24 Poems ~ 24 Hours
Some things are tiny and mighty.
A sore pinky toe
The rudder of a ship
A termite’s teeth
The rudder of a ship
A cotter pin
A paper cut
A dust mote in your eye
The point of a needle
A spark from a cigarette tossed onto dry leaves
The egg of an ant
The birth of an idea
Tiny isn’t powerless.
Tiny can be mighty.
Size, it appears,
is not as important
as some people think.
Where I want to be is fill with lovely trees and meadows that are beautiful green. Maybe it is in Germany or maybe somewhere that is fictional it seems. Fictional land that is set in the future or fantasy. Maybe set in the four nations of Avatar: The Last Airbender or maybe set in Gotham City. There is a lot of places that I want to go but I know for sure that if I went to a place or a fictional space then I would surely enjoy.
Awakened, ye muses
at hour 9
Creativity spell
burned divine
Music Sing!
Moon shadow
Strain or is it
a Refrain?
Halfway there
No need to fear
We will make it
through the night
My dear
I’m an aunt, a dog mom, an anarchist following in my mother’s footsteps, and a writer.
I live in St. Louis. Our summers boast the kind of humidity that’s good for fostering irises and spider ferns and discussions about the merits of dry heat versus wet heat (those discussions have a disturbing lack of innuendo-awareness; perhaps that, too, is a regional failing).
2020 is my first Poetry Marathon. I usually write poetry for purely personal reasons–generally just working through my own thoughts. For work, I have a long-term memoir project, but primarily write about hockey (the Washington Capitals!) for the sports site Russian Machine Never Breaks. I’m also a freelance editor (specializing in academia and short fiction, with additional experience in indexing, and perhaps too obvious a hankering for additional clients…).
I have a dog. He’s much cuter than I am. (He’s also a grumpy old man, but I’m much grumpier than he is.) I’m fairly active on Twitter if you’d like to get to know more about me there.
Otherwise: I hope I finish out the rest of this half-marathon, and shall now stop procrastinating and get to writing!
A strange upshot of the pandemic is that it
has interfered with my novel-reading. It holds
so much of my attention, via constant updates, that nothing
else seems to have priority. My constant wish for more
time is ridiculous. What can be more fruitless than
asking more of what life can give? Better wish for an
effective and inexpensive vaccine. What expanse
of fictionless evenings can be damaging? Months of
only reading reviews, not actual novels is a desolate
prospect. Are novels teaching me another life lesson via their absence?
(This is a Golden Shovel. The final words in each line read as the last sentence of Strange Weather in Tokyo, a novel by Hiromi Kawakami.)
Grief
is like
a rusty chain
wrapped tightly ’round
a tree
trunk,
slowly
sinking deeper
into the wood,
weighing heavy on
our hearts,
suffocating,
stealing
the light
from our eyes
and the oxygen
from our
lungs,
until
one day
we awake, only
to discover we
can breathe
again,
for
the chain
has grown to
become a permanent
part of
us.
(A hay(na)ku is a three line poem where the only rule is that the first line is made up of one word, the second line of two words, and the third line of three words. A reverse hay(na)ku is a three line poem composed in the opposite manner, so line one would be three words, line two is two words, and line three would be just one word. During the 2019 Poetry Marathon, I combined these two styles to create what I called the “mirror hay(na)ku”. This time, I have taken things a step further with the “Hall of Mirrors Hay(na)ku”, which is composed of five separate mirror hay(na)ku stanzas.)
I’ve never been to Mary Oliver’s woods.
The woods that wrapped her in words
that she spelled out in spilled ink
so that we might read,
and, in a sense, walk with her
and her dogs, loving and leading
the way in a place that literally
has changed the world.
I was on the verge of
Losing it.
Tears, angry ones,
Face in the palms,
Sweating through my glasses
And back into my eyes
I could not explode
Here…
I could not let myself
Detonate in the house.
In the sanctuary.
In the calm space.
But the calm space is exactly where
The pain pulses
Through the pipes
And wires.
So I have to hide it again.
Take a breath and wait
Because I know it will start over
It always does
Because meltdowns only stop
When the brain ends.
Piecemeal
So many of my friends even my family
want labels. Want each part of me divided
parsed into neatly organised boxes
drawers shelves folders trashcans
My hands should go into that grey box
marked in black letters worker
My ears should go into a piano bench
tagged with a sticky note where everything is music
My feet quiescent in an old shoebox
that bears the sticker runner. So many miles.
Nearby a roll of foamcore holds a collage
ravens and foxes and nautilus shells. Yūgen
haunter of woods who has no words for green love.
Into this basket woven by Rwandan women
I squish my ovaries identified as breeder
not to be confused with mother, safely stored
between the foxed pages of a thesaurus.
On an adjacent shelf, beside a scarlet chop,
my tattered heart nestles in a bird nest
barely large enough to hold its unnamed pieces.
Its wings are splinted now.
An arm is wrapped in a threadbare infant quilt
a cracked knee beneath a bronze tray
inside a lacquered box a teacup stained
with tea leaves that knew the future once.
Somewhere among these scraps & shards
a compass might point north, and pieces
heed a lodestone’s call. But perhaps words
are not music, and pieces never make a whole.
But possibly… music is the skeleton of language
and song lives within each name. I sing myself,
gestalt of broken pottery, torn pages, lost ribbon.
I sing myself.
I’ve never been to Kansas
Or been swept up in a wind.
I’ve never seen Loch Murington
Or had my collar pinned.
But neither place is near to me
And neither method known
For taking my heart dear to me
Or riding a cyclone.