Thank you, Elizabeth Arden.
Behind your Red Door,
you have made my face
perfectly oblong,
shatterproof.
My head swathed in bandages,
my body in a white gown,
I am a patient
at your hospital of beauty.
Only you, Elizabeth Arden,
know my true mind,
what lies behind this mask
that I hold — only you know
the secrets
to perfect eyebrows,
a mouth that says nothing
except
that I was here.

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Today’s prompt at Imaginary Garden with Real Toads was to use one of two photos. I chose this one, which is by Adolph de Meyer, for an Elizabeth Arden ad from 1927:

Witchetty grub

I am
I eat

sap

and I eat sap and I eat sap,

a good plan
(the only one I have).

When I gain my wings,
I will lose my mouth.

So it goes.
We all must fly

someday.
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Today’s prompt at Imaginary Garden with Real Toads was to write as another living being, such as a woman in feudal China. I skipped that second part and decided to be a grub — and in researching the grub life cycle, I found the witchetty grub in particular.

The weather in here
is stormy
and hungry,
banging shutters
and screen doors
because it can.
An in-between rain
makes umbrellas
necessary and ridiculous,
and it spits
all over my hair.
The weather in here
is yellow, sulfurous.
When will it change?
I don’t know —
tell me what you’ve heard.

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Today’s prompt at Imaginary Garden with Real Toads was to write about the weather.

Maybe I am a tribe
of bees,

solitary, but talking nonetheless.

Is it an antitrust violation
to discuss
the price of pollination,

the going rate, flower to flower,
of transferring the dust
that starts the world
again?

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Today’s prompt at Imaginary Garden with Real Toads was to think about what poetic voices we draw from. I thought about how I’ve written before in the persona of a solitary bee (probably more than once).

I appear in yearbook photos
and classroom photos
(a preschool one on wooden chairs,
and I’m not the only one showing
my underpants — dresses were short
in the ’70s, and I was 3 years old
or 4, because this was Nashville
and we moved to Seattle when I was 4)
but anyway, I appear in photos
of groups of children
starting in Nashville (or should I
call my homes by their actual names? —
suburban towns, not cities, but
the city names help with
echolocation).
OK, in Brentwood, Tennessee,
and then Kirkland, Washington,
Thief River Falls, Minnesota,
Englewood or Clayton or Dayton, Ohio
(this one is a puzzle because where
were my schools, and what was the nearest
suburban town, but then should I echolocate
to where we lived, which was just within
city limits — Dayton?), and then
Worthington, Ohio (oh, Worthington!,
went our alma mater, sing we now),
I appear, and these are the places
where I was with other children, daily,
available to be photographed,
though a whole other small, semiprivate life
occurred before then — Columbus, Ohio,
before Brentwood, Tennessee, and before that,
Redmond, Washington, though I was born in
Bellevue, Washington, at Overlake Hospital,
which my husband and I drove past
a few years ago, on one of those trips
we take because I must loop back
every so often, over and over.
Overlake
sounds like a good place
to start from, begin leaving
frost on other people’s windowpanes,
mysteries in other people’s photo albums
(or shoeboxes),
and I know that it snowed
on the morning when I was born,
in the place I am not from.

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Today, Imaginary Garden with Real Toads had an optional prompt (I mean, all of this is optional, but this was more so), to write a poem inspired by Alice Merton’s “No Roots.”

There’s a second person now —
her name is Fran.
She’s really good at all the things
I don’t do well or don’t like to do,
such as
cleaning anything or
saying no to you
when your requests are
awkward or ill timed, and cause me
to avoid email or voicemail or Facebook or texts
for days on end
Fran says no so smoothly that
you end up feeling glad, caressed like a kitten,
with only the smallest sting of rejection,
so small, you can say
you must have imagined it.
As I said, Fran will also do housework,
paperwork, a host of -works,
but mostly this one:

No.
No, thank you.
We are delighted to be asked but must regretfully say

no.

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Today’s prompt at Imaginary Garden with Real Toads is “second.”

The sky is literally a thing.
I’m not sure you know
how to knock on one door
and get one right answer.

Dandelions are seldom alone
but when they are, they align
themselves by fences, grow
as large as in Allegra commercials
before those could tell you
what they were selling.
But dandelions, real ones,
aren’t selling anything
but themselves

to bees

and anyone else who knows
where to find the key,
how to come in.

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From a prompt to write about “one,” at Imaginary Garden with Real Toads.

I have made a decision. (That sounds more momentous than it really is.) For the past several months, I’ve been miserly about posting poems here because that’s still the kiss of death, for a lot of publications (they count blog-posted poems as having been previously published and thus, embargoed forever). But April is National Poetry Month — and NaPoWriMo — and for the past several years, I’ve observed it by posting one poem per day, even though it amounts to throwing them all down a well. I’m going to do that again, and out of the three different sources of daily prompts that I’ve used in recent years, this year, I’m committing to this one. It asks the most of me, in that you’re supposed to not just link to your own blog but also visit others’ and comment on them. Here’s to community, and to extravagant wastefulness for a good purpose.

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Another prompty place I have loved
And another one as well

Hello … So, I’ve gone silent here lately. It’s not that I’ve stopped writing poetry (I haven’t), or that I haven’t been published anywhere recently (I have!). But I’ve been playing things very close to the vest, lately, as far as posting poems here, since that still does count, to a lot of publications, as being “previously published.” (That’s a lot of commas for one sentence. I love commas.) And as for sharing good news, I do that on Facebook.

Apart from the annual daily prompt things in April and November, I’m really not sure what–if anything–to do with this blog anymore. This is not goodbye, exactly, but I’m going to pause (more) to think about whether and how a blog fits into a life where I’m writing for work and writing for fun and thus, writing all … the … time.

Happy email today … An acceptance from Oddball Magazine for a poem I wrote about last year’s election night. It’s in a special Trump issue that just came out a few hours ago. Check it out! (Right column … and I like the art pairing, too).