King Tut lived in our laundry chute
the dark wooden door
the airy metal-walled chamber
that led to the beyond
or nothing.

Can it be that I once went down it,
landing in a plastic basket
of sheets and towels, not caring
if they were dirty or clean,

only that they softened my landing?
We must have been alone in the house,
if that happened. I do know, I do recall

many nights, walking a wide path
to avoid that door
as my brother whispered, King Tut
KING … TUT!

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Today’s Poem a Day Chapbook Challenge prompt was “opening.”

The smell of your own snot,
recirculated air, saliva,
frozen and thawed, over and over
inside a striped, acrylic ski mask.
One-piece, zip-up snowsuits,
the bathroom difficulties they caused,
and resulting accidents (both kinds).
The teeth of someone else’s ice skate
running over your finger on the floor
of the second-grade cloakroom at school.
And yet there was also the brick-walled kitchen,
the radio on cold, dark mornings, playing
country music—any port in a storm—

Elvirup! (it sounded like)
Oom papa oom papa oom papa mau mau.

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Today’s Poem a Day Chapbook Challenge prompt was to write a poem about displeasure or pleasure.

A pre-softened hand-me-down
from a daughter of some friend of my mother’s,
white cotton blend with rosebuds, faded.
My mother has cut a sprig of lilacs, put them
in a small vase on my nightstand. It is still light out;
the robins, settling in, call to each other. I think
how easily I could climb out onto the small roof
under my window, sit there unseen in my
borrowed nightgown.

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Today’s prompt for the Poem a Day Chapbook Challenge was “Night _____.”

Don’t mythologize anything
like how it was to be three—
you were there and yet you were not.
By now, your memories are at least
75 percent the nacre of time,
year upon year, layers as yellow as
a ’70s living room carpet, say, or
formerly white floor-length curtains,
a puff of nicotine, billowing.

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Today’s prompt in the Poem a Day Chapbook Challenge was “three.”

Alpha-Bits cereal for breakfast,
what does it spell in your spoon?
It could be almost anything
because nothing means much yet,
except the letters in your own name.
There’s an A, a Y—the X doesn’t belong,
but you acknowledge it anyway,
its jumping-jack arms and legs,
how it shouts, or seems to,
as it tumbles around and around
and around.

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This month, I’m doing the Poetic Asides Poem a Day Chapbook Challenge. Today’s prompt was to write an alpha poem.

Once upon a time, a door slammed
hard, and then it bounced once or twice
in its corrupted metal frame.
It was a screen door, you see, and it smelled
dusty. Bits of dead flies were stuck in the squares
of the screen, larger pieces and smaller ones,
some identifiable and some not. It was as if the flies
just reached the end of the world and expired,
and it’s possible that they were the dusty smell.
It’s possible that the slam of the screen door was
a warning, like the clouds, secretly full of the first snow.
But you were new in town and would never be old in town,
and you didn’t know how to read
anything
(that’s not true—you read books, faces, voices—but
you missed this particular warning,
the screen,
the flies,
the clouds,
the waiting snow.)

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This month, I’m once again doing the Poetic Asides Poem a Day Chapbook Challenge. Today’s prompt was “Once Upon a Time.”

This morning, when I was walking my daughter to school
here in Chicago (because, barring anything unforeseen
in the next eight years, my children will have been
entirely raised in one city, in one neighborhood —
and it’s not really a mystery why, is it?),
she said she doesn’t like these mornings when it is
cold but sunny; she likes a winter that is cold and gray.
I told her that maybe she’d like the Pacific Northwest better —
and that went in deeper than I’d intended. She’s been
thinking she might live there, she said. This was news to me.
How is it that I spoke in my father’s voice (It’s great to be open to
wherever the best opportunities are for you), not my mother’s
(Please stay)? Seattle is expensive and not how it was, I know,
and nothing is certain in anything a 13-year-old says,
I know I know I know. But I smiled at the thought of it —
what if, after all these years, that’s how I come home?
Funny life, how you break us in two, sometimes —
how you put us back together, someplace new.

Not knowing how long I would be where I was,
in the in-between, I would listen to
“Music from the Hearts of Space” on NPR
for reasons I still don’t understand.

Do we ever know how long we will be where we are?
I can no longer ask my mother

anything

It’s like looking at the moon through dark trees —
that’s how distant — and I spook myself and soothe myself, both,
every morning in the in-between.

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10 (to be explained)

Sitting on the floor of my bedroom in Seattle
(Kirkland — Costco boom town, after we moved away),
listening to a record where Sesame Street characters sang
various ’70s a.m. gold favorites, like “Feelings”
(whoa, whoa, whoa)
but they made it about emotions other than love.
Anger, I imagined as a hot, itchy cable-knit sweater
yellow or red, a flash like the end of a cigarette
(there it is again).
Anger was something I wanted to put somewhere
outside my room, if it had to exist at all,
maybe in a glass bowl in the kitchen, like the guppies
we had for a while, more and more of them,
giving them away in jars.

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9 (to explain later)

They were not shaky, my mother’s hands
the last time I ever saw her, though she fluttered them
at the over-the-bed table, wondering if the nurses
found her arrangement to be acceptable.
Her arrangement, she called it — a card or two,
a vase of flowers, the perpetual plastic water jug.
It was not shaky at all, my mother’s right hand,
when she raised it as I was leaving, when she
waggled her fingers in the air at me, once, twice —
that unmistakable gesture of goodbye to a child.

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8 (to explain later)