Patchwork Prose and Verse
I went to lunch with some colleagues last week, and we ordered our food in the produce section of a local farm to table restaurant. Imagine our sheer delight when we encountered this cat napping in the sweet potato bin. This is no red potato, friends. Here is the couch potato of cats, right here in rural Georgia.
I Yam What I Yam
I yam what I yam
cat at the farmer’s market
napping in the yams
I’m a lazy and fat
sweet potato kitty cat
….and me?aw, I’m good with that.
Today’s host at http://www.ethicalela.com for Day 5 of the February Open Write is Amber Harrison of Oklahoma, who inspires writers to write a borrowed form poem using a fill-in-the-blank approach. You can read her prompt and the poems of others here.
Amber writes:
Today, I invite you to fill in the blanks in these lines by Whitman, or create and refill blanks of a stanza by another poet of your choice (this could be a time when you fill in the blanks expressively or reflectively in zine form):
I celebrate ________,
And what I _____ you ______,
For every ____________________ me as good
___________________ you.
Original lines by Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
Stolen Socks
I celebrate stolen socks
And what I tug, you wrangle
For every muscle moved by me as good
as hackles you.
Today at http://www.ethicalela.com, Britt Decker of Houston, Texas is our host for this fourth day of the February Open Write. You can read her full prompt and the poems of others here as she challenges us to write letters (epistolary poems) to our younger selves.
When anyone with human flesh
gives you advice
look them straight in the eyes
and say ~firmly~
I’ll take it into consideration.
Do not take it as gospel.
Guard yourself.
Do your own research.
They aren’t experts.
Live your own life
not the one they choose for you.
Notice more,
especially the
hands
in photos (it’s the unseen key
that will slap you
~hard in the face~
like a wet whaletail
when you finally see).
Don’t believe a single promise.
Above all,
practice your mother’s discernment.
She knew.
She knew.
Today’s host at http://www.ethicalela.com for the third day of February’s Open Write is Dr. Sarah Donovan, who inspires us to write poems that experiment with broken lines. You can read her prompt here, along with the poems of others.
I took the ghazal form today of 5 couplets with AA BA CA DA EA rhyme scheme and measured meter, reframed the whole form, relaxed the rules and broke the lines as I thought of my mother’s 81st birthday and the moments I’m so glad my camera captured before she left us in December 2015 with Parkinson’s disease. Above, she reads to her great grandson from The Sneetches by Dr. Seuss.
Shaping Future Tense
when nothing else
made any sense
when family strangers
made you tense
your lap unfolded
picture books
that tore down
every guarded fence
great grandson's
heart and mind you shaped
each page
a moment so immense
your fingers curled
his eyes unfurled
his focus on you
so intense
when nothing else
made any sense
picture books
wrote future tense
Today, our host at http://www.ethicalela.com for Day 2 of February’s Open Write is Linda Mitchell of Virginia. She inspires us today to make a mash-up poem. You can read her prompt here, along with the poems of others. Here is the basic process she describes:
Read two works, perhaps poems you have loved for a long time. Find lines that speak to each other. Take a line from one poem and mash it up against one from the other. See how many lines complement each other as a new work. Write these lines, or copy and paste these lines, into a new work.
My all-time favorite poet is Mary Oliver, and my favorite poem is The Storm, from her collection Dog Songs. My father gave me a book of poetry entitled Poetry’s Plea for Animals by Frances E. Clarke, and in it there is a poem by T. A. Daly entitled Da Pup Een Da Snow, which may have actually inspired Mary Oliver’s poem The Storm. Oliver’s lines are in bold, and Daly’s are not.
Here is my Mash-Up:
Da Pup Een Da Snow Storm
Eef you jus' coulda seen -
running here running there, excited
gona wild weeth delight
now through the white orchard my little dog
ees first play een da snow
with wild feet
all around' da whole place
hardly able to stop, he leaps, he spins
an' fall down on hees face
teel hees cover' weeth white
until the white show is written upon
in large, exuberant letters
w'en he see da flakes sail
how he chasa hees tail
the pleasures of the body in this world
deed you evra see joy
gona wild weeth delight
with wild feet
mak's heem crazy excite'
you would know w'at I mean
Eef you jus' coulda seen -
Today at http://www.ethicalela.com, Margaret Gibson Simon of Louisiana is our host for Day 1 of the February Open Write. She challenges us to write an elfchen, a form she has written almost each day of 2024. You can read her prompt along with (is it elveschen or elfchens that is plural?) here.
She gives us the basic rules:
Elfchen Guidelines:
Line 1: One word
Line 2: Two words about what the word does.
Line 3: Location or place-based description in 3 words.
Line 4: Metaphor or deeper meaning in 4 words.
Line 5: A new word that somehow summarizes or transforms from the original word.
Here on the farm, we are getting ready for a prescribed burn to prevent wildfires and nourish the soil. After the firebreak was cut and the dogs discovered all the wildlife tracks in the soft red clay earth, I could hardly get them back into the house – – it was like a dessert buffet for them! These walks inspired today’s elfchen.
Deer-ssert!
firebreak
illuminates tracks
schnoodle noses enflamed
decadence of wildlife sweets
deer-ssert
There’s No Mask For That
you can’t mask the stench
of hatred that denies a
death with dignity
for her own mother
elder abuse: narcissist
smiling cruelly
About four years ago, I had an ironic conversation about deodorant with a hater, a year before I witnessed the full extent of her putrid stench.
She’d heard I was using aluminum-free deodorant, and so this one who’d bragged for years about her own natural childbirth without any medicines whatsoever and had made the same autocratic decision to withhold all medicines from her mother so she could allow her to die a full-pain cancer death like there’s some sort of trophy for that, struck up a conversation with me.
“So you use natural deodorant,” she informed me, gossip-style, as if I didn’t already know this about myself. I’d only mentioned this to a few friends, so I knew the source of her information immediately. I’d made the switch after a mutual friend was diagnosed with breast cancer.
“I do,” I nodded.
“What kind?” she asked.
“Native.”I’d tried most all the popular brands, but I wasn’t sharing my research.
“Do you like it?”
“I do.” I was keeping my answers short, since conversations with her were awkward and generally nothing but her attempt to gain some kind of ammunition or put someone down.
She looked lost on what to ask next, and I’ll never know what prompted her to take the direction she did, but I’ve wished a thousand times I could go back to that moment and answer her next question a different way.
“So how do you put it on, is it like just maybe three pulls?” This fifty-ish year old woman seemed genuinely confused, as if she’d never used deodorant a day in her life. I wasn’t sure whether to offer to demonstrate how to apply deodorant to the armpits or settle into my suspicion that she ain’t never been quite right, or both. So I settled for her proof of truth.
What I said was “Yes.” And this ended her interrogation..
What I wished I’d said was, “Actually, it’s a little more complicated than your Sure or your Secret or whatever you already use that isn’t working anyway. What you have to do to figure out the number of natural deodorant pulls is first determine the surface area of the solid that actually makes contact with the pit. Then, you use calculus to account for the slope of the solid at the edges if it’s curved, and also take into account whether you are applying it to recently shaved pits, pits shaved two or three days ago, or no-shave Novemberish pits because the hairs actually will hold odor, and they need an extra pull if they’re more than a middle fingernail long. Once you have the surface area of the deodorant calculated, next you need to determine the surface area of your actual pits, using your current clothing size, multiplied by the centimeters squared of the area needing application, and then take the hypotenuse of the cup size of your bra and divide it by the exponent of the pit area. Multiply this by the number of ounces in the deodorant container, and then take the square root of the deodorant’s surface area, multiply it by two for two pits, or (but not and) then divide it in half to account for one pit, and that should give you the number of pulls to apply. It varies by individual.”
I wish I’d blinked hard and cocked my chin to see if she could even do that kind of math.
As the birds make their way back from their winter vacations, I find great peace in sitting on the front porch and counting the species using Merlin ID and recording my results in eBird. This information-gathering is not only fun, but it also helps scientists at the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology track birds across the world when birdwatchers report their sightings. On Saturday morning, the weather was significantly warmer and the skies were overcast. It was the perfect morning for counting 28 species that appeared on the farm in a 90-minute observation. I was inspired to report the species in an Abecedarian list poem today, where each line beings with an ordered letter of the alphabet.
Birdwatching Abecedarian
American Robin
Brown-Headed and White-Breasted Nuthatch
Carolina Chickadee
Downy Woodpecker
Eastern Bluebird
Flittering American Goldfinch
Goose (Canadian)
House Finch
Invasive Brown-Headed Cowbird
Jay, Blue
Kinglet, Golden-Crowned and Ruby-Crowned
Loud-mouthed Carolina Wren
Mourning Dove
Northern Cardinal
Obnoxious American Crow
Phoebe, Eastern
Quarreling Pine Warbler
Red-Winged Blackbird
Sparrow, Savannah
Tufted Titmouse
Up-too-late Dark-Eyed Junco
Very Hungry Chipping Sparrow
Woodpecker, Red-Bellied
Xenial Gray Catbird
Yellow-Rumped Warbler, "Butterbutt"
Zippy White-Throated Sparrow
I was in a Pre-K class, where students were making predictions about Groundhog Day forecasts. I Googled the truth and didn’t spoil their afternoon surprises, but I came back to the office and shared the news in verse.
I bought a set of Haikubes a few years ago for a middle school poetry group, and I still find I love to pull them out of the box and give them a roll to see what the universe brings. Today’s haiku had journey and travel, so I rerolled other dice, slowly adding to the poem until the one in the picture was born.
These dice come in a love set, too, which would be perfect for Valentine’s Day poems.
For today, the travel bug bites. The Aurora Borealis is calling to me even through the dice. I’ve always wanted to see the hems of angel’s gowns in emerald and amethyst dancing through the heavens at night.
Common Threads 