Things You Should Put on a Dress For

Your first
date. Your first death.

Clandestine liasons at dusk.
Upon meeting a bear.
Upon meeting a bear
in wolf’s clothing. When you are naked.
When you are hungry. The first time.
The last time. Once upon a morning
when you wake
to find you are a skeleton.

When you don’t know
what to say. To the pastor’s
house for tea and cakes.
Pull a tight one over your head
in the car on the way to the hospital
while you are in labor.

Do not work too hard.

While your bare feet trundle
the sewing machine pedal.
Mind the silk it is fragile.

Hunting the midday woods
with a bow and arrow. Fishing
for the one that got away. Rise
to the surface in black satin.

Learning to fly.
Learning to speak
another language
while standing
in a dark alley.
When you learn
the awful truth, the cleaner
shrunk your superhero cape.

When there is nothing left
for you to do but stand
up and dress yourself
ask someone else to pull the zipper.

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My poetry pal Carolee and I are trying to motivate each other. Crack the whip. So we are reading The Poet's Companion (Kim Addonizio & Dorianne Laux) and doing every single exercise. Yup. Every one. If we weren't best friends with our hair dressers, we might go gray attempting this task.

The first exercise, in a nutshell: Make a list of the most memorable events in your life...start a poem about one of the events.

I cheated. I didn't make a list. I looked on the floor and saw the red leather bible I got at my confirmation when I was about 10. I thought, hmmm..., that is an event. And I started to write. Actually, I looked at another spot on the floor (my bedroom is a mess) and saw Girl Meets God, a book in my to-read pile. From there, a poem began to emerge. That's as far as I got. A poem not quite out of the oven. So, I resorted to a list poem.

It is like my poem-er, my muse, my creativity, is on vacation.

I will persevere. I will.