heightened awareness
sharpened observations of
places not traveled
I notice details ~
patterns on tiled floor lobbies,
artwork on bed walls
like something ignites
the flames of living in me
I don’t have at home
When I Travel
Getting a Grip
getting a grip on
her future starts with
burning the Christmas tree
boxes one decade now in
her attic
buying enough hummingbird
nectar to last through October
and watering the string of pearls
cascading from the porch table
getting a grip is festooned with
saying goodbyes to too much
long held hostage from living
new lives in better spaces
like all those music boxes
of childhood and sad, stained
table linens frayed with holes ~
gaps in the timelines of
lineage like broken branches
on that cross-stitched tree
of names and thread strands
of who goes where and how
pre-affair, divorce, remarriage,
cousins once-removed now
fully removed and never coming
back because they did the
same thing with their goodbyes ~
they burned the Christmas tree
boxes and all that’s left is
the cooling ash of
what once was
before their birds
left the nest for the skies
From Where I Sit
sheers in the window
sun streaked shadows
morning slants
ever-changing
golden eggshell glimmers
radiant shimmers
streaming in
to greet the day
in slow-paced
weekend rays
I savor this
tempting taste
odd pair shoe haiku
I got home with one
size 7 shoe, one size 9
it was all so odd.
Credelio Question
four ticks already
from taking down the fenceposts
have me wondering
whether we should be the ones
taking the dogs’ flea/tick pills
What’s Next?
What’s Next?
I’ve decided
that when I retire
I should go to
work for Caterpillar
pulling up
fence posts
dragging fences
lifting trash into
dumpsters
raising fig pickers
to the tip tops
of trees
retire from
education to
push the buttons,
turn the wheels,
steer the tires,
raise the levers of
heavy machinery
Backseat Whale Feeding
twenty five years ago
we smiled at family pictures
taken that same day
with all the colorful striped
fish in the Gulf of Mexico
swimming between the lens
and our smiling eyes inside
our masks after our
cruise ship dinner
fish not there to make the
water look like a happy place
teeming with adventure
but to eat of the photographer’s
fish food, tiny dollar signs
not evident in the photos
which is why I told a friend
in Massachussets when we
were in the Uber going whale
watching that the only reason
they could guarantee a
whale sighting was because
they feed them
and her expression said
it made sense to her
but not the Uber driver
who snapped back
that’s absurd!
we do NOT feed our whales,
the ocean does!
but I kept it all
stirred up from the
back seat
asking whether
the tour boat sold photos
and t-shirts and mugs,
nodding with
suspicious raised
eyebrows at his retorts
to these whale feedings
before his bombshell
revelation question~
and you two ladies are whale
watching in those clothes?
(it was true: we were
wearing thin long-sleeved
t-shirts, one layer only,
having forgotten about
the fierce ocean winds
of late October)
where are your jackets?
you’ll freeze
to which I replied
heck, no, sir! we won’t freeze
we plan to buy
the souvenir jackets
when we buy our bag of
whale food
in the adventure shop
my friend could hardly
contain her laughter
and we exploded with
belly-burning snortles
when we stepped
out of the car,
rushing in to buy
thick hoodies and sunglasses
at the ticket pick-up
but we knew he’d won
with a quick phone call to
the tour boat company
when the boat narrator
announced she’d heard
that there are people
who mistakenly believe
that the boats
feed the whales
(glancing in our
direction, everyone
else giggling and
exchanging raised
eyebrow eyerolls)
before explaining
the truth
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
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/
August Open Write: Day 3 with Leilya Pitre of Louisiana
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) 🙂
Common Threads 