In An Effort to be More Spiritual While the Children Watch Disney

She Prays Like Wonder Woman


This is what I would like strangers
to say about me. She is a prayer

Against Desiccation - Poetry Gong #11

Exoskeletons contain rigid and resistant components that fulfil a set of functional roles including protection, excretion, sensing, support, feeding and (for terrestrial organisms) acting as a barrier against desiccation. Exoskeletons have a role in defence from predators, support, and in providing a framework which musculature can attach to.


Skin turned inside out
eyeballs hanging from bloody wire
too gruesome for pancakes, too soft-bodied

to complete even a simple morning routine
though she is flat
as gluten thinned on a griddle.

Like an earthworm ravenous with rain
mothers step from kitchens
hands blistered and peeling

holding out casseroles to ghosts.
Find (dig) the family in the (a) hole
lost in the folds

of an incomplete exoskeleton
pliant, shriveling, gathering in upon
itself—an apron, an artifact, a defense

against burnt offerings, faulty cocoons
entrails refusing to exit. To join,
to crawl under, live among the tissue,

fossilize before the soft parts rot
requires a desire to change, a meeting
of cells, a declaration of kinship.

Enter in your own mouth, see skin
and eyes, hands and hollow bones
molt the unnecessary, feed on what remains.

Mother as Avian

Brilliant feathered kite
sweet aerie seed finch.

Try and try
to mimic home.
Wind stale blue plumage
about your straw bed.

Hover
follow

sing,
signal
for wing mate.

Nest beneath owl talon,

preen for dark raptor

night
after night.

Beautiful thing
swing fast.
Wait on bright flock.


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That Dana. She is such a good influence for thinking out of the box. The prompt this week at RWP is to use a random word generator or a list of random words. I finally, finally put to ue my new box of magnetic poetry--bird themed.

And, hey, why is it just when I sit down to write, my lovely adorable children all of a sudden need me to look at them and answer their questions and help them put a belt on? Why, when one minute previous, they were content to build a Lego ship and watch Pinky Dinky Do?

Can you make our pancakes?

I Touched Him

because I couldn't see his back
rising and falling
like the length of his skinny body
in and out of the pool
all sticky
day long.

(Spotlight on the little-known
phenomenon--
dry-drowning.)

They’re never more angelic
than when they’re sleeping,
or so I’ve heard.

(Warning signs every parent
should be aware
of.)

You will not find the kind of mother
here, checking on her children
in the middle of the night.

In the middle of the night
I sleep.
Like a normal person.

(easily overlooked
or misinterpreted.)

I am no insomniac.
I know my children,
the span of their small
hands, the breadth of their
chests, the width of their feet
their lips, the measure of one eye
between their beautiful blue and hazels—
the third eye.

It’s just the media.
Blame it on the media.
Measuring the depth of my love
on the frequency of my obsession.

At one end,
the pool was twelve feet deep.
That’s three times
the size of my boy.
What is the direct route to his lungs?
How much could he inhale
in an instant?

Under pressure
we can all supply
what is needed.

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I had used some indentations in this poem, for effect, but they didn't all show up when I cut and pasted. Can't seem to figure that out in Blogger. This indenting is something new I am trying...

NaPoWriMo #17 - oh so rough!

Beloved Mother (an exhausted title, written by a mother on vacation with two young children who never tire)

Is there a name for a mother
who takes her children cemetary

hopping on vacation?
Mother-who-courts-ghosts,

maybe? She is a family woman
earthed in tradition and roots.

This is a family reunion
no-one need bring a casserole.

Mother-born-old? Brought up
herself among the stones,

spending holidays delivering
flowers to the dearly departed,

listening quietly to old stories
of older people, strangers, really.

Her people, his people, born, married
died. Where is their plot?

Is there a plot to this tale?
I know this much, my place

will rest with my mother
who rests with her mother.

We will be the-mothers-who
rest together. Come visit.

NaPoWriMo #5: A Terzanelle, of Sorts

Skeptics Say Mother Bird Who Gave Her Life For Chicks Is Nothing But Urban Legend

When he struck it, three tiny chicks scurried from under their dead mother’s wings.

- from widely circulated inspirational e-mail

There are things a woman can not do.
Walk naked from house to house
asking for a cup of flour, a teaspoon



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Another positive day for poetry. I hope my muse stays in good form for the next three weeks (plus)! I did not stay completely true to the terzanelle form, as my end words do not all rhyme. I could change a few words to establish the rhyme, but it loses something, in my opinion. That is how I feel about revision...I don't like it, I don't like it, I don't like it. But I know I need to do it. I am so attached to my first words.

NaPoWriMo #4

A Stranger Walks Up To A Mother Playing In the Park

Hey, do you mind if I play in the mud?
And who is she to deny him,
original mother of mud players, pie makers
trackers of wet earth across her floor.
It has been her job from the dawn of time
to allow mud.
To cover the hut in mud,
cover the wounds with mud,
drag herself up out of the mud.
It is mud she spends her days with,
mud she cleans nightly from their shoes
from their carpets,
washes in wide arcing circles
before sending it cleaned and gleaming
down her drain.
Even as she feeds her children
she repeats the old adage under her earthen breath,
One peck of dirt per child, per childhood.
One peck, one peck, one peck.
We’re all good.
We’ve got the pyramid covered.
Even as she tosses the clean stitched ball to her son
and he drops it in a puddle,
slides through an endless brown pond
to slick the mucky ball back at her.
Even in that dirty instant she knows
she will not drag her children through
the mud back to their car.
She is not afraid of this man
spreading his blanket next to a puddle,
preparing, perhaps, for a picnic
were it not for the mud
he has settled next to,
were it not for the mud
he is wringing through his hands--
a potter working his clay.
It is the stuff of life.
We are born from the earth.
We go back to the earth.
Stranger! Stranger!
The strange man digging his strange
hands into the mud,
letting wet mud fall from hand to hand
from hand to hand,
a brown, cloudy metronome.
Who among us has not wanted permission
to play in the mud?
Who would dare deny it?

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I was going to post a poem I wrote last week, not in April. Then I went on a date with my husband. He told me a story. I came home, wrote this poem. Thanks, Dude!

Overheard at the coffee shop: NaPoWriMo #1

Did You Make a Date To Go To the Circus?

The barista (I’ve always wanted a title like that) asks me a simple question, tilting her head, her hair, her eyes. I wonder how she does not fall over from the weight of her question. I am sure I hear her whistle the first few bars of Send in the Clowns. Between the air hissing out of the espresso machine and the mocha java mist spraying from her tuneless lips, I am sure, I know, I heard her say, Did you make a date to join the circus? How did she know? I thought this was Professor Java’s, not Madame Olga’s. I stopped riding bare backs of horses long ago. Stopped bowing to high-hatted men bearing whips way before my hips gave in to child bearing. With my tattoos lasered off, my slightly arched, solidly respectable suburban eyebrows lasered on, I was sure I passed for wifely. At the very least, with my sequins hidden beneath nubby fleece, I could be assumed mother. It has to be the tightrope. I have hauled myself up onto that thin slice of wild so many times there are wires thin as spider webs rooted in my soles. Tomorrow I will leave the net at home.



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A prose poem for Read. Write. Poem. Based on something I overheard, incorrectly. I'm not sure if I have mastered the prose poem form, but it's a start. The poem cam eout not as I had planned, but more stream-of-consciousness style. Comment/critique welcome! I'd like to do more with this one...whatever that may be!