Tag Archives: #FOWC

“Stirring the Pot” for FOWC

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Stirring the Pot

Chunks and grains swirl round and round. They form a muddy mass.
I keep my paddle churning them as I turn on the gas.
As all the chunks and  bits melt down, the volume now decreases.
I watch the whole mess carefully. My vigilance increases.
I see it all congealing—an oily inky sludge
that after lengthy stirring finally turns to fudge!
This horrid, bubbling, lumpy goo that appeared so pernicious,
in the end turns into something creamy, rich, delicious.

For FOWC the prompt is “Decrease.”

“Killing Time” for FOWC

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Meeting an Old Friend

Sixty years since you lived one block away.
In one hour we meet for brunch and memories.
Really my sister’s friend,
but in small towns, so devoid of much else to do,
people still living and moved away
become legends.
Your mother the nightclub singer
with the distinctive whistle that called you home
from behind trees and low in ditches at night,
the rest of us still caught in the thrlll of “ditch ‘em”–
our version of hide-and-seek.
I was the tag-a-long, the watcher
to your cowboy games
and the neighborhood plays
raising nickel-after-nickel for a memorial plaque
for the small boy killed from a fall from the tallest slippery slide.
That slide gone soon after, the plaque never installed,
as you were gone to a larger town
and voice lessons translating your pure high voice
to the more studied operatic perfection
of a sweet bottom in a tight girdle.
Still a small town girl at heart
now, all these years later,
you pull our somewhat
off-tune unschooled
voices to you
over years
and miles
to sing
the
old
school
song.

For FOWC the prompt is “Killed.”
The prompt word is just a tiny tragic detail in this nostalgic poem of a past
and a present that has now become the past as well.

Empty Nest for FOWC

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Empty Nest

I’ve been missing
that half-grown kissing
that lasts a minute
with chocolate in it.
Runny noses.
Heads of roses
picked off stems
like rarest gems
presented in
a tuna tin.
Priceless treasure
for my pleasure.

My life lacks
these loving smacks––
even a quickie,
albeit sticky
with peanut butter.
A parting stutter,
and then they’re gone
and off upon
contrivences new,
away from you,
taking their kisses
to other misses.

For Fandango’s FOWC the prompt is “Contrived.”

 

 

 

Fallen Memories for FOWC

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The prompt for FOWC is “energetic.”

Fallen Memories

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The monsoon rains come like a blessing, relieving the hot humidity, building the lushness of the rice terraces. Green everywhere. Energetic monkeys in the sacred monkey forest grab my postcards from my hands, leave teethmarks that will delight your children more than anything  I might say in the postcards I send as recompense for the father I have taken off with me to another part of the world.
We grow into these long hot humid afternoons that are washed away for a mere hour or so by the seasonal rains. Shedding clothes like years, we live naked underneath sarongs wrapped tightly for security. You sit on the porch, your soon-to-be-old man’s furry pot belly proudly obscuring the tightly wound tuck of your sarong. Thirty years later, it is that sarong made into a jalaba that I now wear almost daily,  hiding my soon-to-be-old lady’s pot as well.
How I cope with growing old without you is to sift through these memories like playing cards or photos fallen from old albums that have lost their ability to secure. As gullible as upon our first meeting, I wipe away your inadequacies as I’m sure you would have forgotten mine if you had been the one left sorting the fallen memories in the bottom of the album box.
Monsoons, I have been told, blow both moist and dry, as we did over those fifteen years. But we endured and built each other, coping as all of those in marriages judged successful by their lasting power do. Today you are the photo fallen from the album to the floor.  Quickly, as you fell from my life, I tuck you back securely into your correct place, placing on top new albums with new memories built on the foundation of you and all those memories a life, in the end, is made of.  You slip into that middle place old loved ones eventually  are relegated to. Our way to cope. Our way to live life instead of merely remembering it. Because that is what life is. We keep trying. We keep on.

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scan079Bali, 1996, Judy & Bob   

 

“Different” for the One Word Challenge

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When my husband and I did arts and crafts shows, at least once during every show, someone would wander into our booth, have a good look around, and as they left, shrug their shoulders and say, “Well it’s different!” (Usually pronounced “differnt.”) It actually was an “in” joke between those displaying their art—always interpreted as the speaker not understanding and not really liking the arts and crafts. Growing up in a small town, it was not the first time I’d heard the word in its derogatory sense. Thus, this poem: 

“Different”
When I finally made my way into the world so wide
I found myself exotic. Somehow transmogrified.
I liked being the foreigner, eminent in my oddity.
I found that being different was a definite commodity.
It was my prerogative to be just who I was
without creating currents in the small town buzz
of that place I had grown up in. My acts were less explosive.
My strange words now acceptable, not garnered as corrosive.
They thought my weird behavior typical of my nation—
those oddities of word choice and excesses of oration.
In finally being somewhere where “different” was not a sin,
the more different that I was, the more that I fit in!!!

For Fandango’s One Word Challenge: Anomalous. (deviating from what is standard, normal, or expected.)

An “Incident” of Road Rage for FOWC

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 Seven years ago, we were in Tonala—a village of many artisans near Guadalajara— and about to cross (walking) at an intersection when we heard a horn blaring. One car honked its horn and then zipped around the car in front of it, cutting it off, and crossed the road in front of us. Then the car it had passed started blaring its horn and sped after it. The car in front parked in the middle of the street, blocking the other car, which honked at it to move. The woman in the front car came barreling out of her car, yelling, ran back to the car behind her, reached through the window and slapped the driver in the face. This caused the driver’s husband to come barreling out of his car and the husband of the car in front to come running to defend his wife. Then the driver of the rear car exited, but unfortunately forgot to turn off her car or set her hand brake and the rear car went crashing into the front car! When we drove back by 5 minutes later there were two police cars, an ambulance and what looked like a swat team handling the matter. Talk about an “incident“! (We knew the ambulance was unwarranted unless the battle escalated after we left.)

 

For FOWC  the prompt is “incident.”

The Woman in the Mirror

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That Woman in the Mirror

The woman in the mirror has a better sense of humor than I do. This is because she does not need to depart to go into the world. She controls what is behind her and in front of her. Her wounds are my wounds. Her wrinkles are the selfsame wrinkles that fail to respond to the expensive face cream my sister sent me for my birthday. A gentle hint that my apparent age reveals her age, 4 years older.

The woman in the mirror does not necessarily reflect my feelings. She sometimes freezes in surprise at my tears. Chides me to get a hold on myself. She steams over at times and refuses to confront me. She does not flinch at sprays of toothpaste or a misting over of hairspray. She grows younger as the layers thicken. The woman in the mirror chides me to refresh my lipstick, define my eyebrows, pluck hair chins. Slowly, slowly, she ages—turning into first my mother and then my Grandmother, whom I had thought I had left so far behind. That self-pitying look? Shame on her, I chide. Those ever-lowering breasts, that additional girth? I will never get like that, I think, and then I remember.

There is a mirror in my house where my Grandmother cannot find me—a full-length miracle mirror where the one looking back at me is a woman in her 40’s, just barely overweight. She is my grandmother, stretched out—lengthened and diminished in width. It is the sort of mirror that was once seen in fancy dress shops that encouraged women to buy and buy. Like The Hollywood shop from fifty years ago, now long abandoned, shuttered and replaced by a Radio Shack…but whose charms can still lull me into a luxurious feeling that all is well. I am as I should be.

I flip off the bathroom light and move to the bedroom to catch a last glimpse of me in that magical full-length mirror, then climb into bed to dream and dream those slender dreams that, if we are lucky, are the ones that remain in our memory long after the mirrors have cracked and crumbled, like other more recent memories that fade quickly to give way to the past.

The FOWC prompt is “slender”.

Breaking Tradition for FOWC

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Breaking Tradition

A tradition is a habit that we’re loath to break,
a memory that our hearts continue stubbornly to make.
It is our continuity, our chain link to the past.
We make a resolution that it’s always going to last.

And yet our lives must segue to what future we might grow.
We cannot drag the past with us wherever we may go
lest it become a ball and chain that keeps us from what may
be an opportunity that may come our way.

Traditions are so comforting. They deal with what has been.
They make tiny departures seem a sort of sin,
but sometimes they just hold us back, keep us from being free,
and we must let loose of tradition to see what we can be.

Revenge can be tradition and one that’s hard to break,
causing backward facing hearts to fester and to ache.
As hard as it may be for us to turn around and heal,
it’s the only course that may enable us to feel.

When we peel away tradition, it gives hearts room to grow.
We plant seeds of new memories and tend them row on row.
The garden of our consciousness so fertile and so vast
that there is room for new traditions as alluring as the past.

 

For FOWC: Traditional

Technique: How Not to Walk a Crocodile for FOWC

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How Not to Walk a Crocodile

I’ll admit, it’s been a while
since I walked a crocodile,
so my technique is rather rusty
and my memory is dusty.
Still, I’ll tell you if you sit awhile
how not to walk a crocodile!

Don’t walk him through the butcher shop.
The butcher will just call a cop.
Don’t visit bakeries at all.
His roar will cause the cakes to fall.
That store where Mother bought her dress?
No place to walk your croc, I’d guess.

And though your pet may need some air,
it’s best that you don’t take him where
small dogs are left out for our viewing
just right for crocodile chewing.
Dog parks do not work for crocs
Find a new place for your walks.

Don’t walk him on your grandma’s floor.
She’ll sweep you both right out the door.
Don’t take him to your Sunday School.
He’s sure to break the Golden Rule.
And if you take him to the deli,
no saying what ends in his belly.

I’ll share a secret with you now.
It is, I really don’t know how
to take a crocodile for a walk.
All of this has just been talk.
And can I guess by your big smile,
you do not have a crocodile?

For FOWC the prompt is technique

Sticking to the Straight and Narrow, for FOWC, July 28, 2024

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Sticking to the Straight and Narrow


Sticking to the Straight and Narrow
(Mother Superior’s Rejoinder)

Please do not lollygag. There’s no time more.
We’re closing the shutters and locking the door.
Wipe those dreams from your brain, for it is our fear
that your thoughts will diverge from the prim and austere.
Make sure your spirit is pearl white and pure
with no sinful streaks to compete with demure.
Deadly sins number from one up to seven,
and striated souls will not make it to heaven.

This is one of my favorite photos, taken at the Shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City. I love the one nun on the left, turned around to look back, plus the one with her arms crossed in back. I should perhaps crop it a bit on the right. Will next time I use it.

 

For FOWC, Narrow