Free Entry 1, Week 7

Peach belly full
She hangs. A time capsule
Of birthday cakes and wine bottles
decorate
Her skull like shrapnel
Decorates a leg. She scans
Verse written by a woman
Who uses her shoe
As an ashtray. Laughing
She twiddles her thumbs.
A man sneaks by
Wearing nothing
But his underclothes
holding a wastebasket.
Hmm, she thinks. Office party.
Glancing over at the table
She spots
Spools of yarn. She knows the yarn
Is the right color
Blue
because she wants
To bite it, like a cheek.
The twisting knots of the wool
Remind
Her of the suicide in the neighborhood
Last winter. The man’s mother
Died. Elderly.
Varicose veins of blue yarn.
He could not live without
Mother.
His intestines
Spilled out
like blue yarn.

Junkyard Quotes 1-5, Week 7

"lips taste like winter peaches and cold water."
--reader from creative writing panel at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900

"the sound of a sickle"
--poetry reading at Louisville

"as if I were existence itself"
--poetry reading at Louisville

"Although the fate of the Holberts was perhaps more violent than that of many lynched African Americans, both Harris and McMillen suggest it was, on the whole, typical."
--Gary Richards, Lovers & Beloveds: Sexual Otherness in Southern Fiction 1936-1961
(I really like the structure of this particular sentence.)

"she remembered that she still held pieces of mushroom in her hands, and she set to work very carefully, nibbling first at one and then the other"
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Improv 2, Week 6

The First Star
-John Poch

There are no paperwhites on the meadow edge
this time of year; only snow that shimmers
like paperwhite petals in the farewell window
of March's postponed clemency, dune-blown
with skirt-pretty ripples. Like someone cared.
Why come out here and think of paperwhites
bent toward a window with their clustered cups
of six-tricks listening when half a dozen deer
stand prey-still on the valley's facing hill?
The sound of my own voice substitutes
for the voice of God. Here I am. And of course,
the sudden windscatter on snow like sand.
A few maples clacking. The day dies,
and an invisible coydog pack descends
on the fawn of my optimism. The first star
hovers out of nowhere. For courage's sake,
I think it real as a blown flag shadow.
But it could be the spark in air at the end
of a whip on the back of a nightmare.

---------------------------------------------------------------------


There are no paperwhites on the meadow edge,
nor do margins of gold hold wheat
as well as hands--in their lack of volume,
they still manage to cup just as any other bucket.
When the shimmers of petals bid farewell
to ripples and become drops of meadow,
postponed in sand along the edge
of the forest’s windows,
someone will manage to capture it all
in a photograph. Of course, the trick of hands
is that they only descend To full depth
when the first star takes position
in the basin Of sky above optimism,
somewhere before the first flash.
Trick photography dies with the sound
of its own voice,Which is to say
that it never dies only recedes in popularity.

Junkyard Quotes 1-5, Week 6

"It left the cellar forty years ago and carried itself like pile of dishes[...]"
-Robert Frost, Witch of Coos

"This mirror gives the users the ability to draw."
-Instruction on a video game

"Let's talk in functions."
-speech bubble from internet cartoon

"Only about one-fifth of the world’s largest desert, the Sahara, is covered with sand; the remainder is made up of rock formations."
-Random fact from Mental Floss

"Citizens! All Hail your comrade of steel."
-USSR propoganda poster

Free Entry 2, Week 6

II. Richard

Charlie, his dog, ran away one day
But reappeared after Richard falls,
On knees praying to God, Charlie
Bounds back in a halo of light.
He does not know what to think

Of that. That. As if the slight moment
Of religion acts as nothing but a pronoun.
Jerusalem’s famous little green man,
Might be out there, might not. There.
There‘s, there again, like That

Springing up when people do not
Want to name what they believe.
What. On a mountain in Santa Cruz
A witch takes Richard to the top,
Later his wife will leave him for
Her lesbian lover. The wives visit

Him from California. He’s thinking
Of going back to practice psychiatry.
He’s 63. Richard calls on me,
We talk. About novels, medicine,
Walking. Somehow I bring up
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,

He tells me that at one time he
Went to the same psychiatrist
As Ken Kesey. I wonder if they ever
Passed each other in the hallway.

Free Entry 1, Week 6

I. Alice

I pegged her for Dickenson. Shining
By her side floats Collected Poems. Quaint
Lady. Poet. Playwright (one in New York).

My starry eyed glamour filled ramble rattle
head - fuzz. All at what she lives. I ask,
What do you devote your time to presently?

A cookbook. Well a journey really.
South Florida. What does she cook
up? Timid. I hear nothing of her voice

Above a smiling hello. The chomping fangs
Come out alone with Dickenson, wearing
White, hanging in the breeze of the balcony.

Below her suburbanite kids mate. Sweaty
Awkward sex for drugs. When she is not here
Editing, pecking, Dickenson-nizing, she

Recites Blanche Dubois. She weighs heavy.
A twelve year old girl, fat and dancing
In front of the mirror. She buys pink

Stationary placing slips between the leaves
Of her home potter plant. Ripping
The parchment from the leaf hands

Of a plastic greenery Stanley. Pink
Deeds. Dressed in toilet paper minks,
Tin can Chinese lanterns. She cries

And laments. Swaying to the pantry
Caressing the cheek of her can corn
Suitors. South Florida bayou nutcase.

What swamps rasp the roots of her dark
Abstract words? How many “loves,”
“bleaks,” and “lies” ravel around

An alligator tooth? Where’s her white
Dress with the girl inside? She leaves
Everyday with one more word in hand.

Improv 1, Week 6

Icarus, Rejected
John Poch

His canceled self-addressed stamped envelope
looked like a little pillow , all feathers and down!
All feathers and down, R.I.P, you dope,

the foul note replied. There went his hope.
But there was more. Cloud to town. Dream to noun.
His canceled self addressed stamped envelope

with his poetry manuscript: A tired trope.
Your melted ice cream sundae pile of brown.
All feathers and down, R.I.P., you dope.

Stay off the drugs. None of your beeswax. Nope.
and more: A dead baby in a baptism gown.
His canceled self addressed stamped envelope

held a hard pill to swallow. A pillow? How could he cope
with: Flown. On your own. A bandage for your crown?
All feathers and down, R.I.P., you dope.

Mother's smile to smothered frown. No Pope,
the Editor added, drown in drool, you clown,
you canceled self addressed stamped envelope,
all feathers and down, R.I.P., you dope.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

His worn skin hung like a flap of dough
weighing over the edge of a glass pie dish,
all powdered and ready to become something new.

His mellow hands forget their fingers. That they itch
to press hard the seam of an envelope,
in which so many letters were left unsaid,

children hungry for a birthday greeting.
Time has smothered his years into checkpoints
and lack of paychecks. Instead of macaroni

valentines or wedding invitations, his desk holds
a Gideon Bible and two graduation announcements,
clipped from the next town’s paper. Newsprint creased

to a small rip. Years of travel in his wallet
left them smeared blank, but he knows what they said:
honor roll, scholarship, most likely to succeed,

and always, somewhere in the conclusion, proud mother.
Once, he wrote an amendment on a diner napkin:
No father to speak of, just a name on birth certificate.