Tag Archives: NaPoWriMo

NaPoWriMo Day 30: Ciao, Adios, Auf Wiedersehen, Adieu

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Ciao, Adios, Auf Wiedersehen, Adieu

To NaPoWriMo we must say
a fond “Goodbye” on this last day.
I‘m able to, for I have found
the strength to say it the whole world round.

When I was young, I traveled far
from Germany to Zanzibar.
Australia, Bali, France and Spain,
to Africa and back again.

And though I mostly loved them all,
from Venice to the Taj Mahal,
as my departure time grew nigh
I had to voice a sad goodbye.

To Ethiopia I strayed.
For eighteen months I stayed and stayed;
and when I had to leave too soon,
I had to say “dehena hun.”

In college days, when I was young,
German was my foreign tongue;
but when to Frankfurt wir mussten gehen
I just remembered, “Auf Wiedersehen.”

The French were rude and cold and snotty.
They mocked my accent and were haughty,
so while I had to bid “adieu,”
I’d have preferred to say, “pee-ew.”

Florence thrilled me from the start.
Their lasagna is a work of art.
When I left, they all said, “Ciao.”
Their kitties, though, all said, “Miao.”

I never went to Israel
but nonetheless, I’m proud to tell,
the rabbi books? Read every tome.
So I know how to say “Shalom.”

Though “Arigato” is bound to do
when you want to say thank you,
“Sayonara” is the way to go
to bid farewell in Tokyo.

Bali’s full of dance and art
that treat your eyes and fill your heart.
I must admit, I had a ball
before I said “Selamat tinggal.”

Mexico was saved for last
And now I fear my lot is cast
Since “Adios” I cannot say,
I’ve decided I will stay!

(for the sake of pronunciation, I have taken the liberty of adding an extra “e” to “dehna hun.”)

You might have already guessed that on this last day of the NaPoWriMo challenge, the prompt was to write a farewell poem.

NaPoWriMo Day 29: Chew the Train

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Chew the Train

A metaphor is a freight train
that gets us within 30 miles
of our final destination,
but we still have to catch a taxi to get all the way there.
And a simile is just a metaphor whose brakes have failed.
If we know that peanut butter
is like a circus on a tired tongue,
does it bring us any closer to the smell of peanut butter?
Elephants and sawdust
and sequined camisoles flavored
with the sweat of 100 performances?
Is that what peanut butter smells like?
Does it taste like candy apples
and too-bitter mustard
on stale buns
and hot dogs turned too long
upon the rollers of their grill?
Does peanut butter feel
like the unoiled bump of the Ferris wheel?
Does it sound like a calliope
or look like an ice cream cone?
Peanut butter is peanut butter.
I rest my case.

So how am I going to write a poem
without metaphors and similes?
How can I write verse
while telling the pure unadulterated truth?
How can I make you taste a poem
that is only itself?

How can I be Janis Joplin
when I’ve been taught to be Joni Mitchell?
A Rose is a Rose is a Rose,
said Gertrude Stein,
predating my insight
by a generation or two.
But this isn’t Paris,
and folks in Mexico
want a dollop of figurative language
in their poetry.

So let me say
that my mind is a busy beaver,
trying to fulfill this impossible task
of twenty little things.
I’m expected to imagine
how peanut butter sounds.
The sucking gumbo sound
of South Dakota mud
or thick mucus of a cold?
Anything but appetizing.
Ay, Caramba! you might say,
but if you were Australian,
you would say, “Don’t come the raw prawn on me, mate,”
and you would mean
“Don’t try to pull the wool over my eyes,”
or “Don’t try to con me, man.”

So let me just say that peanut butter is made
by grinding peanuts so finely
that all the oil comes out
and it acquires the consistency of butter.
It isn’t like butter
nor is it butter.
It acquires the consistency of butter.
This is literal fact.
But to know the taste of peanut butter,
you will need to spread a bit upon a cracker
and have a taste, or grab a finger full.
What you will taste will be peanut butter.
The truth of it. Its reality.

And only then will I tell you
that literal truth doesn’t always tell
the whole truth.

My friend says
it is the peyote leached into the soil
the corn grows from
that gives Mexicans
such a remarkable sense of color.
The bright pigments of imagination
flood his canvasses.
His peyote dreams leak out into the real world
and wed it to create one world.
“Peyote dream” becomes its opposite—
a freight train taking us into the universal truth.
A larger reality.
This stalk of corn, this deer,
this head of amaranth,
all beckon, “Climb aboard.”

So when you bite into a taco
or tamale, when the round taste of corn
meets your tongue, and pleasure tries to flow
like a lumpy river down your throat,
look up at the poet standing in the shadows.
She’ll call herself Remi if you ask,
but do not ask. Instead, look deeper
into the shadows she wears around her like a cloak
and see that it is light that creates shadow.
See the many colors that create the black.
Follow where the corn beckons you to go––
into the other world of poetry and paint
and dance and music. Hot jazz with a mariachi beat.
Chew that train that takes you deeper. Hop aboard
the tamale express and you will ride into your
new life. It will be like your old life magnified
and lit by multicolored lights and the songs of merry-go-rounds
and when you bite into your taco, it will taste
like cotton candy and a snow cone
and your whole life afterwards will be a train that takes you nowhere
except back into yourself—a Ferris wheel
spinning you up to your heights and down again, with every turn,
the gears creaking “Que le vaya bien.”
I hope it goes well with you
and that you see the light
within the shadow
and the colors
in the corn.

glass-gem-corn-2-460

Today’s prompt is called the “Twenty Little Poetry Projects,” and was originally developed by Jim Simmerman. Here are the twenty little projects themselves — the challenge is to use them all in one poem:

1. Begin the poem with a metaphor.
2. Say something specific but utterly preposterous.
3. Use at least one image for each of the five senses, either in succession or scattered randomly throughout the poem.
4. Use one example of synesthesia (mixing the senses).
5. Use the proper name of a person and the proper name of a place.
6. Contradict something you said earlier in the poem.
7. Change direction or digress from the last thing you said.
8. Use a word (slang?) you’ve never seen in a poem.
9. Use an example of false cause-effect logic.
10. Use a piece of talk you’ve actually heard (preferably in dialect and/or which you don’t understand).
11. Create a metaphor using the following construction: “The (adjective) (concrete noun) of (abstract noun) . . .”
12. Use an image in such a way as to reverse its usual associative qualities.
13. Make the persona or character in the poem do something he or she could not do in “real life.”
14. Refer to yourself by nickname and in the third person.
15. Write in the future tense, such that part of the poem seems to be a prediction.
16. Modify a noun with an unlikely adjective.
17. Make a declarative assertion that sounds convincing but that finally makes no sense.
18. Use a phrase from a language other than English.
19. Make a non-human object say or do something human (personification).
20. Close the poem with a vivid image that makes no statement, but that “echoes” an image from earlier in the poem.

 

 

NaPoWriMo Day 28: Looking Glass Menagerie

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Looking Glass Menagerie

I am trying to escape the menagerie—
all those selves I hold in front of me
as well as the ones I have let escape.
Those that run ahead—
the ones that are my future selves—
are here, hidden in the portrait that you see.
Domineering, perhaps. But seasoned with
an awareness of what might have produced
all of the parts of myself I try to reign in.
This has produced a certain slowness to connect.
The natural is seasoned with a desire to honor dreams
of what I hope to be. When I look in the mirror,
I see them all: my mother and my grandmother
and my sisters. We demand, are stubborn.
Sometime we are martyrs, stifling tears.
Then suddenly, I pass them by like memories
of nightmares: all the anxiety attacks,
illnesses and heartbreak.
We are all wonderful performers,
using bad luck to fuel good.
The belles of our own ball,
we push back the grim news
of what we fear we really are.
Headstrong, we reach for what we can be.
Utterly addicted to change,
Tony or no Tony,
we are the stars of our own lives.

The prompt today was “to find a news article and to write a poem using (mostly, if not only) words from the article! You can repeat them, splice them, and rearrange them however you like. Although the vocabulary may be “just the facts,” your poem doesn’t have to be — it doesn’t even have to be about the subject of the news article itself.”

With massive tornadoes, politician campaign funding fraud, murder and mayhem being the main stories of the day, I was hard-pressed to find any good news to write about. Finally, I chose a very long theater review in the NY Times which I picked at like a foraging chicken, picking a word here, a word there. Above is the resulting poem.

Here is a link to the NY Times article from which  I drew words : NY Times Article

NaPoWriMo Day 26: Pied Beauty II

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Pied Beauty II

Thanks be to Sara Lee for appled things—
For pies, for apple fritters and for thin-rolled strudel crust;
For pastries of the fruit of Eve and sauce it swims within;
Fresh-cooked in ovens, how their sweet juice sings;
The sugar clotted and pierced— place it on plate we must;
And all taste, for how can tackling it be such a sin?

All things made of flour and Crisco and of apples sweet;
(How can they by nutritionists be so sorely cussed
With words professing they won’t make us thin?)
With their tart flavor are sure our lips to meet;
And meet again.

—Judy Dykstra-Brown

Our prompt today was to write a curtal sonnet in the style of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ famous poem “Pied Beauty”. This form consists of a first stanza of six lines followed by a second stanza of five, closing with a half-line. The rhyme scheme is abcabc defdf. I chose to make it a parody of Pied Beauty as well.

And now, the original:

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

–Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

NaPoWriMo Day 25: She

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She

She was fingers drumming lightly on my arm while I fell asleep,
a box of candy that my dad had to hide or it would be gone by morning,
fingerprints of bright coral rouge staining the top of her powder puff.
She was a girl’s rhymed diary that told of filling the church elders’ hats full of Bon Ami powder.
A fatherless girl sleeping with her sisters on a sun porch in Kansas.
A sister of a girl who wore a nightgown to a ball,
the sister of a man who couldn’t stop drinking,
the sister of a girl who died in the great flu epidemic of 1918
and of a father who died in the great flu epidemic of 1918.
She was the sister of a woman who died in childbirth
and the sister-in-law of a man she did not marry to raise her sister’s child.
A woman who liked radish and onion sandwiches
and cornbread and orange Jello with shredded carrots and pineapple.
She was a girl late to marry who lied about her age until in her nineties.
A woman who never told her real name to daughters
until her daughters were women as well.

She was a good friend who never revealed secrets.
A woman who finished her housework quickly to lie on the divan and read.
A woman with a mangle who ironed the body and arms of shirts
while her daughters ironed the collars and cuffs.
A member of the Progressive Study Club who wrote all the plays for State Conference.
The woman who wrote the play, “The Hillbilly Wedding”
that started out, “Ye critters and Ye varmints, we are are gathered here today
to wed this man and woman in hillbilly sorta way.
H’ebenezer, Hannabella, do ye promise to be true and always love each other?”
“We do, We do.”
She was the mother who played silly tricks on her pre-teenage daughter
and hid in the closet to see if they worked.
The woman who had all her teeth pulled on the same day and nearly bled to death.
A town girl who lived in a tiny trailer with my father on the empty prairies of Dakota
and traveled from dam building site to site with him the first year they were married.
The town girl with no bathroom, so they had to park by service stations to use theirs.
The girl who counted to see how long she could hold her hand in the oven
to determine when the heat was right to bake cakes in her wood-burning oven
and who swam with her mother-in-law in a large stock tank.

She was the woman who took her daughter out on summer nights to look for U.F.O.’s.
The woman who never learned how to play the piano
but insisted her daughter take lessons for 8 long years,
and the woman whose daughter never really learned how to play the piano.
She was the trainer of dogs and parakeets and baby bunnies
rescued from the prairie by my dad.
The assembler of Halloween costumes and the decorator of Christmas trees.
She was the woman whose Christmas decorations one year were entirely silver and pink
and who made an elaborate chandelier ornament out of sprayed coat hangers.
The woman who drove her daughters 60 miles to buy saddle shoes
and 150 miles in the opposite direction to see an eye doctor.
She was the woman whose husband loved babies—
the woman who collected spare babies in restaurants
to take them to her husband to hold
while their mothers finished their meals.

She was the woman who showed her daughters how to make
Philippine lanterns to use as May baskets.
The woman who dressed up as a witch for Halloween and was so good in her role
that she sent children screaming down the sidewalk.
The woman who took off her mask for the rest of the night.
She was the woman who made up long rhyming poems about what pieces of the body
were being handed around the circle in a darkened room on Halloween:
a peeled grape, a bowl of spaghetti, a piece of liver.
She was the woman who covered lamps with sheets and pinned on
paper ghost eyes, nose,mouth.
and who collected corn stalks for decorations.
She was the woman who loved Halloween
but loved Christmas even more.
The woman who hid grass nests full of jelly beans and sugar eggs
all over the house every Easter.
The woman who found one of her own nests when decorating for Christmas.

She was the woman who loved to read who could read her daughters like a book.
The woman who could sometimes read her husband like a book—
the woman who said, “What did you do? You brought home another animal, didn’t you?”
the day my dad entered the living room with a sheepish look,
even though he’d left the rubber boot with the tiny puppy inside in the mud room.
She was the woman who had said the same thing
when he brought home the bunnies, the kittens, the tiny mole, the raccoon and the magpie.
She was the woman with the quilted satin robe with the long train
that the baby bunny hopped up on for a ride around the house.
The woman who taught Chipper, the parakeet, to say,
“Hello, Betty Jo. Judy Kay. Judy Kay. Patti Adair. Gee you’re cute!
Gimmee a kiss (kissing sounds). Baaaaaaad Benny!”
She was the woman named Pat whose husband was named Ben.
They were the couple whom later we later learned were really
Eunice Lydia and Gerben Sylvanus.
She was the wife of a rancher but gave him three girls.
They were the ones to insist all three girls go to college.
She was the mother whose travels had extended from Kansas to South Dakota to Iowa
who gave permission for her daughter
to set out to travel around the world
when she was still in her teens.
She was the woman who convinced her husband to move to Arizona
the year her youngest went off to college.
The woman who sold her mangle and became a fashion plate again in her 50’s.
She was a woman with four swimsuits
who did 1,000 exercises in her Arizona pool every day.
A woman who went dancing every Friday night,
who tried to take up golf and failed,
who lay on her chaise on her patio and read books
while her husband went to the corner café to regale his new audience with old stories.
She was the woman who flew to Australia to visit her daughter.
The woman who traded houses every few years
for the fun of buying and decorating a new one.
She was the grieving wife who said, “Ben always hated that clock!”
and watched it fall off the wall.
She was a girl and woman and old woman who believed in ghosts
and who slept near Hadrian’s Wall in the haunted room
of an eleventh century Abbey in Scotland.
She was a woman who played with a cat on Dylan Thomas’s sea wall
and who slept in a room over a pub as well as the Grosvenor House in London,
where she saw Garfunkel walk across the hotel lobby.

She was a woman who liked to sit and look at the decorations in her living room.
An old woman who drank aloe vera and vinegar
and did leg exercises in her bed each morning.
An old woman who got a machine to help her read.
An old woman who listened to the news all day when her eyesight failed.
A woman who bought a breathing machine when her breath failed
and walked around her condo trailing a long rubber oxygen tube.
An old woman who lived to be 91
and who lived alone till the day she died.
A woman who put on makeup and jewelry and who dressed up
every day until the day she died.

I was her collaborator in writing silly rhyming poems to send to my sisters in college.
I was her collaborator the day she dressed like an old woman
and sat in my dad’s chair,
setting him up by saying, “Dad, there’s an old woman here,
and I can’t get her to say anything.”
When she sat hunched over in her white wig,
her shoulders shaking with suppressed laugher,
he said, “We’d better call the sheriff. I think she’s having a fit.”
She was the one who actually never grew old in my father’s eyes.
The one who lived alone for nearly 30 years after he died.
She was the one who wanted a boyfriend to take her dancing whom she didn’t have to kiss.
The one who wore the Evening in Paris perfume
I bought her every mother’s day
until I was in my teens.
The one who fed the baby coon with a doll bottle
and bathed and baby powdered it every day
and put it underneath my covers when I had the measles.
The one who went from matronly house dresses
to wearing my castoff college clothes.
The one who created a whole new life
when her children left and pulled my father after her.

She is the one who has been gone for 13 years.
The one who very rarely passes through my thoughts.
The mother who did what the best mothers always do.
Who released her children into the world and let them go.

Here is a link to the photo of my mother I wanted to use with this poem three years ago when I wrote it but couldn’t find then : https://judydykstrabrown.com/2018/08/01/parental-support/

Today’s prompt was to write a poem using Anaphora–a literary term for the practice of repeating certain words or phrases at the beginning of multiple clauses or, in the case of a poem, multiple lines.

NaPoWriMo Day 24: Building Walls

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Our prompt today was to write a poem that features walls, bricks, stones, arches, or the like.

Building Walls

The new neighbors are not friendly.
From their side of my wall,
they have reached over my wall to sever the vines
that have covered my tall palms
that abut the wall
that has separated our properties
for thirteen years—
those maroon bougainvillea vines,
stretched ten feet wide
by covering layers of blue thunbergia,
formed a community that housed families
of birds and possums and possibly
a very large but harmless snake.
I saw it cross my patio once,
the dog and I turning our heads toward each other,
exchanging looks of surprise
like characters from a stage play or a comic book,
her so startled and curious that she followed,
nose to the ground, to the brush beside the
wall the snake had vanished into,
but never issued a bark.

At night the palm trees
and their surrounding cloaks
would give mysterious rustlings that
aroused the barking of the dogs
and I’d let them in—the pup to sleep
in the cage that was his security
and my security as well—against chewed
Birkenstocks and ruined Oaxacan rugs
and treats purloined from the little silver
garbage can that held the kitchen scraps
saved for Yolanda’s pigs.

Along with the vines,
the new neighbors cut the main stalk of the bougainvillea
that grew to fifteen feet on my side of the wall
and furnished privacy from the eyes
of those standing on their patio,
ten feet above mine,
so that now their patio looks directly down
on my pool and hot tub and into my bedroom,
their new bright patio light shines all night long
into my world formerly filled
with stars and moonlight and tree rustlings.

The old wall has revealed its cracks and colors
from several past paintings
that were later made unnecessary by its cloak of vines.
Now an ugly wall that  separates  neighbors,
it echoes the now-dead vines that stretch 80 feet up
to the fronds of the palms.
It takes three men three days to cut the refuse of
the dry vines down from the trees,
two truckloads to bear the cuttings away.

The dogs still bark, but the possum and the birds
have gone to some other haven,
and the men come to erect the metal trellis,
12 feet high, above the top of my low wall.
I hope the bougainvillea will grow
to cover it this rainy season,
building a lovelier wall
between neighbors who still have not met
by their preference, not mine,
causing me to wonder
if I really am as welcome in this country
as I have felt for all these years.
“My neighbors are the same,” my friend tells me.
“They do not really want us here,
and if you think they do,
you are deluding yourself.”

Thirteen years in Mexico. I miss my old neighbors,
best friends who would come to play Mexican Train at 5 minutes notice.
I miss their little yipping dog and the splash of their fountain
that the new neighbors ripped out and threw away
and the bougainvillea that drooped over my wall into their world.
“Scorpions!” the new neighbors decreed, and lopped it off wall-high.
It was a wall more than doubled in its height
by a vine as old as my life in Mexico
that can now be peered over
even from their basement casita.

With old walls gone,
higher walls of misunderstanding
have been constructed.
Each weekend their family streams in from Guadalajara.
Children laugh, adults descend the stairs
to their hot tub down below.
When I greet them, they do not smile.
I have painted the old wall,
now so clearly presented to view,
and I have taken to wearing a swimsuit in my hot tub,
waiting for my new wall to grow higher.

Before detail of tree vine

“Before” detail of tree vine and hedge.

"After" detail of tree vine.

“After” detail of tree vine.

DSC09288

Constructing a higher wall to limit their view into my yard.

DSC09907

Trimming the dead vines after their gardener reached over the wall to cut it’s main trunk.

DSC09878

Detail of my wall with the dead vines stripped away, prepped for repainting.

(Happy Ending: Eight years after writing the poem you have just read, I now have new neighbors, the bougainvillea and thunbergia have grown to cover the new trellis wall, and they love the vines that actually flower more profusely on their side than mine.)

NaPoWriMo Day 23: The Separation Continues

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Today’s prompt was to find a poem in a foreign language that we do not understand and to write a poem based on what we imagine that poem might mean. I’ve placed my “translation” first. The Croatian poem I translated is below it.

THE SEPARATION CONTINUES

Pry back the blackness spread over the flattened
world, using the voice of poetry for your rake—
poetry no traveler can understand or translate.
Poetry no one knows the cost of—neither
posted propaganda nor cheap
joke, but rather words to soothe bad
kisses or portraits of topless women,
naked out of necessity
for a piece of bread or for a
drink: cheap vodka or blackberry wine. Yes,
this afternoon, crossing the tavern where love died,
and, coincidentally, where he first knew he loved me,
I tasted the rich baklava I used to serve him,
and we raised a glass to him
who will never write poetry again.

2014, Judy Dykstra-Brown
USA/Mexico

 

VRT FINCI CONTINIJEVIH

prije nego li sjednem za ovaj
stol, oprat ću ruke, poezija
ne trpi traktate o sebi, za-
gristi svježu kost, ona ne
dopušta da propadne u barutu
jezika, prahu i bromu to malo
kiše, potražit ću toplu ženu,
jer nijednu riječ nikada nećeš
dodirnuti da te ona ne pita o
sebi, zatvoriti oči, zaroniti, i,
tada, kreću s tavana svi mrtvi,
iz začuđenih usta isplove crni
ozbiljni barkaroli i širokim
zamasima pjevaju glasno
nad otvorima neba

© 1998, Miroslav Mićanović
Croatia

Addendum to NaPoWriMo Day 9 Post: I’ll Leave the Light On

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For our day 9 post, we were to post a poem that incorporated at least 5 song titles.  I incorporated more and offered a prize for the person who could find the most and promised to publish the solution later.  Well, I failed to do that but I am remedying it today.  Below is the poem with song titles in boldface.  If you count them, you will see there are 50!!! 

The winner was “forgottenman,” who didn’t find all of them but found more than most.  He says no fair to use one-word titles, but I wrote the poem and I make the rules.  You won anyway, Forgottenman!  (See his blog at okcforgottenman.wordpress.com.)

I’ll Leave the Light On

This is a world for the knowing,
and everybody knows
that if we would try just a little bit harder
that we wouldn’t feel so trapped.
yet still we cry baby, cry.

You think he’s gonna carry you home
to China?
It’s not like that, darlin’.
It’s more likely
that you’re walkin’ blind.
You will be two marionettes
on the Twickeham Ferry.

Where can I go?
you ask,
trapped,
a woman left lonely
in winter.

What you gonna do––
let your wedding dress
carry you home
to the cold mountains?

Run, baby, run.
Let the black ladder
be your museum of flight.
At heart you were always
a circus girl,
anyway––
that woman on the tier
far above desolation row.

When were you happy?
I know you keep me in your heart,
the one who loves you the most.
I am in your mind,
in the wind.
The memory of me
is better than love.

This is a call—
a broken man’s lament.
I hope it will
carry you home.
Walk away, Renée.
Walk away

You’ll accompany me.
We can take the long way home

 

(There are 50 song titles.  If you came up one short,  Cry Baby and Cry are two separate titles)

NaPoWriMo Day 21: A New York Sorta Poem

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Today’s prompt was to write a “New York School” poem using the recipe found here. The New York School is the name by which a group of poets that all lived in New York in the 1950s and 1960s. The most well-known members are Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch. Their poems are actually very different from one another, but many “New York School” poems display a sort of conversational tone, references to friends and to places in and around New York, humor, inclusion of pop culture, and a sense of the importance of art (visual, poetic, and otherwise). Here’s a fairly representative example.

In following the recipe, you can include as many (or as few) of the listed elements as you wish.

(I suggest you click on the hyperlinks above to better understand the poem below—unless you are such a scholar of poetry that you already know what a New York poem is.)

A New York Sorta Poem

Okay, Dear Readers.
Linda Crosfield and Ogginblog and InfiniteZip
and all you poets and internet marketers
out in Cyberspace who deign to visit
my humble blog,
I am lying abed in San Juan Cosala,
Mexico. It is a fresh day and
thermal water spurts and sputters
into my pool.
This is not fucking New York
but neither is it fucking small town South Dakota,
population 700 and more people than trees.
(Pardon me, okcforgottenman, RepoComedy and Brian Marggraf,
since I have grown dependent on these daily prompts,
I am a prisoner to profanity this day, as it
is a vital ingredient of the recipe.)

It is Monday, April 21, 2014—my thirteenth year
in this same house on a mountain
over a dying lake.
Now, I want to ask you, Ann Garcia
and Patti A. and Shawn L. Bird,
have I ever told you about the day
my neighbors streamed down from the hill
to dance on the dome of my house?
Neighbors had complained about children
who had climbed over the wall and walked
up the outside steps to the upstairs patio and then
run up the dome to jump and stomp.
When they ran home to complain to parents,
the parents came, and older brothers and sisters
and an uncle, and in solidarity, they all climbed over the wall
to ascend the dome and dance and stomp and jump up and down,
but the bricks held and the dome did not suffer
as they faced off the neighbor and danced.
This was before I bought the house, when it was
sitting idle, but it was part of my house’s history
that it lived before it began to live my life.

Those children now grown and departed,
only my dog, Frida the Akita, rests or stands barking on that dome
so that she has grown in fame among passersby and
I have become the owner of the “dome dog”
more famous than me, like having a notorious
older brother or sister, I am more a part of her
identity than she mine.
But I digress (with a fine excuse for doing so—part of the
recipe) and would get back to the point
if there were a point other than using
profanity and giving numerous references
to this place as far from New York City as one could get.
(Actually, that in itself is not precisely true. Antarctica
is further away, and probably Katmandu.)
Which is a big coincidence, since the message
that just popped up on my screen is from my friend
Patty, who worked in Antarctica, and so is an authority
on the subject of being far from New York City, but being
born in Wyoming, was an expert on this subject anyway,
from birth. (And coincidentally, again, today is her birthday,
so I wish I could send her a giant macaroon like the ones
we bought at the beach in La Manzanilla just a few weeks ago.)

So dear reader, Brian Moore or Kavalcade Krew,
had you ever heard of New York Poetry and if not,
have you made any sense of what I’ve written so far?
One hour ago, I was sleeping and I, too, had never heard
of this curious genre. Two days ago I awakened
to an earthquake’s vibrations and then today,
I find this weird recipe for poetry awaiting me as a prompt
and I do not know which has been more the more discombobulating of the two.
And dear readers, Lena or eyewillnot cry,
Are you old enough to have heard of Glen Yarbrough
and if you have, would you be surprised to hear
he rearranged my sound system and offered to record
the musical versions of my poetry to include with my book
and would have done so if they hadn’t messed up his
vocal cords in surgery? This is the only famous person
I’ve met in Mexico, except for Barbara Kingsolver
who wrote me a letter in green ink.
Or perhaps I am imagining the color of the ink. I have
that letter somewhere, buried in a file or a pile.

Pop culture I may have to leave out of my poem,
unless you will accept my mention of my poetry group,
The Not Yet Dead Poets. We have three Pops and two
Moms in the group which makes us sound more like
a singing group from the seventies. And in not being
dead, we sing of life. Or I could mention the poetry wall
near the malecón in the pueblo down below. With poetry
all in espanol (which isn’t capitalized in Spanish),
I think I should add a short poem or two in English
(which isn’t capitalized in Spanish, either, so pardon me for inconsistency)
to declare solidarity with Mario Puglisi or Isidro or Eduardo
or any of the other fine artists and poets of San Juan Cosala
who have welcomed me and included me in their shows
for which I am grateful as it makes me just a tad less gringa
and a bit more cabrona, which they assure me is not a
derisive label when spoken in the correct context and tone of voice.

So, robert okaji, fine poet, and Andrea Giang of Cooking with a Wallflower,
are you following this prompt
and, if so, is your poem getting to be as long as mine? I have
this feeling that the real New York poets didn’t have a recipe
to follow and that their poetry was more like discovering
leftovers in the fridge and making whatever they could,
spontaneously.

I feel this poem coming to an end
before all ingredients are added to the brew,
but since there is a tad more room left in my poetry bowl,
I would like to dedicate this puzzling poem
to Robert Creeley, Ron Padgett and Dorothea Lasky;
and to Thom Donovan I say,
“Like most renowned chefs, I imagine you have left one vital ingredient
out of your recipe that you may shine above your imitators
and be the only one able to create a perfect dish.
And so I lay the oddness of this poem and it’s probable failure to congeal,
at your feet, and in doing so, say it’s not my fault.
I followed what instructions you gave.
Perhaps the fault was in the mixing of my metaphors
or my obvious lack of sexual innuendo.
My failure to mention genitals or body parts
or to make drug references, legal or illegal.
Believe me, all of these elements are present in Mexico,
sometimes to an extreme degree, but that being true,
I would state the obvious in mentioning them,
and so I think I’ll pour this conglomeration
into a pan and put it on WordPress and Facebook and Twitter
to bake and then wait to see if it will rise.”

If you have made it this far, please tell me how it
tastes and take a chunk extra to wrap in a napkin
and put under your pillow tonight and perhaps
if I’ve done the recipe right, it will attract a real poem
which you will dream and remember afterwards
and bring into the world.

NaPoWriMo Day 20: Gray Walls with Boxes

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Our prompt today was to write a poem in the voice of a member of our family.

Gray Walls with Boxes

Once I knew words that fit together.
Now my mind still has the answers,
but rarely lets me in to find them.

People who seem to know me
bring pizza in a box
and we eat it in front of another box I’ve forgotten the name for––
a small world with other people moving in it that I don’t know.
Sometimes words appear in a ribbon on the bottom edge of that box
and I wonder if I understood them
if they ‘d tell me what I’m supposed to do.

On the walls are other flat boxes
with people frozen in them
and I think it is my fault.
There is something I am supposed to be doing.
There is something I am supposed to be doing.
“They are your pictures, Mother.
They’re there for decoration—
for you to enjoy,”
a woman tells me
when I ask her
if she’d like to take them
home with her.

I don’t belong here.
My high school boyfriend
must be wondering
where I’ve gone
and my daughter is as confused as I am,
claiming to be her own child;
and then one day my sister comes
and I have to laugh because they all
look so much alike—
my sister and her niece and her niece’s daughter
whom they try to convince me
are my daughter and my granddaughter––
so many layers of daughters
that it is too hard to keep them
all in mind.

But then that floats away
and I am trying to remember
when I am leaving this hotel
and I feel I’m not suited to run for president
although all those people
cheering at that big convention in that little box
want me to––
that little box they turn off and on each day,
sometimes before or after I’m ready
to have it turned off.

And they take me to that large room
where all those silent older people sit.
I do not want to go into this room,
but I am lucky, and we move through it.
Someone’s daughters have come to put me
into a box that moves us through the world
without walking. At first, I am so surprised by it,
then I remember what it is
but can’t remember the word for it.
As we sit in it, the world moves by
too fast, scaring me, and I try
to weep unnoticed.
But then they take me out of it,
give me popcorn
and lead me into a very large room
with many people sitting down
and an entire wall with larger people
moving on it, and it is so confusing, like déjá vu,
for I remember being in a room like this before,
but I don’t know if I’m supposed to
make them do something other
than what they are doing
or if I’m already controlling them with my thoughts
or if I’m supposed to be
up there on the wall with them.
I can’t remember whether these people
on either side of me are my sisters
or my children or strangers,
sitting chair after chair down the long aisle.

Most days, I am so sad all day long,
but sometimes my real self
comes to visit and I think,
how did I become a martyr like my grandmother
and why can’t I stop myself from crying, just like her?
One gray wall meets another at the corner
and I’m sure
that I am being punished
for things I did but can’t remember.

That blank face
in the mirror
has me in it,
but I can’t get out
and for a moment I know, then forget
that this is why I cry
and cry and cry
and cry.