When he’s gone,
there is a moment when
his shadow registers as
its own kind of presence,
a hole in the shape of him.
When she’s gone,
she’s just gone.
Gone, baby, gone,
instant as a vapor.
Funny how two people
can have such different
ways of disappearing.
It’s as if they’re in two
entirely different states
of matter.
For NaBloPoMo and PAD Challenge, Day 9 (prompt: When he’s gone).
So your love is like a red, red rose.
Congratulations, Bobby.
Talk to me when your heart is
an ornamental cabbage, at best,
when it seems to be choked
by some ugly vine intent on
sapping the life out of everything—
yes, even love. Oh, I know.
Your love is like the melody
that’s sweetly played in tune.
Well, that’s great. Maybe
her melody jangles sometimes,
goes all cymbals and harmonicas,
accordions and tubas, all in a
different key, keeping different time.
Can she enjoy it anyway? Can you?
It is easy to make promises about
things that haven’t happened yet—
your drying seas and melting rocks.
And doesn’t it feel great to leave
with some high-flying pledge
to come again someday?
Bobby, what is she supposed
to do with that—
pine for you as she watches
vines grow over the cabbages
and the tubas come marching in?
Go back to her, Bobby. Let
your love be something else,
something really useful, like
a loaf of bread to sustain you both,
and a knife to cut it with.
For NaBloPoMo and PAD Challenge Day 8. Prompt was to answer a dead poet. I chose Robert Burns.
Left and right,
holding up a crystal platter
of cream puffs, maybe,
or porcelain angels, their wings
already chipped from
a bumpy ride in the back
of a rattling panel van.
Left and right,
holding up a fragile realm
like that, keeping broken things
mostly stable, lest anything
break further, though everything
breaks at least a little in this
unpadded world.
For Open Link Night at dVerse Poets, PAD Challenge, Day 6 (prompt: left and right), and NaBloPoMo.
but i was not there.
were u? (My phone
in my pocket,
scrolling, scrolling,
telling lies
I couldn’t tell yet.)
couldnt tell anything
couldnt see anything
didnt hear u bc
of 2 many circuits,
all coming 2 life,
all at same time.
where were u
when i was not,
or were u?
For PAD Challenge, Day 5 (write a text message poem) and for NaBloPoMo.
There’s another wall waiting to begin
if only we can escape the gravitational pull
of this owl’s orange eyes, threaded with
yellow yarn, a big, dark, wooden bead
in the center of each, like a knuckle
in a fist. This is not what I came
here for, to sit on this houndstooth couch
with you, trying to explain what I mean
about walls beyond walls, some world
other than this one where we are
men and women, machines built for
coping, not for understanding
each other, not in any real way, except
through the flesh. You are wondering
about my flesh even now; I can feel it in
your eyes, your male eyes, and we will
never reach that other world, not
together, not this way. You have
your hot toddy, and I have mine; you are
not my ride home, the shoes under my bed.
We are nothing but two people sitting under
an acrylic owl, trying to ignore some things,
pay attention to others, and—for the next
ten minutes, twenty—not confuse the two.
For NaBloPoMo and PAD Challenge Day 4 (prompt: Write a poem in which the title is “Just Beneath ___).
One day, I will solidify like butter;
it will be, at last, too late to change.
I will be kept in a refrigerated room,
behind glass. Tour groups will come
to look at me; I will be an example of
poor diet, inactivity. The wages of sin.
Children who beg for corn dogs will be
asked, Do you want to be like the
Butter Lady? No one will know that
my ears still work, and my brain,
which will strain through creamy
sludge to instruct rigid limbs
to punch, kick, smash the glass,
let the warm, kind air come in.
For PAD Challenge, Day 3 (prompt: Write a poem that scares you.) Also for NaBloPoMo.
Under an almost-full moon,
over two short glasses of milk,
in milk-white, moon-white gowns,
Sairy and Esther argue about
which one is more important.
Sairy says she is everything
that ever was, ever is
and ever shall be.
World without end.
Immutable.
Esther says nothing is ever
like that; everything changes,
and it’s best to keep moving,
not pretend at stillness
when we are always traveling
so fast we can’t feel it.
Sairy and Esther agree,
as always (or sometimes),
to divide the world in half,
its actions and descriptions.
Sairy is an old woman.
Esther is pouring out
the leftover milk;
a half moon turns
around once, slips
down the drain.
Sairy and Esther
spoon in their bed;
it is big enough
for two to be.
For Day 2 of PAD Challenge (prompt: Write a full moon poem).
As soon as I finish this post, I’ll do another one, for Day 2 of the Poem-a-Day Chapbook Challenge (aka PAD). That’s right — I’ll be posting all 30 of the poems I write this month. Wait … Didn’t I say just a few days ago that I wasn’t going to do that, for a number of eminently sensible reasons?
Yep. I sure did. Yes. But then I realized that:
1) It’s really depressing and isolating to write a poem based on a community prompt and then not share it with that community.
2) The poems I write for these things are often very “prompt-y” and not necessarily what I’d want to submit, anyway.
3) Last year, I talked to a couple-few editors at reputable literary publications who don’t think this kind of thing warrants the scarlet PP (for “previously published”). At least one of my PAD poems (maybe more — how is it that I forget these things?) actually found a home in print.
4) I’m more interested lately in submitting chapbooks and full-length books, and for those, no one cares about PP for the individual poems, as long as you acknowledge where the PP occurred.
5) It’s good to be less precious with poems and to realize that you really can make more. Even if all the poems I write in November are down the well, December will come.
6) This type of challenge, while I do work at it, is also play. If I’m going to play a game, I want to really play it — to go balls to the wall (which, by the way, I recently learned does not mean what I thought it did), as it were.
One thing I didn’t like about PAD last year is that it lives in the comments on someone else’s blog, not on my own. But there’s no reason I can’t post my PAD poems here, too. I also recently learned about NaBloPoMo, which is a challenge to blog daily all this month (you have until the 5th, if you want to sign up and do it, too).
So … I’m going to post daily here and at Poetic Asides (home of PAD). I’m going to link to Open Link Night at dVerse Poets on Tuesday afternoons, as usual, and I’m signed up for NaBloPoMo. If I’m going to PP 30 poems, I might as well PP them all over the place and have a good time doing it.
That’s a lot of talk … Here’s my Day 1 PAD poem, based on the prompt to write about some kind of match:
Match
Whittle it down to matches;
the tree is only the start of fire,
sunlight locked in its heart
like a memory of leaves.
No leaves now, it is wood
in a box; strike sulfur tip,
bring to wet, lichened log.
Cousin!, the match says.
I have returned.
October filled up quickly — I put together a book manuscript and entered it in five different contests (was going to be four, but I couldn’t resist that last one) and also entered a contest for individual poems.
It was fun to dream, but now I have to write. I find I’m either writing a lot or submitting a lot — can’t do both at the same time and give both the kind of focus I’d like.
After some thought, I’ve decided I’m going to do the poem-a-day chapbook challenge again. If you don’t know what this is, Robert Brewer of Writer’s Digest posts a prompt on his blog, Poetic Asides, each day in November. Many people post their poems each day in the comments of his blog, and I did that last year, too.
If you’re less “publishy” than I am, either because you’re content to post poems and get lots of comments, or because you’re just getting started or restarted and don’t feel ready to submit to literary publications, then I would absolutely recommend posting poems there. It’s almost universally a very supportive environment, with maybe an ideological squabble here and there but lots of people who will read your work and give you very specific praise and only the most gently worded criticism.
Don’t think of it as a chapbook contest — it’s not (there’s no prize, other than acclaim). But it is a great way to make sure you write each day for a month. That’s why I’m doing it again, even though I plan to only post on Tuesdays, the same day I post for Open Link Night at dVerse Poets.
Why hold back? While I was able to place some of the PAD poems I’d posted on Poetic Asides, different editors do have different ideas of what counts as “previously published,” and it was kind of a big deal to end the month with 30 poems that were a bit compromised.
Those who are interested in submitting for publication, I would never advise you to hold everything back and to never, ever post online in some form. Posting on your own blog, a poetry site, or some other online forum can be so gratifying, and again, you will find editors here and there who are willing to accept poems that have been posted. (Do disclose this, however, so there are no unpleasant surprises or hints of deceit — editors don’t like either of those.)
I would advise you, though, to think carefully about what your goals are, and to consider holding back a little something if you can. Do you just want to do the work and get (and give) some comments, and publication beyond the blogosphere doesn’t matter so much to you? Great — go for it! Do you write a bunch of poems, so you can easily spare one each day? Again, great — go for it! Otherwise, I would just say … think before you post, and consider maybe not giving away the whole show.
But what do I know? Ask me in a month, and I might say it felt parsimonious to follow the prompts but not share daily, and that it’s best to go into these things completely open, and hang the consequences. In any event, I intend to comment a lot and post weekly, and thus feel like I’m contributing a little something, and not just mooching the prompts.
Will I see you there? (Or will you be lurking, too?)
The mystery isn’t in the feet,
left and right or left and left,
but in hand on small of back,
silent pressure, a presence
of body through clothes.
In fourth grade, we danced
in gym class, making squares
on green tile floor, lunch tables
pushed aside; this was our barn,
the record player called our tunes,
our movements. We were the interior
of a clock; allemande left, honor
your partner. We knew nothing
about honor then, or we were
learning it. We were too young
to hurt each other much.
If you wonder how you’re dancing,
you’re dancing badly. But I could
no more abandon this watchfulness
than I could unravel my skin,
walk around like that for a while.
In eighth grade, a boy, deer-nervous
and spiky-haired, asked me to dance.
I said no because I knew he was just
making fun of me. I fled to the restroom,
looked in the mirror to make sure I was
unacceptable, all wrong, and thus, right
to decline, right that there was no way
anyone could see me on the edge
of a gyrating circle and want
to pull me closer.
Sometimes you’re wrong
when you’re dancing
or not dancing.
Sometimes you only learn
the mistake later on, once
the streamers have been
taken down, all the punch
drunk, the boy gone home
or somewhere like home.
Marilyn Rauch Cavicchia 