The Poetry Marathon

Twenty little poetry projects, after Jim Simmerman and Lexanne leonard

1. Start with the salt
2. Stir up and down, up and down then around 17 times. Slap it twice
3. scatter randomly throughout the poem.
4. Feel the purple crawling up your fingers, the slow cut of murex shells, then pour when it reaches the top
5. Rhiannon, flying in the wind, the slow smoke over Winnipeg
6. Shake it off, shake it, shake it shake it off, shake it all off
7. And rush to pick it up, the small soft body
8. Remember that all words go into poems, even prose, even the badly spelled (sic)
9. Because it belongs there if I said so
10. Coom ben the hoose, hen, coom ben
11. The stinking smoke of far off wildfires glaze the sky, the breakable image of tomorrow
12. but still sweet on my tongue, colours the afternoon, perfumes the day
13. I watch myself without looking, a sly glance from the corner of my eye
14. Change my zoom label to she/he his/her like all the modern kids
15. When I will speak and have them listen, all of them, even the ones I’m talking to in their little tiles
16. Overlapping every corner in their monochrome screens
17. Here! I will stand here, in the corner and sprinkle my hollow cupped pyramidal words as garnish
18. Remember l’esprit d’escalier and go back
19. So that it blinks and blinks again
20. Then fuzzes out, signal lost, sweat drips into my eyes

2
if I thought about it at all ten years ago it was as some nearly invisible ladder whose bottom rung I couldn’t quite reach despite my best attempts, and I read books and wrote words and hid them away and cooked for myself and you the sweet and savoury and rubbed your shoulders and sewed on buttons and swore and sweated and made love and told myself it didn’t matter as my fingers wrinkled and jowls sagged and hair grew shorter and more sparse and all along the ladder was climbing me

P cherrett

1
the past draped about us like a cloak after Diana Khoi Nguyen

poems breed poems, as we breed children of our own and throw them to the future

as we hide ourselves in the accumulation of story, of facts and images assembled and assessed and sewn and knotted to camouflage confusion and intent

as we invent ourselves again each day in the old knowledge of speech and touch and scent and self justification

as we stand together and alone at the edge of an empty platform, toes and noses over reach the yellow line

as we throw ourselves into tomorrow, and hope

P cherrett