If Roman sandals could carry a world
over heaps of diamonds, I would
sketch the scene
on the side of a box of pears.
I mean what I mean:
Excelsior Interruptus brand pears,
or World Beater, maybe,
the sandals slicked with rain,
the pears spotted with sun,
the box forgotten in your attic
until one day you find it
while looking for something else.

Catching up from travel. A Poetic Asides prompt from a few days ago (footwear).

In the lost and found
there are
items that need our attention.
A raveled thread,
a hole in the sock of life:
We were gone for several days
and now we are not.
Our lost things await us
on a certain folding table
at the top of the stairs
as a janitor polishes the floor.
If we left again,
maybe he’d still be there;
forward and back, forward and back
goes time.

Prompt: Poetic Asides (lost and regained, from a few days ago when we were out of town).

If my flower-and-bird painting–which I left on the wall even after you returned
from the flower show–was in any way heartless, then I certainly do apologize.
I was thinking of taking off (on a short flight, or a long one) the whole time
you were here, when I should have been thinking of nothing but the experience
of fragrance, how not to generate a mood of oppression. Tell me: Has the season passed?
Am I now left to be my own teacher, pressing for explanation, walking dead flowers
from one room to another, remembering when I still believed I had the power to fly?

Prompts: Poetic Asides (take off), NaPoWriMo (long lines — which I know before even hitting “publish” will not display well here), and Imaginary Garden with Real Toads (Sen No Rikyu’s poems about tea).

Love is in the air,
or maybe it’s the musk
of a thousand

woodpeckers.
They look musky,
don’t they,

hammering away
with their bills
into the heart

of trees?

Prompt: Poetic Asides (a love or anti-love poem).

This is where we did our exercises
before we died anyway.
To live better, we did them daily,
some of us in gray sweatsuits,
some of us in middy blouses
if it was long enough ago
and we were female
(as some of us were).
We played tennis or we rowed
in covered gymnasiums,
or we swam in natatoriums
where the water is now
gone, even the place for it
bricked over, filled in.
We can’t imagine it, our water
gone. But we know this is so,
as well as the things we lifted,
the steps we ran, our efforts,
our breaths, numbered after all.

Prompt: Poetic Asides (exercise).

If I were
an elephant
I would
unfold you
like a plum

Prompt: Imaginary Garden with Real Toads (elephants).

I should have unspoken my wish,
reeled it back into my mouth–
or at least tried. Maybe the intention

would have meant
something.

But now it’s out there, my wish,
drifting over the back fence
to kill chickens or children,

wringing whatever small necks it can find.

Prompts: Imaginary Garden with Real Toads (a wish) and Poetic Asides (unspoken).

Is it cool with you if I smoke
this ham
in your living room, as long as
I open all the windows and doors?
You weren’t using this
prosthetic leg
for anything, were you?
I mean, I know you use it sometimes,
but right now you’re just sitting there, so …?
Are we cool?
Is everything cool?
Good, because I used your 20 dollars
to buy monkey chow at the zoo.
I figured it would be cool
because it was only 20 dollars
and those were some hungry monkeys.

Prompt: Poetic Asides (a cool and/or uncool poem).

This is the office where we figure out what’s true
and what’s an urban legend, like so much Dr Pepper
poured down the storm drain to melt all the alligators
like hot dogs or stomachs. This is where we keep the truth,
in alphabetical files that line every wall. The untruths
resist filing. They smoke in the bathroom and stare at us.
They tell each other their lies, make us feel
like our work will never be important.

Prompt: Poetic Asides (a poem about an office).

My honeydude is no Half-Day Tony.
When I’ve reached my stresshold,
when I’m procaffeinating because
of some intense fuckery or other,
he brings me a baker’s shit ton of
flowers or little packets of sugar.
When I thank him, he says it’s all
in the homie fund. We go out
for a snakemeal every three days,
then I lose myself in lady snores
while he waits for me outside,
snapping his icicle fingers.
 

Prompt: NaPoWriMo (include 10 words/terms from a specialized dictionary. Guess which one I used?)