,

me ? I've got glue to melt

            and reins to unbreak, mine

are needles dancing at top

            speed under the skin quilt—

pull it round you—I will

            shiver red and wakeful, but don't

ask me what

            is going on. It's better

if you keep your returned

            "I love you" to yourself—better

if I can let mine

            out into the faint

haze around you not

            to be answered, better

to wonder, emptying, so

            much better to wait—

BONUS:  http://www.bornmagazine.org/projects/servant/born.html

http://fishousepoems.org/archives/lucy_anderton/stone.shtml

LUCILLE CLIFTON

jasper texas 1998

for j. byrd

i am a man's head hunched in the road.

i was chosen to speak by the members

of my body. the arm as it pulled away

pointed toward me, the hand opened once

and was gone.

why and why and why

should i call a white man brother?

who is the human in this place,

the thing that is dragged or the dragger?

what does my daughter say?

the sun is a blister overhead.

if i were alive i could not bear it.

the townsfolk sing we shall overcome

while hope bleeds slowly from my mouth

into the dirt that covers us all.

i am done with this dust. i am done.

wife

we are some of us

born for the water.

we begin at once

swimming toward him.

we sight him.

we circle him like a ring.

if he does not drown us we stay,

if he does

we swim like a fish for his brother.

cutting greens

curling them around

i hold their bodies in obscene embrace

thinking of everything but kinship.

collards and kale

strain against each strange other

away from my kissmaking hand and

the iron bedpot.

the pot is black,

the cutting board is black,

my hand,

and just for a minute

the greens roll black under the knife,

and the kitchen twists dark on its spine

and I taste in my natural appetite

the bond of live things everywhere.

i once knew a man

i once knew a man who had wild horses killed.

when he told about it

the words came galloping out of his mouth

and shook themselves and headed off in

every damn direction. his tongue

was wild and wide and spinning when he talked

and the people he looked at closed their eyes

and tore the skins off their backs as they walked away

and stopped eating meat.

there was no holding him once he got started;

he had had wild horses killed one time and

they rode him to his grave.

PROMPT: 

Write a life moment of yours (or someone else's) as if you are narrating a dream. By this I mean, it does not have to be linear. Imagine Jackie Kennedy after the assassination of her husband - it must have felt like a dream, looking back at that moment for her. Clipped images or voices sort of bumping into each other.

The moment you write of can be small or large (sometimes I choose the moment I was born, and write as if I remember it. Sometimes I challenge myself to write five stanzas about finding a pearl earring in the grass.)  It’s up to you. (It always is!)  Use images as verbs to convey tone. Use temperature and sound. Smell. Texture. Surprise the reader by describing a horror with an alarmingly ordinary thing, i.e. “The cold girls were found out back / daisying the field.”  Below is a word pool, for a kickstart:

porcelain

darkening

sermon

flooded

glitter

rabbits

amnesia

lipstick'd

devour

anchor

carpentry

sugar

polite

bones

magnified

fisted