NaPoWriMo

Dishing the Dirt (PAD, day 7)

Now that I think about it, that would have been a great (and way more work-safe) theme to explore for today’s PAD prompt, which was to write about something “clean” or something “dirty.”

But, well, this is what showed up instead. Today’s effort was typed directly into a gmail message box (I e-mail my digital drafts to myself, both for backup and as a diary of sorts — knowing I can go back to an earlier incarnation of a piece frees me up to take risks with it, since I have the older version a few clicks away if it turns out I’ve headed into the wrong direction or slaughtered the wrong darling); I wasn’t quite expecting it to become as long as it did (or to veer into the directions it ended up taking), which is another reason I started it online rather than on paper. Total time since sitting down has been about an hour (with some business correspondence and research mixed in); total thinking time before that was across maybe ninety minutes (got a late start this morning, and looked up the prompt only after skimming the NYT and WSJ and some online research for a fic-in-progress. I made three or four changes between the version on gmail and the version posted at PAD (including the title and adding a new final line), and two more edits between PAD and here (ETA: and at least one more since posting):


Behind Closed Doors

Pain has a way of trumping prudishness
so when I long aloud for an axe
to hack out the Gordian gnarl
of masking tape and mistletoe
encased within my skull

and Mary Jo then tells me
about coffee enemas,
I go buy the kit and a tiny foil bag
of a fair-trade blend, and I test
the brew with my tongue and then
I take it all to my bathroom
and lock the door even though
I live with no one but a cactus
who thrives on the dregs of my lattes.

I’m not surprised that it works.
It’s almost like sex: so ridiculous
and so messy it belongs nowhere near
the sanitized chat of the water cooler,
but Mary Jo’s a friend of many years,
one with whom I can be blunt
about the commandments I break
and the breaking of them, especially
the ones about what comes in and out
of my mouth. If there exists a hell
beyond migraines and menstruation,
I’ll be consigned to it not for murder
or other majestic mayhem, but
for gossip and petty tyrannies
and lies to cover my ass. Sometimes
I dream of scrubbing out my brain:
the regrets and their residue
take up so much space, and
not a thousand stale breadcrumbs
will erase them, though I stand
on the banks of the Harpeth every fall,
casting my white-bread sins into its current
and silently begging God to make it easier
for me to be good, to keep my nose clean
no matter who might be coming next through the door.

– pld

NaPoWriMary 6

I think the last two days’ work has been too serious. Today, at Job 2, Clayton gave me this punchline (which, on another night, could have become a serious poem, and still might):

For a Botanist

Key this leaf.
Monocot? Dicot?
Its time of flowering?
Its neighbors in the field
or wood or coastline of the marsh?
The men who’ve walked
out of the rising sun
(their skin too pale
to know its rays)
have offered me my weight
in millet for these stringy stems
found roadside
as they entered my domain.
Ah, my kingdom…

writing farther, writing faster…

Today’s PAD prompt is “something missing.” I may yet write about socks and/or holidays, but for now, what you get from a cold and cranky Peg is Elizabeth Bishop and Thomas Wyatt too much on the brain:

From Poem A Day Drafts

Without Leave

Screw the art of losing. The things that don’t stay gone
cast the longest shadows and spawn the cruelest dreams —
now I see you, now I don’t. What manner of fun
merits such easy prey? I pray you and your schemes
to cease this hide and seek with what you say I own:
unhappy is the hound who once possessed a bone.

– pld

NaPoWriMo Day 5 (Brianna)

(What I’m up to.)

Thanks, everyone, for the encouraging comments! They’re very motivating.

Mary, I put Kamloops and Osoyoos in there specifically for you!

Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, II

Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, II

Walking the lip of the jump, I notice a tree
a ways off the path, a scraggly, wind-wracked,
haphazard excuse for a tree, still leafless
for the most part, and cold-looking.
Bits of bundled fabric—frayed, sun-faded, more like rags
than ribbons—hang in its branches. They seem somehow eerie,
like abandoned toys, or Christmas lights no one bothered
to take down. It sticks in the back of my mind.
As I leave I mention it to the Blackfoot girl at the desk.
The asking makes me shy, like an intruder. She glances away
and says the tree is sacred. It holds offerings and prayers
to the ancestors, so that they can use this place. Does that tree
cover for me? Or could I, in all fairness, trip and fall
over the jump, that wind that frays the fabric
fanning out my hair, before my skull splits
on the kill ground, brains white as cloud, falcon food.

Holy Day 5, Bat-poet!

I think my response to today’s Poetic Asides post ended up as #479. The prompt was “landmark”; I snuck a peek at it before church, and even jotted down some ideas while in my pew…

From Poem A Day Drafts

…and, two Word documents and eight attempts at a title later, this is what it’s gonna be for the night:

Here We Go ‘Round the 440 Loop

The spires of the Batman Building to my left
tell me that I’ve once again gone astray,
auto-piloting my car to Green Hills
instead of the museum at which I was supposed
to meet you ten minutes from now. It’s hard
not to feel like a joke when this happens: if I
were a cartoon, I’d be Charlie Brown’s foot
connecting yet again with nothing but air
and mockery. And yet I don’t mind
making my girlfriend laugh when I explain
the photos she wants to see of the plum tree
three blocks north will be stuck on my phone
until I reload the BlueTooth software
that’s on the CD I happened to file
somewhere other than where I looked last night.
There’s no diploma from Superheroine U.
shining from my walls, and yet I can’t help
feeling I should be able to help myself
from and over this kind of stupid —
to hurdle the rote and routine in a single bound
and hurl myself headlong into any darkness,
trusting my heightened senses to haul me through
and restore what I can to a story we can bear.

– pld

Take Two (NaPoWriMary 5)

I was challenged to re-write yesterday‘s poem idea without a rapist, as they are, possibly, “easy antagonists”. (See “Mr Hyde’s Daughter”.)

So, I got about twenty lines in, building story, but don’t think I have the stamina tonight to finish. Violence is short-hand for many things but sister-speaking is a longer thing. More on this later.

Opening lines:

You went when the banners came.
Your war found me mid-field,
misbehaving, tongue-slip of your name
stilling the overseer’s slap. Magic

NaPoWriMo, Day 4 (Brianna)

(What I’m up to.)

Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, I

A peregrine and his mate nest in the face of the jump,
now, in the quiet season, before tourists herd themselves up
and down its slope, craning their necks, snapping
photographs.  Now it’s just us and the biting wind
he glides on, and his shriek.  He lands on a signpost
he doesn’t know is a signpost, flares his feathers, eyes us
with ancient ferocity.  Guarding his nest
from our invasion of two, our binoculars
and peanut butter crumbs.   Poor guy,
I tell my husband. He has no idea
what’s gonna come.

PAD Day 4: Downward Dog

I mis-clicked on something when I checked Poetic Asides this morning, so I spent most of the day thinking the prompt was “thankfulness” (which was the prompt for April 4 last year). Fortunately, I think there’s somewhere else I want to send that poem once I’m done writing it.

In the meantime, the actual prompt for today was “animal.” So:

Downward Dog

At yoga class, the woman to my left
radiates anxious importance
and under-applauded expertise,
proclaiming how many hours
she’s already worked that morning
and how little sleep she’s running on
and how much she’s sweated
through her other sessions at the studio.

It feels like contagion, like water
from a river soaked with pollutants.
I try to increase the distance between
her body and mine without being rude

and then I want to sink through the floor
because it’s dawned on me, This is how
I come across! Not as a glowing
whirlwind, not as a bringer of fire,
of fuel, but as someone tarred
by her own mis-juggled torches…

My face burns as I stretch. I slouch
back home to my couch, the better
to lick my self-inflicted nonsense, but my girl
shoves her snout into my lap, full
of warm, insistent pet me NOW.
I tell her she’s a menace. She slurps
at my toes and wags her tail harder.
As my fingers obediently scritch through honey fur,
I silently stammer, Lord, teach me
to turn my own insatiable clamoring
into something I myself could welcome.

The N+7 exercise Joanne mentioned in her most recent post looks like fun, so I may indulge in that once I’m done reminding myself how to sing fourths. (They’re not usually quite this troublesome, but my ending E-natural happens to be against the first sopranos’ F-sharp, and during rehearsal I was hitting everything around the damn note, but not the E itself.) And in publication news, Spider Vein Impasto is now available from Blood Pudding Press, and it includes my poems “Camouflage” and “At Persephone’s Cafe.”

NaPoWriMo, Day 3

I forgot: writing poetry is hard.

I don’t think I’m going to title my daily bits of poem, because they won’t all be individual poems, and may in fat all be pieces of a single long poem.

—

Pack the tent like pick-up-sticks, shake ice
from its nylon guts, jump  in the car,
crank the heat, repeat—
three mornings in a row marked by the mad dash
to Tim Horton’s red signs, two double doubles each,
the CBC to keep us company
and Canadian.  My hands crack, red
from snowmelt wash and gas station bathroom soap.
Night number four—all campgrounds closed,
we camp in a farmer’s field and wake
to geese shitting up a storm beside
a frozen pond—white ice, white shit,
white snow—and me to my period, red gush of blood
on top of all that white.