Monthly Archives: April 2015

Bent: April 2015 PAD Chapbook Challenge, Day 15

So down the road I went,
bent over my walking stick,
my whacking stick, for
striking the kneecaps of
impertinent little imps
who dare to drink my
saucers of milk, which
I put out for the elves,
as everyone should know.
When elves get angry,
you don’t want to see
their whacking sticks —
tiny, yes, but heavy
as apples, capable
of a crippling blow.
Elves have no scruples.
Nor do I. But I do have
a door that’s painted
periwinkle, a long,
straight road, two feet
and my back, bent
to see the sparkle
in the stones.

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A Rivulet, a Seam: April 2015 PAD Chapbook Challenge, Day 14

There’s nothing dishonest in saying
that your eyeballs are burning
and that you hope for sleep
to wash over you like a rivulet
of milk, a dusty sweet sourness
of dreams as they really are, not
as they are written down, analyzed.
It’s honest to say that you don’t
know everything, but you hope
to retain what you do know
at least a while longer.
Everything unravels, but
everything refills, re-knits
so that eventually, you can’t
see the seam. That’s the
hope, anyway. The dream.

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Small Objects, Small Acts: PAD Chapbook Challenge, Day 13

Once, while wandering around
a college campus at night,
in a locker room for med students,
I took a bunch of magnets
off a bunch of lockers

and threw them onto other lockers.
Some landed on the top — the roof,
we might as well call it; it was
that inaccessible. I don’t know why
I did that. At the time, I thought

it was all OK — I wasn’t
stealing them, and it would be
easy enough to find them later,
plus a med student is what, 22?

An adult, so it’s not like
anyone would be sad over
a stupid thing like magnets.

Then I saw how high the
locker roof was, how futile
it would be to search for
many of the lost. I was

ashamed. A few years later,
I learned that an adult
can indeed be very sad over
small objects, small acts.

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What Am I?: NaPoWriMo 2015, Day 13

You’ll curse as you scrub me off your walls,
but I will keep your secret under wraps
until it’s ready to be revealed. To begin,
you first must find my end. Many things
are better than I for many jobs, and
my maker also makes many other things
for my jobs and the jobs I cannot do.
But when you need me, you need me —
you rummage through many other helpers.
Am I in the gorse and the heather? Call me
with bagpipe and drum. I might come

around.

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Eggnog in April: April 2015 PAD Chapbook Challenge, Day 8

Do you dare drink the expired eggnog?
I dare you to enjoy sparkle nightmare
holiday visions of treats gone by,
gone bad. I dare you to embrace
listeria, E.coli, any of the other
suberbads that will trouble your
sleep, make you regret that you
ever heard of baby Jesus or whatever
pagan tradition brought us eggnog
in the first place. Eggnog in April
is well ripened and fizzy — at least
that’s what I’m guessing. The darer
need not take the dare. I didn’t
make that up. The usual rules
apply here, the ones you learned
at the back of the school bus or
in dark corners of the playground
where such deals are made. This
expired eggnog will take you back
to those halcyon days of youth,
when dares were all that mattered
and consequences were nothing.
That’s right. Let it take you
on that journey, divide you
from everything but this.

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I Hid in My Bread: NaPoWriMo 2015, Day 8

If truth be told
(and it seems I may as well)
we did see the ships come in

that night, but we hid behind rocks
and chewed our hair, the hems of our
nightgowns, and wished to never be

discovered.

For days and nights after, we hid
in our houses — I hid in my bread,
as if the flour had closed my eyes
and ears — not answering their
entreaties, becoming more and more
brazen in our ignoring. Some of us

never did change out of our nightgowns.
We chew on them still, the salted hems,
while we go about our various occupations
and the small sails hit the horizon.

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Little Pings and Pops: April 2015 PAD Chapbook Challenge, Day 9

We worked it out by
plugging my circuits
into his circuits
and then everything
was fine. Was OK.

Worked.

It’s a couple of years
later now, and there are
little pings and pops

here and there,
nothing serious,

but I begin to wonder if
we need some kind of reset
or if any of this was right,
from the very beginning,

and also whether
the best thing to do
on the day of that
first problem

was not to interlock
our circuits but to
disconnect our hoses,
reprogram our CPUs
to ignore each other,

and roll our separate ways.

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