Junkyard Quote 1, Week 9

From one of those Did You Know posts:

Drowning in salt water is different from drowning in fresh water. It takes longer, and salt water draws blood from the cells into your lungs. You drown in your own blood.

One user responded: "That is so metal".

Critical Commentary 1, Week 8

Response to Andrew's Improv 5, Week 7:

I think I want to take this piece by piece, if that's ok with you. First line, fine, but I really love that second line. Perhaps syntactically odd, or simply in need of a colon, but uncanny, interesting, visual. I'm also curious about this personalization of the liana. There seems to be some fiddling with disjointing, a literal display of body parts. I will say that what strikes me as odd in this particular section is the move from halved fingers to a whole hand, which seems to be the start of a bodily connection as opposed to the prior. Mammal contours sits rather stumpy on the tongue and just does not work with the sweeping latinate sound this draft is trying to retain. Next, 3rd to last stanza. Suffer doesn't working there. As a reader I paused and thought: suffering? It calls too much attention to its own mechanics, the slant rhyme with suppers which would be cooler if I didn't see the machinery. Also, first section where we have these consistent breaks with a comma, which could work but it would require me to see more of this particular sense of disconnect in the rest of the work. It seems to fizzle off by the end and I'd like to see that idea carried out. As far as a narrative is concerned, there seems to be one in places but its rather obscured. I keep meaning to tell you this but I think Amy Pence would be a good read for you. She'd bring out the narrative sense in your writing while still showing you how to incorporate this lush and latinate movement you have in your work.

Improv 5, Week 8

A baby doll. Face speckled with dust.
Even his frown cornered with some freckle
of dry mud, he calls to leopards
spotted and powerful, the tight mound
of their shoulders meeting their knecks,
flexing, arching, bending to feed or
sink the claws into the damp mounds
of jungle, scratching away the deep brown clumps
until the earth moves, fresh and clotted,
gives up, pudgy and glazed, some doll head glazed
with dirt. ....

Improv 4, Week 8

There are no little girls here. Not anymore.
Lost to the swaying, amputated spirit
of these dolls--these many dolls that peer
from the mangled hiding places of trees,
wire wrapping their necks, that little girl
slipped off many years ago. They say
he took her place, brushing his hand
along their tattered limbs, running fingers
through their webby hair, so much care.

Improv 3, Week 8

What my brain writes at 5:45 in the morning:

Why do these people soak me in their intimacy?
I'm just a cashier, do I need to hear the bass
of your bedroom voice warbled through phone space,
finding a way to thump on my ear drums?
What is it about groceries that makes a woman
slide her hand into the back of her husband's pants?
Maybe we aren't selling groceries at all.
They say oysters are an aphrodisiac. If so,
we keep sex vacuum-sealed in seafood, or saucy
in white wine and garlic on aisle eight.
And maybe what I'm ringing isn't noise
but the de-evolution of "Slow Jams".
Baby, I've moved beyond the register
of voyeurism. No checks, no balances,
I wanna let go and hold you light
like an artichoke, careful like a glass
bottle of IBC. Me and this store,
we're the creators of attraction,
we've got something to sell--step up.
Move quick, you're in the express lane now.
This is where our transaction ends.

Junkyard Quote 2, Week 8

Creepiest Place on Earth

Improv 2, Week 8

She moves like the unraveling of dawn, each muscle
creeping to a slow wake in her wheelchair.
In the Kroger checkout, her husband holds her
chair handle in one hand, a basket in the other,
before he releases to set his groceries, cheerfully,
on my lane.
                 I smile at her,
meet the open-eyed puncture of her blue gaze.
Five cans later her hand stutters into air, wobbly wave.
I start talking and her husband steps forward,
dapper, bow-tied and outlined
with suspenders. He's all smiles, loves this:
the bounce of my voice in his ears
while his wife sits, mute, head drifting, her neck giving
to its weight like origami to a finger's press. He and I,
we parry puns. She used to be a part of this.
She used to stand between us
writing out checks in her slow, shaky hand
...

Junkyard Quote 1, Week 8

Let's talk about some war poems.

Improv 1, Week 8

My stepmother told me she loved me once.

Only once she told me she loved me.

 At the kitchen table, (one of those faux oak

numbers connoting intimacy in a tight oval)

we confessed, through tears, our shortcomings

in daughter things

.... 

Improv 3, Week 7

It was breast cancer awareness month.
After being forced to ask for donations
for six hours, an onslaught  of confirmation
and denial, mostly denial, I asked a woman
old and sour face, green shawl swooped over
the curved mountain of her shoulders,
if she would like to make a donation
and, certain she'd say no, I almost missed
the sad scrunch of her face, like pinching
the wet and puckered chicken skin.
Her face molded into it's self with sadness
and all her wrinkles deepened, the limpness
of her thin hair sagged into the grooves
of her forehead. Through bouts of agony
she nodded, explained her mother was fighting
stage three cancer while I scanned
the pink note, a floppy representation
of the ribbon with a blank box for signatures.
I handed it to her and she wrote a note
to her mother, telling her to fight on.
I placed my hand to her shoulder and felt
the world move, like a finger on Tangshan
as all the ink stones and rice bowls rattled
into a great pit of earth, so too did I shake
and the both of us, trembling, rocking
took in her wobbly message: Fight on,
Faye Lively, mom, fight on
and I couldn't help thinking any woman
with that last name, couldn't know when
to give up, shouldn't know what it's like
when the Earth falls open.

Improv 2, Week 7

When Marie Antoinette was a shepherdess,
she'd flaunt her legs in peasant clothes, work
paths around the orchards and the cows.

The Queen's Hamlet was a real farm,
with peasants bought to work the land
and cows cleaned and kept for the sweetest milk.

How, as her neck met blade, her thoughts
must have flashed to that place, burned
and hen-less, no longer waiting for her flounce
and step, like so many man-made truths.

Improv 1, Week 7

Two accidents, one stretch of road that zips
steep into a busy highway, stamped
with houses high with bushes near
their windows, like perfectly tapered
fingernails picking apart the sky.

I've only been in two accidents and each one
took place here under the wide awe
of windows, the first with my stepmother,
small-legged and sassy, broken to shudders
behind a front hood smashed to the bumper
of another car.

It was here, on the phone with my father,
seatbelt off and face flying into fabric seats,
that I sought out logic, so that when the phone flew
and I, confused, decided I should scream.

Critical Commentary 1, Week 7

Response to Daniel's Improv 1, Week 7:

I'm really interested in this destabilizing of writing--this idea of writing as harmful. We all think of writing as a sort of escape, a way of living and experiencing, but the reality is that writing is an arduous process, exhausting and to a certain extreme, rather self-destructive. Much like a sword without the hilt, one often wields writing but stabs themselves in the process as well.

Moving to a more micro approach to the writing, though I like this idea of one's own blood being inadequate to express the soul, I feel like the opening line could be tighter, more powerful. The enjambment doesn't really do much at this time and the word "soulfully" hits my ear oddly. As well, does one ask their ancestors for their burden or to help should his own burden? Vein juice is once again a little odd to the ear, however I love the next moment of self-inquisition then followed by the beautiful imagery of ink. Please pursue this further in the future.

Diamond

Junkyard Quote 1-2, Week 7

Rather than language I'm capturing uncanny subjects to write about in the future:

Six drown in an attempt to save chicken fallen in well:
[x]

Bimodal Sleep Patterns
[x]

Improv 5, Week 6

Rework of a Carol Ann Duffy Improv from before.

It must have been weeks, the scratching.

Her fur careening to somersault

in evening's hungriest hour, when sleep gnaws

the peaked head of sun and launches

her fleas to feeding.

In the tub, her nails seize porcelain.

She dreads the faucet, the honey-milk

shampoo. I work my fingers along

her spine's jewels, flick the flattened

thoraxes of fleas from her suds.

Critical Commentary 1, Week 6

Response to Taylor's Improv 3, Week 6:

So bypassing the obvious hyperuse of the word "pearl", which was clearly an intentional bit of play and thus saying it was somewhat overused would be unnecessary, I will jump in to say there are moments here worth keeping. I always find it interesting when poems utilize repetition in order to force a certain awareness into me as a reader on the way words function. Generally that repetition forces me to create new meaning or different understanding of the function of the word as a verb or noun. However here, because the word “pearls” never really changes how it works, this leads to the feeling of triteness. Lines that I feel like could be carried over to another draft: Told us something in Chinese  / that mentioned pearls; and shakes his head at pearls. / nods his head at pearls. I also like the ending question, like a method of purpose from the writer.

Improv 4, Week 6

Un

Unzip the word, pare it
to the root.
Have worlds.
Have branched off worlds
that live closed off,
open to meaning.
How funny, two letters undo
everything.
Every law, every linguistical
system--unfair.
Here where the dark undoes
our lips, we no longer
do late night things
but undulate
in the muddled swamp
of monosyllables
and the deep throat
of the guttural.
Without it, even unity
would still place I to you.

Improv 3, Week 6

Taking this moment to stress the reality of a speaker, not the poet.

Improv of Amy Pence’s 8^th Grade Locker Combination:

I stopped liking grape jelly years ago.

When I chose strawberry, my whole life spread

into the endless possibilities of choice and sandwich.

When I worked the knife along the jam rim

and rubbed its seeded goo into the grooves

of my whole wheat, I saw marmalade

and toasted bread, whose heat melted

the peanut butter like the promise

of something that could have been real--

like you, had I not waited several hours

in a plastic gown to lose you, in netted cap

and booties watching 13 Going on 30,

thinking you would never know those numbers

or the taste of a childhood staple

and not even losing a tear.  

Improv 2, Week 6

Rework of Mosquito

Outside, the dark gnaws our seats

though a citronella’s light outlines

your face. Over wine, you tell me

you don’t miss her and I’d hear you if

I didn’t recall other nights like this.

At cocktail parties, where your eyes

worked past me in dim bars of light,

to search for some sliver

of her smile against the crowd.

Or the nights she wasn’t there—

how you looked for her

in the soft down of your pillow, or

in the noisy toss of winter wind

and summer shade—hell, any place

that wasn’t my outstretched arms.

Seriously, you tell me, it’s done,

and yes, I’d hear you

but I can’t seem to shake

my urge to press this mosquito

into the candle, to feel the wax give in,

to hear it, buzzing, drown. 

Junkyard Quote 1-2, Week 6

1. My rage is multi-factored and many-layered. 
2. "I took these creatures as I found them on the shoreline, and then placed them in 'living' positions, bringing the back to 'life', as it were. Reanimated, alive again in death." --Nick Brandt

Improv 1, Week 6

Here.

The fountain of youth is a salt lake in Tanzania,

whose wide mouth plucks birds and petrifies

their bones below a gray and stillborn surface.

I’ve seen the photos—doves with wings tucked

like paper airplanes to their chests,

flamingoes whose feathers pare to the slim

scoop of their mummified necks.

Imagine it was our bodies bubbling down there,

deep in the ten foot steep of natron solution,

calling up threads and taut lines

of muscle we know…