I make everything
easy for you now
easier than it needs to be
like some kind of
cyclamen
or
a coin-shaped
geranium petal
as big as the sun
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For the PAD Chapbook Challenge, Day 10. Prompt: “_______ Trouble.”
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.
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.
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.
Are you happy now?
she asked, and I said
Yes, I think so,
even though I knew
she was not really
asking me, so much as
sighing inwardly
and outwardly
at something I’d
done or said. But this
was before I was an
expert reader of tone,
before I had all the
translations, the full
glossary of human emotion,
which I now carry around
with me all the time
and can never put down
even though it’s heavy.
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For the PAD Chapbook Challenge, Day 6. Prompt: Happy now.
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].
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 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.
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For the November 2014 PAD Chapbook Challenge, Day 3. Prompt: a blanket poem.
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.”
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?
Marilyn Rauch Cavicchia 