Picky Eater
I can’t stand mushrooms, abhor liver.
To dine on brains just makes me shiver.
Drinking milk’s against my wishes.
Fish is simply for the fishes.
Raw tomatoes? I’d rather die.
And one more mouthful I won’t try?
I have no taste for humble pie!
All paintings by Betty Peterson. Click on photos of paintings to enlarge. The reflection of my hands superimposed over the hand in her painting was purely accidental, but I love the implication of our work being combined in this piece. R.I.P. Betty, friend of twenty years. The one sketch and watercolor of me was done in a small bar/restaurant in Tequila as we were waiting for my broken-down van to be fixed on our way to the U.S. The other painting of me she gave to me as a surprise, using a photo I had in my blog. She added Morrie, not realizing this was a photo of me in my wedding dress in 1987. Love how Morrie was suddenly transported back in time.
Conversing with Betty
You are the first person I see every morning—
there on my wall and hanging from my curtain rods––
your heart and talent painted onto watercolor paper,
matted, framed and preserved under glass.
Your freed spirit spreads out into my room like memory––
the sorties to find pre-Columbian treasures,
van breakdowns on the road to Tequila and road trips to the border,
shared secrets, successes and heartbreaks.
My friend, your life expired while mine still runs its course,
but you have left the women you gave birth to
behind you on paper and on canvas.
Their eyes follow me upon my rising, look over me in my sleep.
In them, I retain the best of you
here in my heart and on my walls,
grateful to have you still around me,
conversing in our favorite language.
Purple Prose
Grandma grinds plums in her conical grinder, shredding the flesh from the pits. Under the table, my little brother sits, purple around his mouth from taste-testing the plums he no doubt earlier helped her pick. A stream of sugar on the table is a roadway for tiny black ants.
My father pushes a cooling cup of Postum closer to my grandmother as he resumes the story I’ve interrupted. It is another “Deafy Sterner” story, and he emulates the high explosive accent of this man from his past that I’ve never met, yet know so well.
I dash to my room, having just minutes to prepare for the dance before my car full of friends arrives, honking the horn. My Grandmother begins another story about the old country as I tear off my school jeans. I dress in their stories—patterned and purple as night.
Below is the dVerse Poets prompt today. The quote we are to use in our short prose piece is by Kimberly Blaeser from her poem “When We Sing of Might.” Image by Engin Akyurt on Unsplash.
Photo of Kimberly Blaeser from University of Wisconsin
Incorporate the above quote into a piece of prose. This can be either flash fiction, non-fiction, or creative non-fiction, but it must be prose! Not prose poetry, and not a poem. And it must be no longer than 144 words, not including the title. (It does not have to be exactly 144 words, but it can’t exceed 144 words.)
The Dance of the Terrible Middle
Caught in the terrible middle of the animal,
in the white nerve of my sleeping grandfather,
I go with the signs of night in a straight line,
eluding the contented star animals,
breathing with the transformation of their high place.
The high mountains are my prison,
the fear of your love my punishment.
I occasionally give in to thoughts of you.
The ghost of your memory is in my center.
We are separate, but
in each of us is the house
where both of us live.
In the table of your hair,
in the locked room,
to the living heart of the beast,
we come for charity.
The sweet scent of reason
dances to my middle self.
It is of the moon,
but equally of books––
a mongrel with its tail between its legs
howling a mortal solo of our split lives
and our separate deaths.
The rolling body of the star,
my body spinning to the paradox
of what I could believe in––
the faded ochre of the one truth of your friendship,
the disparate truth of my grandfather.
All out of line, unparallel.
Lover with your full nights’ sleep
and half of your life lost to this sleep,
you dream of three futures while
I dance the tango of the terrible middle.
Missed Americas
Now that they are runway-bound,
those extravagantly gowned
are oft-driven to expound
with words not overly profound
about beliefs they’ve newly found
(overheard and swiftly downed)
just because they love the sound,
hoping in the final round,
their golden tongues will get them crowned.
For the dVerse Poets Quadrille Challenge: Crown.
Image from BBC.
“Baptism on the line, also called equatorial baptism, is an alternative initiation ritual sometimes performed as a ship crosses the Equator, involving water baptism of passengers or crew who have never crossed the Equator before. The ceremony is sometimes explained as being an initiation into the court of King Neptune.” Wikipedia
Baptism at Sea
We were happy at Christmas. Pale Andy didn’t dance, but moon makes even mouse-hair gold, and it was golden hair that swung to breeze. Out on the deck, baptized by salt spray, we watched dolphins spread out in a line, racing our boat to the equator and winning, flipping tails and turning in one fell swoop, synchronized in their returning to where we’d all just been.
But we went farther south, turned west, then up again on Africa’s farther coast.
We cross a fine line,
speeding into tomorrow,
courted by the sea.
This is Fran’s prompt for dVerse Poets: This week, Let’s give thanks! Write a haibun about one person, place, or thing for which you give thanks. It could be your favorite playlist or album, a holiday getaway, childhood home, or someone truly special to you. Whomever, or whatever, you decide to give thanks for, let your haibun manifest that to us!
For those new to haibun, the form consists of one to a few paragraphs of prose—usually written in the present tense—that evoke an experience and are often non-fictional/autobiographical. They may be preceded or followed by one or more haiku—nature-based, using a seasonal image—that complement without directly repeating what the prose stated. The haiku is a Japanese poetic form that consists of three lines, with five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third.
In the Mirror
Her rag doll image
rejects the girls room twitters,
counts to five and says hello
to the new girl she sees
in the mirror who doesn’t care.
The dVerse Poets prompt is to write a Wayra poem. The elements of the Wayra are:
1. a pentastich, a poem in 5 lines.
2. syllabic, 5-7-7-6-8
3. unrhymed.
A further request is to use onomatopoeia.
Since I’m addicted to writing to prompts, I am randomly choosing prompt words for myself as well: by letting my eyes fall randomly on words on this page or my desktop. Here are the prompt words: twitter, count, image, hello, rag, rejects.
Categories of Terror
Footsteps behind you in a midnight park
or the sentence of standing center stage.
A shadow, darker, moving through shadows,
that one voice, remembered, calling your name.
Echoes that follow you through the years.
Only one terror worse.
Alone in the whole wide world.
No more morality or fame or love or blame.
Now, what is the purpose of your being?
Zombie Ball
Slice of liver, ooze of spleen—
add them to the soup tureen.
See all the pallid corpses preen?
They seek to woo the zombie queen.
Complexions chalky white or green
through the haunted house careen,
much rowdier on Halloween
than all the holidays between.
For dVerse Poets Quadrille Challenge: Careen
Dental Discourse
She could not stand the sad sad sight
of his horrendous overbite.
She arranged to take him to a
dentist, thinking he could do a
makeover.
She asked the doc what he would charge
to make his overhang less large.
The price he set to make each tooth less
was, I fear, greedy and ruthless
overkill.
Thus began their drawn-out dicker
that I think would have gone quicker
if his teeth had been less icky,
and the job a much less tricky
overhaul.
After much talk, they struck a deal,
both thinking that they’d made a steal.
But then with little else to do,
she said if he attempted to
overcharge,
she would have his license lifted
no matter how bloody gifted
he might have been (when this all ends)
at cutting down her toothy friend’s
hangover.
For dVerse Poets prompt: Compound Word Verse Image by Diana Polekhina on Unsplash
This form consists of 5 five-line stanzas with aabb rhyme schemes, each containing 8 syllables and each stanza concluding with a three-syllable compound word that had one element the same as all other compound words in the final lines of the stanzas. Phew!
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 