Free Entry 2, Week 9

Draft 3--Formally "We're All Getting Somewhere"

Jackknife

Today, I unfurl like the hem
of your favorite sweater, I forget

you don't care, like when your mother plowed
into the mailbox with her Plymouth.

A torrent of letters cascaded her hood,
like chickens flocking a trough.

I'm tired of flagging you down, reminding
you elms don’t flourish in deserts,

however deep their roots plunge,
water won’t congregate in sand.

The best jackknife I ever saw was on I-85:
hundreds of chickens skidded

the pavement, traffic jammed for miles.
It was like a pillow factory exploding.

I embroidered a pillow once with the inscription:
Please wipe your feet here. I wish I could

tighten the bolts of my four speed Huffy,
comb the streamers with my fingers. Maybe I will

scrap the bike for your birthday, become lone walkers
together. Pedaling uphill is rough

on my ulcer anyway. They say George Hincapie once biked
from Portugal to Austria in three days,

he said it was so easy it was like pedaling
in his sleep. In my sleep the desert was awash

in those feathers, all the lightness,
that airiness, floating down to the ground.

You, however, were never one for travel.

Free Entry 1, Week 9

Draft 2—Formally “Three Cows in a Pick-up"

Georgia O’Keefe in a Truck Stop

I am qualified for warning: which is to say
my clichés aren’t original. In New Mexico,
they put warnings down like rabid coyotes.
Those free-wheeling vagrants that prowl
the ditches for road kill like drunks digging
in payphones for forgotten quarters. Tuesday,

cactus pollination reduced monoxide emissions
to dwarf-sized complaints. Keyholes, really.
If the mayor of San Juan gave Georgia O'Keefe
a key to the city would she key the town dealership?
Call her vandalism a postage stamp? The gift of the forgotten
is that they force remembrance. I saw her:
Ram's Head White Hollyhock and Little Hills,
once at a truck stop, next to a shot glass

with three cows in a pick-up, and a pig at the wheel.
Both collector’s items. Incapable in the art of driving,
I once heard that O’Keefe bought a Model-A
right off the line. Secondary green like mildew
flowering in the split of the ram’s skull.
I drive without warning, she said, It’s key
to sand myself in landscape, to hound.
I would hock my teeth for all those dead coyotes.

Improv 2, Week 9

Last Words
-Angie Estes

Let us cross over
the river and sit in the shade
of the trees. Pardonnez-moi, Monsiuer,
wait 'til I have finished
my problem. It's been a long time
since I've had champagne. Too late
for fruit, too soon for
flowers: hold the cross
high so I may see it through
the flames. Get my swan costume
ready. I am about to--or I am
going to die--die: either expression
is used. Who is it? Ah, Luisa, you
always arrive just as I am
leaving. Sweet Rosabel, I leave you
the truth: if you can read this,
you've come too close. L.
is doing the rhododendrons,
the boat is going down, and I'm going
into the bathroom to read. More
light. Am I dying
or is this my birthday? I should have
drunk more champagne. Either
that wallpaper goes or
I go. What is the answer?
Very well, then, what
is the question? Oh why
does it take so long
to come?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Let us mingle over the warble
Of wallpaper that hangs in my aunt
Louisa’s dining room and drink the petals
of rhododendrons in our tea.
Funny how you have honored the petals
Like champagne, how you crush
The leaves over the rim of the cup
like a ship on its maiden voyage.
It’s always your lipstick that I remember
You by, biting the white of the cup
Just beyond your fingers . And after
I wash my hands, looking forward to leaving
The lace of the afternoon and I find
A tube of lipstick bathing in the outline
Of Aunt Louisa’s china hutch. I twist
Until you poke up, all curious
Like a baby pig and I run your wax
Over my lips. This is our tea time.
This is you in a spring-time shade,
Champagne. Here in my hands,
very well and pink , costumed
to the very crook of a promise.

Improv 1, Week 9

Gloss
-Angie Estes

My mother said that Uncle Fred had a purple
heart, the right side of his body
blown off in Italy in World War II,
and I saw reddish blue figs
dropping from the hole
in his chest, the violent litter
of the jacaranda, heard the sentence
buckle, unbuckle like a belt
before opening the way
a feed sack opens all
at once when the string is pulled
in just the right place;

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


When I was young my grandfather threatened to sell me
to the gypsies. The sale would be final,
he said, no returns. Forced to their caravan,
made to wear rags and chains.
Every broken lamp or carpet stain
summoned his threat.
Every fib that floundered
past teeth meant a life of dirt, scrubbing
wagon wheels, or polishing stolen silver.
Once I dropped a jar of beets
on the white carpet of my grandmother’s kitchen.
All at once I saw my life as gone.
A blackboard in its finite blackness.
And after the boat ride
to France comes dismantle as I’m stripped
of my sweater and given a hand sewn smock,
fashioned miss-matched
pieces of fabric resembling
my grandmother’s quilt.

Junkyard Quotes 1-5, Week 9

"In Tom Piper’s suggestive set, the island is a circle of white sand in the middle of a light-blue stage floor, a space that stands out against the behemoth terra-cotta back wall onto which the actors’ long shadows are projected like gargantuan ghosts."
-John Lahr, Big Magic, The New Yorker

"A sculpture's instruments find second homes."
-tagline for article, Tools, The New Yorker


"By 1899, Tesla was able to power 200 light bulbs using one electric motor 26 miles away."
-everythingishistory.com

"The quantum wave can split in two and recombine, like ripples flowing around a stump in a pond."
-sciencemag.org

"It seems like a hell of a time for us to smile and warble: "Brothers!" It is a rather flabby battle cry."
-Dr. Seuss

Free Entry 2, Week 8

When the sap levels are low
and the shoots are free of leaves
there comes the rare occasion
when they each disagree.
Usually this falling out stems
from winter or if winter arrived
at its proper checkmark, the calendar
maybe a day or so behind.
What the saps fails to recognize
is its lack of ability to weave
itself like fingers, until a cup forms
and gives to others the hollows
of industry. Somewhere in the past,
shoots stretched like constellations,
a bud-a star, a perched bird-a meteor,
all basic ingredients for harvest.
The moon spells out a language that falls
into the hammocks of leaves
with seasonal torrents, and so blisters
of water dot the undersides of sills
that overlook the Willow groves.
There are only certain types of Willow
that are good for weaving. Winter
being the ideal time for collection,
if possible. Odd how the tree so resembles
fingers as if the fingers were a cage,
caging a monument a disagreement.

Free Entry 1, Week 8

What is stillness? What is more still than last
frayed dandelion holding onto its white bones?
It gives with wind, each sway equals a bending

towards forgiveness of itself, to the last girl who claimed
to feast upon leaves. Imagine this: a fist, knuckles
jeweled like the glint of a new balloon,

as it swaps a pocket for a face, yellowing an eye.
A still bruise below a blood shot iris now a clutter
with the blooming redness of anger. What is more

still than an empty bed, where the absent bodies
press harder than bones of the real? What is more
still than the ice breaking the pain of the fist’s cut,

arriving and departing at the bone? Imagine that
same fist grinding the dough of language, shaping
fire of mouths-spitting jewels that case names
and oxygen-the gift of failure that all must breathe.