Tag Archives: writing

NaPoWriMo, Days 11 and 3 (Five Senses, and a Wedding)

Day 11: A Five Senses Poem

Wednesday Morning

Cool, smooth hand in mine;
how is it that she is still
so little, when her world
gets bigger every day,
and her personality is
as huge as the sun?

At our front door we see
a big, orange box that holds
a double stroller for our
upstairs neighbors, two
women who are about to be
two moms for two babies,
one boy and one girl.

In my left ear, I hear
my one little girl prattle
in her customary way
about how maybe she
can baby-sit these twins
once she’s 10 or 11, or
in her “late teens.”

We cross the busy street,
stop to sniff an early lilac
fooled by the good weather
last month; now its scent
is tamped down by the cold.

My mouth holds a hint
of coffee, masked by
Colgate’s finest; this is
the taste of a school day
when I drop her off
on the playground so
she can walk through
a big door, into a life
other than my own.

Day 3: A Wedding

Hydrangea

You are not my favorite flower.
I am about native plants, fragrance,
pollinators. You are fussy, foreign,
have no scent. And yet you are

a wedding as giddy as any I’ve ever
been to, enormous heads of pink and blue
on one plant, as long as there is, around
your roots, a marriage of acid soil and basic.

You unite the earth. You express it in color.
Pink blooms and blue, your salute to summer
and, I suppose, to love—I know my eyes
love you in spite of the rest of me.

Sometimes, too, you bloom in purple.
Then I think the earth around you is so
mixed, it can no longer be separated;
the two have become one flesh. Yours.

 

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NaPoWriMo, Day 4 (Catching Up): A Poem in the Form of a Blues Song

I was dreading this one because rhyme and form are not usually my friends. But I actually had fun with it, trying to fit within the form but also say something real about my son and how we relate to each other.

The Mother-Son Blues

Oh, I have a little three-year-old boy
I say, I have a little three-year-old boy
And he brings me nothing but pain and joy

My boy, he likes to burp out loud
Yes, my boy, he likes to burp out loud
But when I scold, it just makes him proud

He acts a fool whenever I’m looking
Oh, he acts a fool whenever I’m looking
Then he gives me a hug, says I’m his cookie

Sometimes I don’t know which end is up
Oh, sometimes I don’t know which end is up
Is he a demon from hell or a cute little pup?

All his jokes are about tinkle and poop
Yes, all his jokes are about tinkle and poop
Sometimes I laugh, then I have to regroup

He makes me laugh, he makes me cry
Oh, he makes me laugh, he makes me cry
And I’ll be his cookie til the day I die

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NaPoWriMo Day 5 (Catching Up): For Baseball’s Opening Day

Seventh-Inning Stretch

My mother was a Yankees fan,
had a jersey and everything;
she wore it with Keds and little
socks that didn’t match at all.

I don’t know anything about
this game, only that it made her
happy to root for someone.
In my mind, I can see the logo:

the bat, the hat, stars and stripes.
I can see her, too, if I really try, but
the image gets hazier with each
new year. I swore it never would.

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NaPoWriMo Day 10: Borrow (or Steal) a First Line

With many, many thanks to complynn, who told us all about “Enter SHIFT” for returns within stanzas (and thereby stopped my growling).

Cousin Fergus

(after Who Goes With Fergus? by William Butler Yeats)

Who will go drive with Fergus now?
That’s what I’d like to know about it.

I could ask him, but he’s always
half in the bag, and the stench

knocks you back a ways. He lives
down at the end of that crooked

road, in a split-level he stole from
his aunt. He has filled it with his

leavings, the odd little dolls he
whittles, tries to give away to

children, whose sensible mothers
pull them closer, keep their hands

from reaching, reaching toward
Fergus, his dolls, his beseechings.

Who will go drive with Fergus now?
All he has left is a motor scooter,

and it can’t climb hills very well.
There are things he needs, and

I suppose I’ll drive him, though
his aunt was my own mother,

and every time I see that stolen
house, it splits my heart in two.

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NaPoWriMo, Days 6, 7, and 8

All right … Can any fellow poets tell me how to override the WordPress tendency to double space after each hard return? (And am I phrasing this correctly?) The only workaround I found is to manually add spaces so the text wraps to the next line. Pretty tedious. Oops — it’s worse than I thought. It’s not WYSIWYG, apparently, and so my poems went all crazy and r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r-like. I am not e.e. cummings. I am a WordPress dunce … If you know how to get around this formatting, please comment! For now, I had to go with the blasted double spaces. Grrr.

Day 8: Outdoor Poem

Egg Hunt

My mother-in-law’s dog

is retrieverish, but he points

to each plastic egg. My daughter

is sharp enough to pick up on it.

My son blunders in wet grass,

gets as many as he can

without any interspecies help.

This is the day we leave,

gray and cold, like so many

Ohio Easters of my youth.

Concrete Buddha on his tree stump

watches as we do this, all in our

pajamas, before we dress, load up

the rented car, slowly go back to

who we were before this morning,

before this search in the damp.

Day 7: Color Poem

Orange

Double hot

sparks a flame

nothing can

cool off; orange

knows its own

particular ways,

does not mind

that few people

love it, does not

wish to be loved.

It carries, after all,

its own warmth.

True color of

the leaves once

all the green is

drained away.

Once the sun-

food cells

switch off,

the leaf can

dance, show

what it was

always made

of, the secret

we never knew

until, one day,

orange told us.

Day 6: Animal Poem

Bonobo

You confuse us.

Are you a chimpanzee

that looks like a gorilla?

Vice versa? Neither?

A sign at the zoo

calls you

the “forgotten ape.”

Your rear end is hard to

forget, your genitalia

comically swollen,

on display, always

ready for action.

You are the cousin

we seldom visit, the one

who believes sex can solve

anything. You try to show us;

we watch but never learn,

never can get it right.

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NaPoWriMo … Oh, no? Day 9 (Day 1 for Me)

So, I was already doing the Poem-a-Day challenge, and then I found out today about NaPoWriMo, which is also great … and which is also this month. And I was out of town all last week. I eked out some rather lame PAD efforts from various living rooms and basements and Red Roof Inn bathrooms (free WiFi, kids sleeping, you get the picture) on the road. As a good friend just put it, I have a lot of pos to wri this mo. Indeed, I do.

Below is my effort for Day 9 of NaPoWriMo, based on the prompt to write a persona poem. I have a thing for solitary bees lately. Seriously, they’re cool. Thank one today (or tomorrow — let them sleep). I did days 8, 7, and 6 as well, and will post those *soon.* Then I’ll continue to catch up on the rest of the old prompts and keep up with the new ones. Whew!

Solitary Bee

If I                                                                                                                                                                find                                                                                                                                                                    your                                                                                                                                                                  flowers

I will                                                                                                                                                                fill                                                                                                                                                                       these                                                                                                                                                                baskets                                                                                                                                                            on my                                                                                                                                                           legs

Sun                                                                                                                                                                 is                                                                                                                                                                 high                                                                                                                                                                     day                                                                                                                                                                              is                                                                                                                                                                 long

I am                                                                                                                                                                all                                                                                                                                                                 that                                                                                                                                                                   I                                                                                                                                                                    am

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A Not-So-Designing Woman

When I started this blog, it was with somewhat mercenary intentions. My husband and I had just fallen off the same cliff as a bajillion other Americans, in that his unemployment benefits were about to run out, with no job in sight (and no extension this time).

So I was going to be the family hero, riding in with my red pen to rescue us all by building a freelance editing and writing business — in my spare time. And … I was going to do that using the power of SEO. Someone had told me blog posts were really great for that, because each one is a new shot at climbing that Google ladder. I was going to build a great website, blog a lot, have the two things play off each other, and BOOM! Skyrockets!

Well.

What’s happened since is that I’ve been enjoying blogging about writing, and reading other people’s blog posts about writing, and about editing. And about reading. You get the drift. I’ve been enjoying it so much that the Designing Women-type business-getting drive, at least in terms of this blog, is all but gone (seriously, I envisioned myself in the shoulder pads).

So much for SEO mastery.

And yet, it’s all working, somehow. I do get freelance assignments — through good, old-fashioned word of mouth. All have been interesting, all have taught me new things — and just when I wonder when/if a new one will arrive, sure enough, it does. I am profoundly grateful.

But … If you need an editor or writer, please do let me know. My assignments thus far have run the gamut from academic proofreading to manuscript revision of all types to simply sharing some tips with an aspiring poet and nonfiction essayist.

I would particularly love to find more creative writing clients. I can proofread, give you an honest opinion, share some thoughts on where you might submit your work, and generally be your editor friend (well, OK, a friend whom you pay) who knows how it is because she’s also a writer. If that interests you, please let me know.

And if not, then please do stick around and I’ll get back to blogging about writing soon. As a matter of fact, I’m taking off my shoulder pads right now. Ahh, that’s better. Those things get heavy, you know.

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I’m not writing — and I love it!

I am now deep into another submitting phase, which means I temporarily have zero interest in writing any new poems because I am so wrapped up with looking back at the ones I’ve written in recent months, and with trying to find good homes for them  — and for some that previously came back rejected but that seem to deserve another chance.

When I first got restarted writing poetry, I feared this phase. Why did I no longer feel like writing? What if I never wrote again? But now I know better than to fear it — or fight it. When I try to write during a submitting phase, the lack of engagement with what I’m doing is very apparent. It is all too clear that I’m not doing what I really want to do, which is to take another flip through Poet’s Market, get some sample copies of publications I haven’t read before, and start sending things out.

Both phases have their appeal, and each has different things that make them exciting. During the submitting phase, I love reading different publications, admiring what other poets have written, and getting a sense of whether I can imagine certain of my poems in those pages, too. I love dithering around and agonizing over which poems to send to a particular publication. I love making myself so crazy that I eventually have to pull the trigger and just send it already. And then I love the time of possibility, when every day might bring an acceptance in my mailbox — virtual or actual. That I sometimes (often) get the opposite result doesn’t dampen my excitement … or at least, not by much.

Here are a few places to which I’ve already sent poems, or intend to soon:

Blood Orange Review

The Dirty Napkin

5 AM Poetry

Pearl

As for writing, the only thing I’m doing, really, is following Robert Lee Brewer’s weekly prompts — because I love them, and the community that convenes at his blog on Wednesdays.

Other than that, I am reveling in not writing a single thing. Little whiffs of ideas come up from time to time, and I feel wonderfully, luxuriously lazy because I don’t try to chase them and wrestle them into words. Why? Because I’m in a submitting phase. It feels like I’m gorging on cake frosting — and like this is totally OK.

But when you eat a lot of sweet, empty stuff, eventually it gets to be too much, and then a salad tastes really good to you again. April will bring another Poem-a-Day Challenge. Until then, I’m really enjoying March. More frosting, please!

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