Keep This to Yourself

Anyway, I don’t believe in
whiskers on kittens, gratitude
journals, fluffy slippers, or
any of those Martha Stewart

Good Things or whatever
it is that Oprah knows
for sure. I’m a crank,
and I’m meaner than I look.

But I know and you know
that there are still
lowercase, non-italic
(Roman, let’s say)

good things in this world,
and it is still worth
being here, if for no
other reason than to see

what happens next–even if
that thing is terrible
and you can’t stop it, so
it keeps you up at night

or it wakes you up just
before your alarm goes off.
Look, I’m not an optimist.
The power of my positive

thinking? It could maybe,
on a good day, light up
Duluth. Not even. Bemidji,
let’s say. Maybe just

a bar in Bemidji, some dark
little place with whiskey,
beer, and Paul Bunyan. Here
I am, struggling over this

on my couch in Chicago,
and there you are, wherever
it is that you are. If I
could, I’d meet you at that

Paul Bunyan bar in Bemidji,
our good things like tiny
suns, bouncing off ice cubes,
making indoor Northern Lights.

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For November PAD Chapbook Challenge, Day 5. Prompt: Keep This [Blank].

Amaryllis Woman

Tell me again how I burst forth,
reaching for the sky with immense
petals from some rainforest where
my ancestors came from, but I
sprang up from nowhere, arrived
in a dark green vessel, unmarked
and unheralded. Tell me again
the story of how you didn’t
know me and then suddenly you
did, and how you watched me
every day, how I sat on your
windowsill and performed the
superhuman act of making you
happy in the middle of February.

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For the November PAD Chapbook Challenge, Day 4. Prompt: a superhero or superheroine poem.

In case I haven’t mentioned it, besides pushing myself a little by writing directly here rather than in Word, which is my usual, and which gains me a modicum of editing time before I post, I’m also not looking at the prompt until I’m actually ready to write. That way, I don’t prewrite by mulling over ideas all day long. The poems you see this month are as close to my “first mind” as you’re going to get.

Hey, big news! I just found out that I get to be part of a reading at Woman Made Gallery here in Chicago on Sunday, December 7. I hear it’s a really great space, and I’m honored to have been selected. I’ll be reading from my chapbook Secret Rivers. If you’re in Chicago, I hope you’ll come out. Also, there will be snacks.

Blanket Statements

Blanket me with my own eyelids,
like two beautiful sheets of

ham.

Cover me in a shipment of snow,
quiet and white like flakes of

soap.

Shower me with red rose petals,
someone–I deserve a luxury so

trite.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

For the November 2014 PAD Chapbook Challenge, Day 3. Prompt: a blanket poem.

Couldn’t

But the good news is, Humpty
didn’t want to be together again
anyway. He lay there for a while,
staring up at the sun, enjoying
how he felt with his inside
and his outside no longer
contiguous. Will the circle
be unbroken? Humpty had always
hoped not. And now he felt like
he might contain something he
never knew he had: a tiny chick,
cheeping somewhere about the
ineffectual horses and men,
the wall, the fall, and
everything.

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For the 2014 November PAD Chapbook Challenge, Day 2. Prompt: “together again.”

November First

And then when I lost my last ball
down the rabbit hole, and no amount
of flippering could ever bring it back,

when the lights came on in the hotel bar and
suddenly, we all knew exactly who we were
with–no more magic, no more mystery–

when November first brought empty candy wrappers in
piles of leaves, the porch decorations already coming
down, everyone raking up the zombie hands, Silly String,

when I felt the world slide toward a little less light
in every cup of day, nothing but dead bees, dead flowers,
a retreat toward the tired and the empty, the passionless,

what could I do but bring in the geraniums and then
invite the ladybug to stay, the one that hitched a ride
on my hand to come in out of the hail and the snow?

I don’t believe in “game over”
until the game is over, and it’s
not over yet. No, it’s not over just

yet.

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So … I’m doing the November PAD Chapbook Challenge for the first time in at least a couple of years. Today’s prompt was “game over.”

You can expect a poem here every day this month (except for a few days when I’ll be out of town, which I will then make up later). I’m trying something new, too–doing it all here rather than writing in Word and then copying and pasting. My intention is to show you things this month that are a little less edited than usual, maybe a little more jagged. I hope you’ll come back tomorrow and the next day and the day after that. Spend November with me, won’t you?

Frost Free

and filled with distinction:
a standing rib roast
a rack of lamb

minted chicken salad
clams Hollandaise
and some entire beast

en croûte.

Here are all the
edible creatures
of land and sky

and sea. The exterior
is seafoam green and all
cool reassurance of

permanent plenty,
banishment of want—
everything that was
needed and not had,

now procured,
secured,
safe.

PAD Challenge prompt: ____ free. If it’s Tuesday p.m., be sure to check out Open Link Night at dVerse Poets.

Incomplete, Unauthorized Episode Guide to The Love Boat

Captain Stubing awakes on the deck of a cruise ship.
How did he get here? What has he become?

Guest star Charo eats some bad salmon, is forced
into close quarters with Doc Bricker. ¡Ay, dios mio!

Hour-long closeup of Isaac, staring into
the middle distance while wiping a martini glass.

Vicki wonders what life is all about.
Ah, well. Time to hit the disco.

Certain promises are made
by guest star Betty White.

Julie, having no other activity ideas, directs
the passengers—including guest star Charo—
in a production of No Exit on the Lido Deck.

Some ugly lady and some ugly dude almost break up,
but then they look up at the stars together and decide
that’s a whole lot of empty space up there.

Gopher. We haven’t seen much of him yet.
He’s been living deep in the ship’s hold,
lining his nest with cast-off cocktail dresses.

Chlamydia sweeps through the Pacific Princess.
No one is spared. (You knew this was coming.)

Guest star Art Carney, clearly confused, keeps
delivering lines to some imaginary waitress character
named Alice. The regular cast rolls with it.

What is this all about? Nobody knows anymore.

The ship runs aground, and this bunch
must somehow form a family.
Various things are made from coconuts.

I suppose you could call it that.
A version of love, sure.

Two people die while dismantling the Princess,
overcome, at last, by her toxic gases.

If it’s Tuesday p.m., check out Open Link Night at dVerse Poets. Today’s PAD Challenge prompt: Love poem/anti-love poem. (I think this is the latter.)

A Bad Fall

Someone keyed my Corolla,
the one my parents leased for me
(electric green with a spoiler
and a gold package—ridiculous
and loved). As I looked at the
scratch, the gallon of milk I had
just bought, just splurged on,
tumbled off the roof, hit the
asphalt and exploded, ran
in all directions even as I
indulged wild fantasies of
somehow scooping it up,
or getting back in my
scratched car, driving
back to Kroger, getting
a replacement as if
any of it was the store’s
fault, what happened in
my apartment building’s
parking lot, under a stupid,
stupid purple twilight sky.

For NaBloPoMo and PAD Challenge, Day 30 (prompt: milk). OK, that’s it for the daily poems. April is another daily posting month for me, and between now and then, you can expect a poem each Tuesday and occasional musings on writing and publishing. Thank you so much for reading, liking, and commenting!

Fact

When it’s all done, you are wearing enormous mesh underwear
and a huge maxipad that’s also an icepack. The emptiness shakes you
for a while, and the sleep-nonsleep of the hospital begins while you’re
still looped on whatever hormones got you through, whatever made you
think of your grandmother and wolves, whatever put you in a tunnel so
you were totally alone, apart from speech, your own voice and others’,
out of range of any soothing words or hypnotic suggestions or whatever
it was you were supposed to learn in weeks and weeks of classes that,
as it turns out, were total bullshit, completely insufficient. The good news,
the great surprise, is that you were sufficient. Now you are glad again
that your husband is here, that the chair reclines enough that he can drift beside you, pretend to sleep sitting up as carts clatter in the hallway outside your pretend door with no lock, as you pretend to sleep lying down on the pretend bed, amidst all the pretend comforts of this pretend room. There is, somewhere, your real baby, in your arms or in the plastic box. This is where
it all begins.

At the Monkey Factory

We don’t kill any monkeys, not even the ones that don’t pass QC.
Instead, we discount them and ship them direct to you as factory seconds.

Some of those monkeys are perfectly good monkeys. Who cares if a monkey has
a birthmark, or maybe an extra kink in its tail? Not me. That’s why one day,

I just stopped killing defective monkeys. Just stopped. My boss thought I was crazy,
almost fired me, said we’d be overrun with monkey returns, and what would we do

then? But I know about monkeys. Once you have a monkey, you’re not going to
return it, even if it bites (and they often do). So I think it was a pretty good decision,

and also I’ve stopped having those nightmares. I can’t even tell you about them
except to say that every night, a monkey reached its hand up to mine,

from the floor, you understand—and I killed that monkey anyway.

For NaBloPoMo and PAD Challenge, Day 28 (prompt: Write about how it feels to stand up for what’s right when faced with adversity in the workplace). Speaking of adversity, WordPress hates this poem and won’t present it properly. It’s supposed to have five two-line stanzas followed by a single line on its own. I can’t make this happen, and my last attempt resulted in the whole thing disappearing. If you want to see it as I intended, let me know and I’ll send it to you. OK, moving on …

Marilyn Rauch Cavicchia

Tag Archives: Poem-a-Day