Tag Archives: Prairie Moths

Leftover Nightmares: Weekly Wordle 519

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Leftover Nightmares

Sharp teeth of moths that daily fray the fabric of my dreaming
through the faulty screens of youth continue to come streaming.
Will nothing seek to stop their flights and free me from my dread
of lines of dusty millers that by rights should now be dead?

I try to curb my memory—the dull sheen of their eyes
as they fly slowly toward me in their moth disguise.
All those evil prairie spirits, rising from the grass
to find me after midnight and fill my dreams enmasse.

 

This poem is partially memory, partially fiction. The flutter of Miller moths, the adult form of the cutworm, are so much a part of my growing up on the prairies of South Dakota that I named my first book, “Prairie Moths.”  Then when I built my own house in Wyoming, moths again rose to swarm around me–so many that I had to light ceiling bulbs at night and put large bowls of sudsy water under the lightbulbs to trap the moths by the hundreds to free my house from them. So, although the surviving nightmares of moths are completely exaggerated, the theme is authentic, brought out by this week’s Wordle prompts. Prompt words today are daily, sheen, rights,  try, nothing, sharp, moth, fray, free, line, seeks and streaming.

For The Sunday Whirl Weekly Wordle Prompt 519

She Reads Me!

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The Prompt: Your book is about to be recorded as an audiobook. If you could choose anyone  to narrate it, who would it be?

prairie moths cover 8.5_ (1)
She Reads Me!

When ever I go off to sleep
there is some company I keep.
No Teddy bear or other furry––
the thing I use to stave off worry
of that proverbial smoking gun–
the unkind deeds I might have done–
is a simple bedtime rite–
an audio book to stave off night.

Instead of wandering my mind,
mental ramblings of another kind
fill my thoughts before I slumber,
for fiction does less to encumber
my dreams with guilts of past misdeeds.
Entertainment rarely breeds
nightmares of a shocking sort.
The words of others just abort
somnambulant wanderings through the vast
savannas of my distant past.

So–short story long, if you’re the same––
using sleep to sort through blame
for all your guilty pleasures past,
and if you seek a way to cast
off all these worries of the night,
and choose my words to soothe your plight,
When I lay you down to sleep,
I hope I’m read by Meryl Streep.

Here’s what I wrote the first time I answered this prompt:   https://judydykstrabrown.com/2014/09/11/3307/

 

Sixteen!! The Combiners (Excerpt)

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                                        Sixteen!! The Combiners (Excerpt)

This is an excerpt from a longer narrative poem in my book, Prairie Moths.  It is the final section of  “The Combiners” –a poem about the itinerant workers who would drive up from Oklahoma each summer to harvest the wheat crop in South Dakota.  This infusion of fresh young men was, of course, exciting to teenaged girls whose own male classmates were a bit immature. Not that any of us ever did anything about it.  Imagining and talking was enough for us at the age of sixteen!

combiners dance

The Combiners

I saw him first on the bleachers
on the other side of the floor.
As dancers came together and parted,
I saw him and then didn’t see him.
After the music stopped, I craned my neck
around the legs that stood in front of me,
trying to see him across the cleared dance floor.

Then the voice at the top of the legs
asked me to dance, and I looked up–at him.
Feeling uncertain, wicked and wild,
I answered yes.

I’d served him once or twice
at Restaurant 16–
that highway-fronting restaurant
as exotic as its name.
I knew he was working the Weston place
with an outfit my dad had never used.
He liked his steak well-done,
French dressing, no tomatoes.
Butterscotch sundaes made him cough.
Over the water pitcher and order pad,
we had traded a look or two.
I knew he wore Old Spice
and drank Cokes with breakfast,
but I didn’t know his name.

When we got to the dance floor,
he took my hand,
put his other hand on my damp waist.
It was a slow dance and the night was hot.
The dance was work.
I was awkward–too inhibited to get as intimate
as following in dancing requires.
Over the music, we tried to shout our names,
tried to find a mutual rhythm,
finally giving up both endeavors
to dance the slow song, not touching,
moving our arms in fast song 60’s style
to the slow song rhythms.

When the music stopped,
he walked me back again
to the bleacher
he had plucked me from,
reinserted me into the correct space in the line of girls,
smiled, and walked away.

My friends closed around me
like a sensitive plant
to hear the news.
I watched his back,
blue short-sleeved shirt,
his pressed Levis
and his cowboy boots.
I watched the Oklahoma swing of his hips–
danger on the hoof.
He wouldn’t ask me to dance again,
yet, his sun-blackened arms,so finely muscled,
had held me for a minute or two.
His bleached blue eyes
had seen something of worth in me.
He had asked my name, touched my waist,
and walked me off the dance floor.
And, since this was as spicy
as any of our stories would likely be
all summer long,
I turned to my friends to tell the tale.

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/only-sixteen/