Tag Archives: PAD Challenge

What I Remembered While I Was Forgetting Something Else

Today, I remembered
that the kids in my high school
used to play a card game
called Egyptian Rat Fuck.
The name popped into my head
while I was trying to remember
something else, though now
I forget what that was, and it seems
like there have been other times
just like this, though now I forget
what I remembered while I was
forgetting something else.
The net unravels even as
I patch it. It catches only
the least relevant fish, bony
and inedible, ridiculous. I didn’t
even intend to go fishing; I’m just
holding this net and need something
to occupy my hands while I try to
remember what I came here to do.

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Catching up. PAD Chapbook Challenge, Day 17. Prompt: an afflicted poem.

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Just Sweet

Sweetie pie,
you are just made of
candy, aren’t you?

Rock candy on a wooden stick,
no flavor to speak of.

Just sweet.

Never anyone’s favorite
(that I know of),
but always there,

easy to enjoy
because

candy is candy
sweet is sweet
you are you.

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Catching up. PAD Chapbook Challenge, Day 18. Prompt: Write a sweet poem or a sour poem.

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My Going and Being

Did you wait for me there,
and did I never show up?
Are you still waiting,
after all these years,
with a rock in your hand
and a small grief, a
a small, hard grievance
against me? I’m sorry.
I had places to go
and people to be;
I wasn’t in control
of my going and being,
and besides, you only
half remember me, and I
half remember you. We
each invent the rest,
filling in spaces with
a dusk that we create
where really there was
only streetlight pollution
buzzing as you stood,
holding your rock
and waiting for me.

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And we’re back! For the PAD Chapbook Challenge, Day 19. Prompt: Write an excuse poem.

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The End of Every Road (Plus a Program Note at the End)

We don’t have a lot of options left,
he said. But I said, There’s always
room at the end of every road.
The sun went down while we were
talking; I sketched a map in the
gravel with the toe of my boot.
I was trying to show him something.
I was always trying to show him
something, in that time before
the moon came up and I knew
the only option we really had.

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For the PAD Chapbook Challenge, Day 13. Prompt: An optional poem.

Also, please sit tight and do not panic. I’m leaving town for a few days, and from past experience, I know that I’m really terrible at writing poems in hotel rooms (or worse yet, hotel business centers). So, there will not be a new poem here until next Wednesday. But never fear! Once I’m back, I’ll catch up on the prompts I missed. Yes … there will be double poems. So, try to hang in there, and I’ll see you on the flip side.

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Over the Falls

Like a breath inside
a pill bottle
that my father tossed
off a bridge into
the Niagara River and
then into the falls.
They got married
not far from there;
she wore a pillbox hat
when it was time
to go away. I wasn’t
there then, in 1965,
but I was there
in 2010, when my
father said goodbye
to her small hands,
her one pointed ear,
everything that
could be burned,
and was, and sent it
over the falls
“in a barrel,” he
said. I was startled.
I was glad to be there.
Later, we had pizza,
or beef on weck, or
we walked over for
the nightly fireworks,
or maybe that was
the night he said
he was too tired.
So much happened
later, and since.
But a part of me is
still on that bridge,
watching the water
converge, make the
shape of a heart
at the spot where
she went away —
the last place
I ever saw her,
my mother.

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For the PAD Chapbook Challenge, Day 12. Prompt: a poem for/about something that cannot be seen.

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A True Story

But this didn’t have to happen today.
You could set it in any time, and it
would still work just fine. No one
would know that it had been lifted
and set back down, the screaming
squirrel in the tree. When did
squirrels first appear? And trees?
When did yellow leaves and green
first appear together, hanging in
the gray sky that has seen it all,
and then seen it all again? How long
have there been mothers with two
children, older girl and younger boy,
and the boy suddenly wants to know
why only mothers have babies? And
how long have those mothers heard
themselves saying that same stupid
thing about the special seed that
helps the baby get started? And how
many little boys have seemed to feel
better then, knowing their bodies
aren’t totally fruitless, without
life-giving magic? This could happen
any time when there’s been a scooter
and some Halloween candy, a day off
from school, a season just on the edge
of turning into something else completely.

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For the PAD Chapbook Challenge, Day 11. Prompt: a timely poem or a timeless one.

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Emerald Ash Borers Branch out from Ash Trees

The emerald ash borer considers its options,
now that it has eaten all the ash trees, or
they have been preemptively cut down, burned,
a funeral pyre for all the emerald ash borers
still left within. The emerald ash borer never
thought it would have to start over like this
in midlife, develop a taste for something called
a fringe tree, which it never noticed before,
so enmeshed was it in boring through ash. But
as it turns out, fringe trees taste pretty good,
all things considered, and the emerald ash borer
thinks it could easily complete its life cycle
within one, if it came down to that–which it
very well may. But this will not really affect
the forest diversity in New Jersey, says
an entomologist, with confidence. After all,
the emerald ash borer would never target
forsythias or lilacs, those shrubs not having
enough meat on the bones, so to speak.
Looking back, the emerald ash borer has no
regrets about how it’s made its living–it can
only move forward, finding new trees to girdle
with its larvae, another generation to find
its way somehow, as we all must. As we all do.

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For the PAD Chapbook Challenge, Day 9. Prompt: A poem inspired by a news story. Here’s the one I used.

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All of This Will Be Forgotten in an Instant

When I close my eyes, then I see
red

quiet as snow, the light
only a dim awareness

It may as well be sun
and I could be a seedling

sleeping in the earth
of my mother’s womb

waiting to be what it is
I am to be and am

becoming.

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For the PAD Chapbook Challenge, Day 8. Prompt: a blind poem.

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I Made Fun of People Who Walk Around Staring at Their Phones

But that was before
I plugged in a computer brain
and a phone brain
where my actual brain had been,
and when I still read books
on the train
and when I didn’t need company
at all times, and to always
and always and always
check to see who loves me
and who loves me today
and five minutes ago
and two minutes
and now.

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For the PAD Chapbook Challenge, Day 7. Prompt: A compulsion poem.

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