Smashed Hopes
My fascination with kale is nil,
but smashed potatoes fill the bill.
They go best with butter and
homemade gravy, never canned.
Rosé goes with clove-studded ham,
but I must admit I am
fond of gin for getting smashed
when the potatoes are mashed!
The dVerse Poets Quadrille challenge prompt is Smash.
And you can find more responses to the prompt HERE.
Noises in the Night
She was six years old and alone in a room that had noises in the wall. She would curl up into a tight little ball under the covers and concentrate on the friendly sounds––the tapping of the pendulum of the clock which hung on the wall beside her bed and the water gurgling through the heating pipes. The muffled voices of her parents down below in the living room. She liked these noises. They made her think that she wasn’t alone.
But she could hear other sounds of the summer night–– the sudden loud popping noise that she thought was a gun until daddy told her that it was only houses settling, or the sound of the elm tree outside her window scraping against the brick on the chimney or the wind as it whined through her screens, making the venetian blinds scrape against their wooden window frames. She could hear things in the walls, too––noises that sounded like people walking and high shrieking noises that daddy said were just mice and not robbers.
The sheet felt muggy on her bare legs and she kicked it off and rolled over. She lay on her stomach and slipped her hand beneath the pillow, sliding it back-and-forth against the trapped coolness of the percale. She glanced at the noisy pendulum clock Santa had brought her for Christmas to help her learn to tell the time. It was her first real clock and it was in the shape of a Shmoo. She could just make out where its hands were from the light of the streetlamp shining through her window. It wasn’t very late.
She flipped over and slid her legs over the side of the bed, feeling the slight stickiness of the linoleum on her feet as she walked to the window. The air had cooled a bit and it had started to rain. A slight breeze tickled the hairs on her arm and sifted the rain onto her nose as she pressed it close to the screen to smell the mustiness of the wet night grass.
She wondered when her older sisters would get home and come up to bed. It was lonely in a room all alone in the upstairs of a house that had robbers in the walls.
Most of you have probably seen this next post about my sisters, but I had forgotten it so perhaps you have, too: https://judydykstrabrown.com/2021/11/06/my-sisters-camera/
This pictorial post from two years ago actually prompted a book which I am doing the final editing on. Hopefully it will be published in the next few months.
For the dVerse Poets prompt: Siblings
And you can read what others wrote in their response HERE.
Dear Genie (A note Affixed to a Bottle)
Get back into the bottle. You’re doing nothing right.
The Adonis I requested just the other night
turned out to be the plumber. He got here around nine,
but the pipes he chose to work on were not any pipes of mine.
A problem with your hearing is a possibility,
so for now there’s only one more wish that I would ask of thee.
A doctor of ear, nose and throat you need to visit, please,
for when I requested money, you brought me hives of bees.
Now I’ve sufficient honey and beeswax it appears—
almost as much as I imagine you have in your ears.
As it is, each thing I wish for occasions my new fears.
So you’re confined to quarters ’til your hearing reappears!
Vidalia Onion Dicer. No More Tears!
Sauerkraut and mustard, ketchup, onions, relish—
a hotdog was created merely to embellish.
The tears came later, when the bill came. Go HERE to read the story of the thirty dollar hot dog. And you’ll just have to imagine the story of my my recent forty-dollar corn dog eaten at a hotel in Billings, Montana. Pictured below, its story is too painful to relate. No onions, this time.
Here is the link for the prompt, and here are more poems on the subject for dVerse Poets: Vidalia Onions
Short Vacation
Just for today, repress advice
that the world is not so nice.
For just one day, forget the slime.
Pretend the world’s once more sublime.
Let’s hop aboard our little dingy,
grab that picnic hamper thingy
and simply sail our fears away.
Escape the news, just for today.
The dVerse prompt today is “Vacation Reminiscences”
To see other poems written to this prompt, go HERE.
(This is a poem I wrote in 2018. I had forgotten it, so perhaps you will have forgotten it, too. A shortie, just like the vacation described.)
No Longer in the Present
In chairs around the tables of our favorite cafe,
our attention to each other has come to be passé
We are not present here and now. We’re all in other places
as we stare at our tiny screens, caught up in far off faces.
For dVerse Poets Quadrille Challenge, the prompt was “present.” HERE is Lillian’s challenge.
Inevitable
What folly that we thought our “we”
was something that would always be.
That lot we thought that we had cast
though once it was, was not to last,
for life is fated from the start,
conjoined hearts to rip apart.
Divorce or death, when it is done,
reduces two joined hearts to one.
For dVerse Poets Pub: “We” Couplets
To see other “We” poems go HERE.
Full-length Mirror
Mirror, mirror on the wall,
I’m addicted to y’all.
I can’t resist casting an eye
at my reflection passing by.
I’m so enamored of my face,
I cannot keep up my pace.
I must stop so I can see
the spectacular whole of me!
For the dVerse Poets Quadrille prompt: Mirror
This is one of three guitars I decorated for the “Guitar Gallery” in Ajijic. It was covered in mirrors and silver ornamentation. It was purchased by a gallery in Montana. If you ever see it, please let me know where its new home is.
If Only I Could Play Guitar
At times when now I only hum,
I’d pull out my guitar and strum;
and by the time that I’d be done,
completing my last pluck and run,
perhaps whoever sees and hears
would be reduced to sobs and tears
by every perfect tone and note,
the sentiments that I emote,
and tender lyrics that they knew
because of course I wrote them, too.
But I would be so humble still,
(my hubris would be less than nil)
that when they laud me at the Grammys,
I’ll be home curled up in my jammies—
still unaffected by my fame,
astonished at my new acclaim!
And when Bob Dylan asks me if
I’d like to come and share a riff,
of course I will not turn him down.
In spite of all my new renown,
I’ll take the time to show him some
new ways I’ve found to pick and strum.
Mick Jagger would hang out with me
(and Leo Kottke, probably.)
We’d get together to talk and jam.
The whole world would know who I am!
My fame would spread to presidents
and queens and Knob Hill residents.
I’d be so busy that I fear
my writing would fall in arrears.
I might forget to feed my dog,
forsake my friends, neglect my blog.
So all things taken to account,
as negatives begin to mount,
and though I know that I’d go far
should I decide to play guitar,
I’ve penned a note unto myself,
“Put that guitar back on the shelf!!!”
The dVerse Poets prompt is to write a poem about music. I admit that this is actually a poem I wrote nine years ago so I am guessing few who now read my blog have seen it before.
To read more poems on this subject go HERE.
Looking Out, Looking In
Folks look into my window every hour, every day
when they view my photographs or what I have to say.
It isn’t that I have a need to publicize or flout.
They are just a way to let a part of myself out.
When I’m outside the room of me, looking here and there,
it’s like I am a voyeur. I pry and prod and stare.
The window might steam over, obscuring what I see.
Then I wipe it clear again to see what I might be.
I really just write what I see as I’m peering in.
Each failure and each triumph, each kindness and each sin.
Each interior arrangement has some ugliness, some beauties.
I hold inside life’s pleasures, her sadness and her duties.
Each poem that I’ve written—be it whisper, be it shout––
is a way for me to let a part of myself out.
And if you choose to view them and see where I have been,
You’re standing at my window with permission to look in.
For dVerse Poets “Window-Gazing” prompt.
jdb photo
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 