poem from last week

it was a tuesday after a laundry day and you and luella and elvis and and. that was the crowd plus the beaded eye from that blinking doll you carry in your breast pocket like a miniature fennec fox whispering lines from children's tales, grim and genderized like the little blue boy in all his teenage waste and the intravenous literature was not enough to update his thesaurus. and that is when elvis dialed out on the peeling blue rotary phone with the numbers that spelled l-o-s-t-y-o-u. i painted my face white and left my face on every pillow in the house. i found you in the kitchen swallowing your fist and luella is eating faded polaroids of me from two summers ago, you know the one in my underwear in front of the old oak tree by the lake where your parents first met?      you replaced that memory with the equations for your geometry on the twenty-ninth and seventh and i sing dolly parton songs backwards in that faded buckskin costume we borrowed from the children's choir three thanksgivings ago and elvis is laughing on the empty reciever. thanks for calling me slugger is the note sprawled across your breast bone with the wetted ash from the bottom of my purse, but i used the freckle under your nipple to dot the i, after that night where i followed you home and it never almost happened and i wait at the bus stop with the woman and her three children dressed as skeleton ducklings tied together with twine. she whispers 'laundry day' but it is may.

phantom minnow

moon boned and winter
faced. a cichlid die each
snowflake in the arms
of a tramp-
oline like that Amazonian
fish that nestled
home in your urethra

I am parasitic

there was that once
and you were singing
the one about the
roller skates

but I was swimming
and stealing the odd numbers
and and you

stole that tank
from the man with the fraying
mustache and he
ate raisins from my
hands for he the chickadee
went fishing
for phantom limbs




This is the poem from the first week of the project with Adam. We are picking a  "subject" and each writing a poem in response to that. This was written last week. I might post this week's poem later..

just wrote&shared

said ten weeks and dry milk

nipple-faced and monster childed
eat trains like tunnels
like a hitchcock still of sex
but wrong
or er
and they will climb aboard my back
at least until may
when i unload the disinfectant
and the g-day will eat me


it will be a softer appetite
and i will avoid the lungs
on wednesdays
and always bellow
like ella and billie
but will be eating stamps if unproven
to you
or them

hide your antlers today, the dress
code is business
but my windows are not cleaned

re-working

I am trying to write again. After a long dry spell....I am trying to be better about writing more often.
 Adam and I have decided to try to write weekly responses to each other...which involves picking a topic and then us each writing a poem based off that and then emailing it to each other to review.

Last week's topic was "phantom minnow" and this week I decided on "rotary telephone."

shoe ties like lamps

tumult walked dainty like

in line

lined by powder

where you left that one time

and I was supposed to wait

but three and two and ten

passed

and you hadn’t

but

hey, etta did you leave

your hair here

hear

I cried it to the wash

room

whom the lady asks a dollar

her name is pearl

or u

trance like and staffed

my mother

asked you to dine

yes

-terday

but your tea drops

had made an appointment

first

sleeping in wet cement

was prescribed

to the woman

whoo

pigeon-eyed and

fringe banged

like lamps.

for MyGoose

empty breasted face panes are talking to me about options. collaborative counseling and my you
is in the room, but i asked for the bandages to be removed. the bandages removed. are you
dancing to wards that spirit gummed hussy with the black fur when all i could afford was the blue
and you never wanted me the same. i wanted to eat you to the spring hours, but i think you lost
my number, i could send it again? again, you wink calloused fingers and i collapse in between the binding
string on the composition notebook. you hide your ticket stubs there. of all the movies that made you
think of me before we met. can we meet again?

flavored development

Eating giants on cornflakes while the sugar dives for oysters who hid the last radio show under their tongues tasting the saccharine and spearmint. I search for gelatin air waves, but I think I am landlocked. And drowning. Like a salt coated slug. Pink germaniums. why do I only write when my cardboard surroundings crumple to the wind’s hand? the internet reads sentiments like praying mentis eating at innards. I quickly try to close my abdomen but the bike ride is too long and I drag behind. where were you with my lunch bag, when I was choosing to scalp baby birds and writing addendums to endings that were never mine. I am thinking about a drug habit. But my veins leak rhino beetles and mothers cry on hill sides. Where every side if green. But the void is what. Until I stop having trouble growing antlers, but 13 years of puberty eats inside out and fawns have moved on. You are grammatically seizing and the foam blinds my hands so we sit spit conjunctions and sentence diagrams like back inked tattoos.

dear hair, grow faster.

that is all I can say.

new poem thing:

hey vestal. i though about the yesterday and you should shorten the hearspeak. i can only taste the jargon when i got to that one porch where you ripped your shoe lace, but i don't seem to remember the shade. madison was smaller this year, shrinking the porn shops to doll houses, in a child love sort of way. my mother will delete this. vestal call me two ten. and then.
and then.

just now

just wrote this, at work. I actually am kind of excited about it. I am reading a LOT lately, so that is good.





sometimes your face looks like a horse
when i forget your long vowels
and long eyes
drawing out each b
blinked
and i forget about your elbows
the angles that speak
to each of my rib bones
about the menial items
like weather next week
and the girls on the block
with too long legs

the fourth

wrote this yesterday on the bus on the way to fireworks...



when graveyard suns
lick my face
yesters sane into
the background and
I want to wear you home.

your reaction to
my arm length
left me
lingering for rained feathers.

plans for plans

this is a poem I wrote a few weeks ago. it is one of a number that I have written in the past few weeks that I want to compile into a chapbook.




I left on moths
taste of solar dust
taken from the ceiling fan
sealing plans
for when you send limbs
to daughterhouses
you left empty curling spouses

when you ate arithmetic

I like when you said you'd take me to dinner. And conversion tables say the twelve skipped breakfasts and three drive thru lunches almost equals a dinner. You have to use the quadratic equation and round up from the third number beyond the decimal point, but I have it all on paper. Right under the unstubbed tickets for that show you mentioned that happened last night. Ask me again why you're here. The evenings cast a certain glow and you look like my father as you're zipping all my organs inside me. But glaring sevens rip you from that place and the door shuts with my tooth tied to the knob. spilling me on the laminate.

too busy!

to post. due to finishing chapbooks for my advance poetry writing class
AND
PLANNING the small press that Adam, Baby Becca, and I are starting.
so excited. so busy.

definition poems

these are little alternative definitions for words:

lashes.
they are black painted ladders.
guardians of tears meant to bat.
made of fishing line, carrying men to bed.

beluga whale.
it is silk and salt flavors. put to be in children's choirs.
blowholes for pony mail and horse hair.
sing for me, wailing.

men.
they are, lengths of tannish.
lost until linked to oils and viscosity.
fly with hesitation and necks of rose.

wishlist to pass the writer's block

plagued with terrible writers block. uninspired.

I will post some new stuff today. Hopefully.

until then..


Another wish list:













1. an attractive, inexpensive, vintage or vintage-inspired sofa/couch





















2. an interesting, inexpensive, functional dresser






















3. cute summer dresses

punching buttons

I just hit send on an email submitting 6 poems for consideration for the university's literary journal. I am very nervous and very excited!

Forgot about Philip Jenks

I completely forgot to post this picture.

the plan and start

Adam and I have decided (loftily) that we want to self-publish a collaboration book of poetry. The way we have decided to tackle it is to pick a topic, any topic, ever, and send it to each other. We will then write our own takes on the subject and then place them on facing pages in the book. Adam has given me the first topic and I have written TWO different poems on the subject, but think I have decided which I am going to go with. I am really excited about the whole project even if it takes forever.

newest for class

the assignment was a memoir, but unpersonal. so no pronouns.




“when the wind rushes by where the foot was, it gets chilly”

stood in front of faces to reach up to the lips. just wanted to climb something. nothing would impress all. the red scrap metal amphibian licked teeth out of mouths. carried the previous night and a pigeon wing in pocket. offering an olive branch to the music box Viking through a series of 1001011000100. built a nest for five children’s t-shirts, grounded jaw, and eyes on back. was going to sleep in a real pile. when the pile was sound, found lost finger, but sewed it to hand. six and four is two hands. the bear held head through the morning and spelled adorable backwards. wool as tangled in exposed tibia and trailed to the door. the cursive urine read: “post script don’t want to step on wet floor.”

Jenks Jitters

For Class we read On the Cave You Live In by Philip Jenks and had to write an emulation. Philip Jenks came to class and did a reading and talked about his work. I actually read my emulation, which was super nerve racking. Here it is.


the pawn shop editor
chose the ceramic ponies
chipped into the black footing
are naval tattoos.

speaking Aramaic he traced
faces from tobacco stained yearbooks
balanced on skin screen
lost globes