Are You New Here?

Unlock the tree to access the sun in the sap;
it’s the only thing you can do sometimes.

When life hands you limes,
learn to make limeade
instead of the lemonade you expected
to make out of this shitty situation.

Go forward when you have the light
to do that, but when you don’t,
try not to envy those who do —

somewhere a lettuce grows or a cabbage,
maybe a cabbage, and it carries your name
in its cruciferous heart; you have only to
water it and weed it and harvest it and read it.

Today’s prompt over at NaPoWriMo.net was to write a poem in which something is hidden or hinted at or otherwise not obvious. Can you guess what mine is?

And Then You Lose the Details

That one tooth
that was slightly askew —
was it top right or top left,
and how is it that I can’t remember
when I said I’d never forget?

http://www.napowrimo.net/day-three-3/

Recipe creates one beasy mist, which may be shared separately or encountered alone in a snifter. Back door must be open and screen dirty, with dirty-screen smell, and yard must be gray. Enjoy!

In windowless room
open one window
using serrated knife

or saw

Place hand through
one window
so hand is outside

One palmful of mist
is now
on inside of hand

add bees
or beast
or bezoar

Muddle in the
inside of
puddled balloon.

Today’s prompt at NaPoWriMo.net is right up my alley: a poem inspired by a recipe. My poem was further inspired by the recently viral story of what happened when scientist Janelle Shane trained something called a neural network to come up with some names for new recipes. Some of its attempts sound like they could be in my 1961 Betty Crocker cookbook. I was especially taken with “beasy mist.”

To be honest, if you wanted all the chairs
I would let you have them, not just the one
in the dining room where you watch us
and sleep, alternating eyes open,
flickering in a dream, your throat swallowing
under its thumb of white.
To be honest, I need to walk more,
and I cheer for you about the chicken bones
(even though I know they’re not good)
because I know how you scavenged
to stay alive, and it’s good to feel capable,
to know you still can. You trot ahead of me
with your tail up, all the way home.
To be honest, on your second day here,
when I emailed to say
I couldn’t go to a thing for work
because you were new and crying,
and seemed to need me most of all,
it felt like maternity leave again.

No one to carry roses
as if they’re really in love
and need to show it,
no hands with which to
carry anything

only ears
eyes
tail
paws,

a follow from room to room.

Is it time for fresh cherry pie
after a mountain trout luncheon
in the charming, steeped-in-tradition home
of Gladys Mason, a true Californian, or

Mabel Ross, formerly of our staff?
Poor Mabel. Where has she gone?
It wasn’t enough, her eggnog chiffon pie
after a dinner of Italian spaghetti,
buttered green beans. It takes more

than that, Mabel, to earn a seat on our
gay, paprika-colored sectional sofa,
or a uniform and a place to stand in our
Homemaker Kitchen in Golden Valley.

I’m like the old lady on the #6 bus
(Jeffery 6, before it became Jackson Park 6)
who used to cry, “Hoo hoo!”–
a weird, stagey cry meant to get attention,
and if you asked her what was wrong,

she’d unspool a whole narrative about
a broken vacuum cleaner and her mother,
alive in the story but surely not in fact,
and sometimes she would alternate “Hoo hoo!”

with “Stupid!” which she spat out
in no certain direction while staring
into the aisle or out at the lake,
the latter of which, whether leaden
or innocent blue, never did care.

And one time, when some politician was new,
she asked, “Do you know what he’s going to do?”
And her seatmate, a stranger, said, “No. What?”
But it turned out that this was not rhetorical —
she didn’t know but was sure it wouldn’t be good.

The hoo hoo lady is long gone now,
as dead as any vacuum parts
or her mother, and part of me is glad
that she didn’t live to see any of this,

but I am not dead

yet,

am still alive to see —
I, who sometimes ride the bus
and ask questions,

and cry.

Abstraction
is difficult
when there’s someone standing on my neck

Jack in the Box
built my house
out of better sticks
than I could imagine.

In the drive-thru lane
at dawn, are you
where you thought
you would be?