Month: August 2024

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Day 5 of the August Open Write with Anna Roseboro

Anna Roseboro of Michigan is our host today for our fifth and final day of the August Open Write. Anna encourages us to walk through poetry from #VerseLove 2024 and apply the TIME acronym to the elements of a poem and construct a verse about one of our choice. You can read her full prompt here. I chose Stacey Joy’s Our Old Kitchen Table to think about these elements in her poem and to write about each.

Time

Imagery

Music

Emotion

Tabletime Tempos

Through all these tender table times
In games, gatherings, cartoons, showers,
Meals, drumrolls of dice and laughter and tears against
the backdrop of time ticking
Emanating life tempos tintinnabulated and tolled, thus told
around the old kitchen table

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Day 4 of the August 2024 Open Write at www.ethicalela.com

Today’s host for Day 4 of the August Open write at http://www.ethicalela.com is Jeanie White of Missouri, who inspires us to write postcard poems. You can read her full prompt here.

Jeania encourages us to think of ourselves as a sock in a suitcase and somewhere we might find ourselves, or to write from a place we have never been. She encourages us to use one of the short forms – a form that would fit on a postcard.

I’m choosing an acrostic, in which the place I most want to visit reads vertically and each letter starts a new line.

Travel Fever

I want to pack my bags, go where it’s

Cold – to soak in thermal springs, to

Explore an ice cave in the

Land of Ice and Fire

Aurora Borealis dancing as the

Northern Lights

Delight the eyes and soul

Facts retrieved from: https://www.trafalgar.com/real-word/facts-about-iceland/

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August Open Write: Day 3 with Leilya Pitre of Louisiana

Image generated with AI with the tell-tale six fingers on a hand…..

Our host at http://www.ethicalela.com today for Day 3 of August’s Open Write is Leilya Pitre, who inspires us to write Lune poems focused on the Monday Blues. You can read her full prompt here.

One of Leilya’s coping strategies is “to plan something enjoyable for Monday. ” She asks us to think of what helps us get through trying days and to write a poem about it – specifically, a lune.

Leilya explains: “A lune poem, also known as an American haiku, is a short three-line poem. Lune poetry originated when American poets noticed that writing a haiku in English didn’t quite capture the essence of the Japanese form. Japanese words typically have more syllables, allowing for fewer words overall, so English poets adapted the form to better suit the language.

Poet Robert Kelly first created the lune in the 1960s. After some experimenting, he stopped on a 13-syllable poem with a 5-3-5 syllable structure: 5 syllables in the first line, 3 syllables in the second, and 5 syllables in the final line. Later, poet Jack Collom introduced a word-count variant of the lune that is more popular today: three words in the first line, five in the second, and three in the last (3-5-3 words).”

Happy Planner Stickers

Monday morning blues

start Sunday,

checking the boxes

*** ***. ***

but Happy Planners

bring forth smiles

(colorful stickers) 🙂



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August Open Write Day 2

Today at http://www.ethicalela.com, Linda is our host for The Open Write. She inspires us to write Clunker Exchange Poems, intentionally exchanging a line (I chose into another world to use in my poem and offer all of my lines as clunkers today). You can read her full prompt here.

Sunday Morning Scrambled

all hell breaks loose

here on this peaceful

Sunday morning as I

sip coffee, write

a clunker exchange ~

sudden frantic barking

of my three vicious

Schnoodles bounces

and echoes through

the house as they

slo-mo scramble

from window to window

no-traction toenails

on the rugless wood

floors, looking like

Saturday morning

Flintstone cartoon

pets running for all

they’re worth but

going nowhere fast

when I look out and see

mama D-E-E-R

(no need to spell it

now – besides, our one

speller alerts the

other two anyway)

streaking into the woods

her two spotteds

stumbling along behind

her, pausing at the edge

to look back at this

house of horrors

where hell hath unleashed

its fury on this holy morning

then disappear

into another world

with dangers all its own

far from here (here~

where I want to exchange

all the clunked-up lines

for world peace

on the Funny Farm)

Fitz, the dog who knows D-E-E-R spells deer, leads the charge on scaring the deer away. Even the babies. Especially the babies.

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Day 1 of August Open Write with Wendy Everard

Today at http://www.ethicalela.com for the August Open Write, Wendy Everard of New York is our host for Dadaist poems. You can read her full prompt here. This form is fun – it involves finding an article and cutting out words, then pulling them out in random order to use them to form a new poem.

I took a copy of the July 22, 2024 The New Yorker and wrote down the lines of the cartoons, then cut them up on swatches of a page of a yellow legal pad. Here’s what I dada’ed:

the heat
his ashes
he didn’t want

I’ve enjoyed
smash open the pinata
while you wait

hold on –
as it became clear that
for me to
see you in
the requisite strength

are we sure
same pirate
I don’t love

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Thawing the Kingfisher

no, that bird

wasn’t fake

but it wasn’t

alive either

it was frozen

this Belted Kingfisher

posed for the

painting in all its

grays, blues, and blacks

fresh from the freezer

thawed in the eyes

of the artist

captured in each

stroke of her

brush on the

blank canvas

waiting to

take flight

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Breathless Heaven

only the stars are

visible when

the trees close their

eyes and lift

their leaves

in prayer

when this

pinhole light

of heaven

seeps down

breathing song

into leaf

into branch

into trunk

into forest

when shimmery

halo glitter

of ancestral

angels

cascades down

swaying waves

into oceans

into lakes

into streams

and creeks

for all the world

to hear

the music

of hope

for all those

still here

who listen

**first lines inspired by words photographed at The Immersive Titanic Exhibit in Atlanta, Georgia last weekend

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Invitation to My Barbed Wire and Fig Picking Party

When they come to harvest timber, all fences must come down

if y’ain’t never

took down no

barbed wire

fence with

reg’ler pliers

and a tractor

bucket, yer

invited to the

barbed wire

party next

weekend ~

c’mon,

y’all – free

pickin’ of

the last of

the figs ~ and

don’t forgit

to dust yer

socks for

ticks ’cause

them deer

ticks’ll

keep you

itchin’

in places you

didn’t know

were there

Releasing the barbed wire from thick brush

lifting the goat fence posts out of the ground









Fig picking from the bucket of the tractor – where the real fun is found

a basket of fresh-picked figs to quarter and freeze for pouring over pound cake at Thanksgiving

quarter, mix with lemon juice and sugar, and freeze to preserve a taste of summertime for the dead of winter
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Lines

it messes with my

mind and heart, these

Titanic exhibits like

the one in Atlanta,

the Immersive

Experience

(no pun intended,

I’m sure, but I’d

have chosen a

different name)

I learned about the

Titanic as a child when

an elderly couple in

our church were

on the next boat out

late for their honeymoon

on the Titanic ~

the Testers, Mr. and Mrs.,

lived because they were

late, and for all the

cussing I might have

muttered missing my boat,

I’d have learned a

thing or two about

what it means to

let things go

and move on

I can’t imagine the terror

inside the hearts on

those lifeboats

all the loved ones

watching their own

sink to their deaths

in freezing darkness

as they rowed on

I wonder if F. Scott

Fitzgerald started

at the end of Gatsby

and then went to the

beginning to start

again

so we beat on

boats against the current

borne back

ceaselessly into

the past

which is why I

began taking photos

of snippets of

lines in the exhibit

wondering what

poems might

emerge, turning the

grief back to joy