Day 30 NaPoWriMo - How to find my heart after I’ve disappointed myself

How to find my heart after I’ve disappointed myself

Dig under any oak tree, between its two largest roots.
Dig with just your hands, let the twigs and pebbles harm you,
Dig deeper past large stones, earth worms, cut worms,
potato bugs, ear wigs, the white eggs of fire ants.
Dig past the smaller roots, cut them if they get in the way.
Go further under this heathen loam until you can’t find your breath.
Take a left into your body, download the data for breathing.
Let your sweat drip numbers down into the widening hole.
Take a right into lost, narrow your hands into claws.
Dig further until you become an animal that you don’t find in the wild.
Become an animal grown from a lab of test tubes, beakers, and regret.
Grow scales on your back and broken beer bottles for toenails,
long lost candy wrappers for skin, rusted car parts for hips and femurs.
Dig further and you’ll find me under a membrane of resin and plastic.
Open the skin of my rib cage, root between my computer wire veins
and the audio files of my diaphragm and speech. Under motor oil,
slit open my cardiac sack and you’ll find my heart,
cowering like a mole that’s just surfaced into broad daylight.

Day 29 NaPoWriMo - Paper and Honey

Paper and Honey

Some poets write with ink
others with their blood.
I write with honey
to invite ants to march
through my sentences,
twitch and leave
their footprints
along the page.
I write with honey
to attract
the unnoticed things,
the small ones
no one looks for.
I write with honey
as if it were my finger
guiding your eye to see,
look at the world,
its sweet details.

Day 28 NaPoWriMo - Disturbia

Disturbia

Can I have another life?
Can I have another wife?
Can I wish for a knife?
Can I wait to make it right?
Can I pause and roll the dice?
Can I count to one, two, thrice?
Should I give her more time?
Or should I sing her to sleep with a nursery rhyme?
Can it be ashes to ashes, dust to dust?
Can I sign her grave in iron and rust?

Day 27 NaPoWriMo - Occhiolism

Occhiolism

I am a worm, a flea
a fly on the wall
a mote of dust
floating in a sun beam.
I am a singleton
one brain one body.
I have two eyes,
but I only see
through me.

I can’t walk
in someone
else’s shoes
and I can’t borrow
someone’s body
for a day.

I am me and me, alone.
and that is a sorrow
to only exist as one,
never able to dip
a toe into someone
else’s world,
never to pull back
their curtain, look in,
see.

Day 26 NaPoWriMo - A day in April

A day in April

The whirligigs of wind’s delight twirl,
their fans, jingle, chime and chung night and day.
Flowers push themselves through soil’s tight fist,
sun willows the clouds away blue, blue, blue,
sky like an ocean to set sail on
and the lilacs reveal their purples.
They smell sweeter than lavender, grow tall,
clusters of button sized flowers open
their breath tastes like violets candied in honey.

I will take everything from this spring day,
create a girl with a name made of spring.
She will smell of lilacs when they first open,
her hands will dig into the earth and loam
and find the treasures of bug, root, and stone.
She will make whirligigs to catch the wind
and weave it into her own blue blue sky.
She’ll wear her name like tulips wear petals
with rain and sunlight, she will bloom, bloom.

Day 25 NaPoWriMo - NaPoWriMo

Today's prompt was to write an "occasional" poem. I chose to write a poem about National Poetry Writing Month!

NaPoWriMo

Crocuses are out, cherry blossoms, tulips,
daffodils, dandelions, and rhododendrons.
April opens its curtain of rain to let the sun
and poetry shine through. Sidewalk chalk
hasn’t washed away and there are words
everywhere in the air, verse and stanzas
clouds and stars. This is the month of poetry
the time of propagation, creation. A time
to gather your words into spring, write them,
read them aloud to invoke the weather to change
and bring on the heat and berries of summer.

Day 24 NaPoWriMo - Curtain Fox

Curtain Fox

The curtains dig burrows in the sand
And adjoin to other curtains in tunnels.
The curtain’s fabric is prized in the world
with 32 chromosome pairs of exotic.
Curtains live in packs among the window rods.
They are straw-colored with a black hem,
tapered tassels like a dog’s wagging tail.
Curtains explore sand dunes and vast treeless areas
and prey on lizards, skinks, birds, eggs, and tubers.
They have the spine of a vertebrae.
Captive curtains drape themselves over one another
in a mating ritual when windows are open.
Their young are made from the weaving of sand
and air and the beige fur of foxes. Turning fabric
wild and exotic, trapped in the spinning wheel
of breeders, capture and disappearance.

Day 23 NaPoWriMo - Cut in the butter

I followed the Prompt and chose to respond to Ellen Bass's poem "Marriage". This prompt took me on a journey through my immediate morning and the feelings that I was having. I've chosen not to share this poem as it is one that I plan to submit.

Day 22 NaPoWriMo - Himalayan Blackberry

I wrote this poem in my notebook on day 22, but just got around to typing it up.

Himalayan Blackberry

It was the blackberry that Eve ate,
not the tame apple. She wove her hand,
cut it on the thorns to reach the sun
warmed morsel. She didn’t bite it,
no. With tongue and roof of mouth,
she pressed it, gushing out into a nectar,
filling her mouth with wild revolution.
Purple dribbled out her mouth,
and like an animal, she licked it up
quickly, not to waste a single drop.
She plucked more, each one like
a string on an instrument, music
of her hunger, collecting them
in the palm of her hand. She wanted
to give them to Adam, have him try
their violent flavor, but she ate
every one of them herself.
When all the berries picked,
she found him sleeping under
the shade of a willow tree;
she kissed him. He licked his lips
tasted sweetness and it was enough.

Day 21 NaPoWriMo - Filling

Filling

Blood can fill a vial.
Vials can fill a hospital.
Hospitals fill up with sick people.
Sick people fill up the beds.
Full beds and not enough workers to fill their needs.
Workers can fill an emergency room.
An emergency room can fill anyone with dread.
Dread can fill the halls of hospitals with our dead.

Day 20 NaPoWriMo - Sijo to Spring

Sijo to Spring

I slipped on my sandals to take the garbage out to the curb.
There, on the stoop, sat a fat bumblebee, powdered in pollen.
It groomed itself with spring, I too wanted a taste of yellow.

Day 19 NaPoWriMo - How can I help you today?

How can I help you today?

I dread calling customer service,
dialing through the menu options
taking time out of my day to listen
to a robot tell me all of the selections
that do not fit what I need help with.
A robot that thinks it knows what I need,
a know-it-all robot that is too happy
and tells me that it can’t take me
to an agent until it has more info,
and when I yell at it, it doesn’t react.
Instead, it tells me it didn’t understand,
can you please repeat your service request?
After the third attempt, the phone disconnects
and I never actually talk to a human.

Day 18 NaPoWriMo - Poemfish

I can't believe we're already on day 18 of NaPoWriMo. This month always seems to fly by. It's been a gorgeous week here in the Seattle area, plenty of much needed sun.

For day 18, we had to take a chapter heading from PoemCrazy by and use the heading as a title of our poem. I chose the header Poemfish and ended up writing a poem about Pacific salmon, Coho and Chinook, and their life cycles in the tributaries of the pacific rivers. They're whole survival and lifecycle is poetry.

Poemfish

I can write its mouth to speak and eat
and take a pebble from the river bed
and suck on it like hard candy or place
it in a quiet eddy next to more pebbles
next to the bring orange globes, suns,
like clusters of berries lying deep
in the water, no stems to pluck,
no branch or leaf, just the branch
of the cool river, like clear milk.

The shadows in the globes move,
fins and large eyes, they swim
in their capsules, moving, moving
their strong bodies against a current
of orange. The large fish comes back
with another pebble, then another,
labor after labor, its once bright scales
dull as the gray rocks of the river.

Its fins lined with scars, but like one muscle
it powered against whitewater, jumped
over waterfalls, bashed against the concrete
of every single dam and fish ladder,
to finally make it here, in this tributary
of a tributary, to spawn, to build its wall
of pebbles around the roe of its body,
to gather, create, protect, and send
forth downstream as its own body decays,
dies, floats belly up in the gentle current.

Its death feeds the roots of trees and
they open their leaves a little wider
to shade the banks of the river
to give safe passage to the young fish
as they move like rain clouds in the water,
as they move like poetry in the water.

Day 17 NaPoWriMo - Lodestone

 For Day 17, I followed the NaPoWriMo prompt to write about the moon. Alas, the moon is one of my many inspirations, and I tend to write about it too many times, but I also can't resist. I wrote the poem "Lodestone" in honor of the moon and it turned into a 14 line sonnet. I won't be posting here, but I hope to publish it eventually.

Thanks and happy writing!

Day 16 NaPoWriMo - Memory

 Hello all,

I'm not behind in NaPoWriMo. Instead, I've been writing each day and making poems. For Day 16 I wrote a poem to Rattle Magazines monthly ekphrastic prompt and decided not to post here on the blog because I will be submitting it. Currently, it's going through revision processes.

Happy writing!

Day 15 NaPoWriMo - The Stubborn in Our Mouths

Today's prompt asked us to think about a small habit you picked up from one of your parents, and then to write a piece that explores an early memory of your parent engaged in that habit, before shifting into writing about yourself engaging in the same habit.

The Stubborn in Our Mouths

She sets her jaw, the two parentheses
on the left side of her mouth, open,
facing the same pathway.
She thinks hard and her lips move
to the side, crooked, concentrating.
The passage between her eyebrows
narrows like the Suez Canal.
Nostrils flare as if she were a dragon,
ready to flame the world.

In study, discontent, or anger.
It always starts with her mandible,
the mountain peaks of her teeth grit.
Sometimes there is no anger or thought,
she just stares out the window
watching the rain pour over the gutters
as if her body was not there,
just her soul reaching outward,
escaping the mortal weight of being.

I too hold my feelings crooked in my mouth.
My parentheses like the moon shapes of fingernails,
lips offset as I stare at her staring out the window.
Together our shoulders and bodies
curve and slump like parentheses,
pointing in the same direction.
Both of us cannot face the other,
an endless wound of space between us,
we won’t close ourselves with forgiveness.

Day 14 NaPoWriMo - Brittany, What’s in a Name?

Today's prompt asks to write a poem that delves into the meaning of my first or last name. I chose to write about my first name Brittany.

Brittany, What’s in a Name?

I am a region, Breton or Briton,
it mattered in the past, but it doesn’t
matter anymore. I am a name and
nothing else, Brit-tah-niy, an ermine,
soft fur, black and white against the sea.
I am a dialect and language, not yet dead.
Tristan and Iseult took a love potion,
inside of me, they sometimes live,
sometimes they die of their own grief
depending on which version you read.

Brit-tah-niy, in all its variations,
There is only one Brittany in France.
As poetic as that may seem,
the paparazzi still fight for pictures
of Britney, or Britni, or Brittnie.
Nothing matters in a name anymore,
only the camera, lights, and action.
Lovers do not take their poison
and women do not shave their head
without the whole world watching.

Day 13 NaPoWriMo - Fields of Tulips Refuse to Stop Blooming

Today's prompt instructed us to write a poem in the form of a news article you wish would come out tomorrow. I wrote about tulips that will not stop blooming. Because we all need a little spring in our life, no matter what season.


Fields of Tulips Refuse to Stop Blooming

The tulips won’t close.
Their petals haven’t fallen
two months after blooming.
They collect dew and sun.
They hold the moon.
Tulips in salmon, lipstick,
velvet, cloud, butter yellows.
Their stems won’t droop,
their leaves won’t brown.

They won’t return to the earth
instead they are open like eyes,
watching the sky for a sign.
We don’t know how long they’ll last,
through the heat of summer
or the chill of autumn.
Through the seasons, their flowers
will hold so much sun and moon light,
they will be pregnant with sky.

The flowers will not die,
we need them in constant prime.
We need them to hold up the earth,
keep the sky from falling around us,
the fires from torching our ignorance.
We need them to keep watch
as the seas rise and threaten to drown us.
We need them to watch
for the next era of our passing,
witness our souls moving upwards.
Our guardians, they will not close, they watch.

Day 12 NaPoWriMo - The Story of Antiope

The Story of Antiope

Zeus arrived on earth in the form of an android,
titanium & recycled plastic, face molded
in the shape of a man. How cold his hands,
his touch like ice. She felt inside of her ice.
& she exiled herself from her kingdom
as her belly grew with his strange twins.
She grew & grew, wandering the countryside
consuming bitumen & berries, hunger
never satiated. She chewed on the asphalt of roads
& the unskinned meat of the deer.
She ate the world, natural & manmade.
She stripped plastic chords of wires,
ate them like strings of licorice or noodles.
She collected grocery bags caught
in the branches of trees. She fished in the rivers
for salmon, fishing line, & bottle caps.
She could feel her twins, metal & plastic,
resinous & moving, sharp elbows &
titanium toes. Made of the materials of Zeus
& the within the body of her time.
They tapped inside as if she were a ripe watermelon.
& so, Antiope found an abandoned car lot,
& labored into the early morning pushing out
the amalgamates of her children, their newborn
bodies like so many small parts of a machine.
She took a wrench to them & put them together,
Her hands making form & shape, mold & tool.
& when the last screw & nut was placed,
they screamed aluminum, tinny & sharp.
From one of her breasts leaked amber gasoline,
& from the other, tar oozed. Her children
ravenous, latched & drank her. Oil on their lips,
she looked down at them, her manmade creations,
gods & monsters, product of her hunger.

Day 11 NaPoWriMo - Epistolary

 Emily,

The wind blows like a tapestry through the power lines; they crackle like a blanket with static and I am without direction. I sit on a rock contemplating time, the commodity I have so less of and soon will have none. If I spend my life giving to others, I will diminish like a chord, fraying. I will be undone, unwoven.

What advice can you give me except to live? Stop living in a future that is not here. I can only give it a voice here with you on these pages and hope that you have some words, poetry or not, that can bring me to the present and braid me back into place, maybe a chord looser than before, but in some semblance of order and balance.

I hope you are well and are finding peace and contemplation among your things.

With Love & Poetry,

Britt M.

 

Britt,

I cannot say the future nor divine it with cards, tarot, dice, or tea leaves. The wind blows here as well, but it blows past daffodil petals, crocus, and cherry. Spring did not want to come, but it came. Slow, dragging its feet. I think of you as the spring. You are so in love with the dark and the cold of winter, that you must be coaxed out of your cave, reassured again and again. When spring finally arrives, slow and hesitant, you never understand why you resisted at all in the first place. Especially when you feel the sun on your face.

I am not one to change, nor are you. All poets, I fear, are always trying to stop time, close our hands around it, make it small, so we can have some certainty. And yet, poetry feeds on change and the state of ambiguity, poetry rests within and outside of time.

Our grappling and struggles, our fruitless endeavors, make poetry poetry. Whatever the future brings, whatever events and changes, they will make great poetry. And in that, rest assured, that is the giving you must give yourself, when you feel you have given all yourself away. You are a well, deeper than you think. There are many buckets that can be taken, but the rain always will come to fill you up again.

I have my own fears and insecurities. My own lonely treading heart. I envy you, your family, your adventures, the noise of children. Life is simpler than we let ourselves believe. Poetry helps me see this, and I know poetry does the same for you.

With Love & Poetry,

Emily D.

Day 10 NaPoWriMo - Your Bag of Wonders

I followed the prompt today and used Gnossienne No. 1 by Eric Satie for my song and riffled through my parents junk drawer which made me think, what if my body is a junk drawer, containing so many pieces that must be put together, to be riffled through and upended. Am I an endless bag of useful things or do I need any use, just that I'm there in all of my pieces wandering through time and space? The poem ended up into the shape of a sonnet...

Your Bag of Wonders

 
The smell of rain settling dust into ozone,
bringing the air down into the earth to mingle.
The hyacinths opening their pink and blue towers.
You, your scent of jasmine, climbing through your hair
like a green vine with star shaped flowers.
I lay with you in our tent and I wander with you,
always. You have the pieces of my mouth, my ear,
my breast, rib and the butterfly wings of my hips.
You collect them like you collect my scent,
sweat and citrus, the smell of cut limes and lemons,
You hold my brightest parts and keep them
in your bag of wonders and adventures.

And, I must confess, I never wish to be completed.

Please do not finish me.

Day 9 NaPoWriMo - Preparing the poison apple

Preparing the poison apple

1. Pick up the elm sticks.
2. Find the apple.
3. Buy a copper pot.
4. Weave the white string.
5. Tap the side of the pot.
6.Circle around the pot three times counter clockwise
7. Fill pot with water.
8. Put sticks inside of copper pot.
9. Tie string to apple stem.
10. Dip apple in pot.
11. Leave in for three breaths. Remove.
12. Give apple to a young woman
13. Watch.
14. Wait.

Day 8 NaPoWriMo - Laura

Laura

The Stellar’s jays came to me every summer
and I listened to them each year.
I maneuvered through and around
my many pots of gardenias and daphnes
to reach the bird feeder. I fed them well.

 
Their breasts plump and royal blue.
Their tassels on their heads like hats.
Similar to the one I wore at our wedding.

 
I had our pictures in the back room,
but when I looked at them, I saw

two strangers in black and white.

Gerald didn’t look like Gerald.

 
The Gerald I remember is the one
with his hair falling out, wearing
the wool hat with the black tassels.

 
Every night, I listened to him rasp
trying to remember everything he could.
When he got tired, he would hum notes
of a Sousa march before he fell asleep.

And I would always wake before him
to the sound of the Stellar’s jays
scratching at the earth, fluttering their wings.

When I fed them, I swear they sang louder,

but no matter what, they always flew away.

Day 7 NaPoWriMo - A Shadorma and Fib

Shadorma

Traffic lights
Reflect in the rain
Stretch like stars
On the dark
Concrete streets, green, yellow. Red.
Some stop, some speed up.

Fib

A
Muse
Opens
A white door
And leaves it ajar
For any to waltz in and sing.

Fib 2

I
Have
Been there
On every
Time zone, living through
A redefining of clock work.

Day 6 NaPoWriMo - Risks in their Form

I grabbed a few words from the book A God in the House Edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler. The words are “Risks in their form.” I started my poem assuming that would be the title, and I still feel like that title fits the poem, even though I wasn’t trying to keep it.

 

Risks in their Form

I see these crocuses, their petals
like the streaks of light that make
a star a star, tendrils of yellow
stretched by distance, space, time.
Crocuses are stars at their turning.

The flowers will wilt, petals curling
like the fingers of a paralyzed hand.
Just as every star is in a new phase of dying.
Even when root and bulb are buried white
in the earth, death is there. Stars are not immune.

They find darkness, the black holes they form
a tearing apart, an upending of their form,
similar to the dilated pupils of the dead
widening up like a toothless maw
to swallow all the light in the universe.

Day 5 NaPoWriMo - Flowering Cherry

I used Robert Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay" as my model poem to use each line's first letter and the syllable count.

Flowering Cherry

Never am I winter,
half of me bare branches
half of me deepest roots in frost.
Don’t pity my bark or buds,
they fold in on themselves,
stay tight with my warm trunk.
Spring takes its time to come,
name me first, I blossom.

Day 3 NaPoWriMo - In Harmony

For day 3, we were tasked to write 100 different words using the "Personal Universal Deck" method by Michael McClure. I found the whole exercise thought provoking. There were words that I love and use everyday and others that took more time to come, but each one was rewarding. After I wrote all 100 words on small slips of paper, I put them in a hat and drew out 8 words. The ones I chose are highlighted below:

In Harmony

Camping in the gulch, I look up and shuffle my hands to my sternum and beat them against my chest, rhythmic, in time to my heart beat, in time to my gait. I swim through the music as if it were a river, rapids and roar. I can hear whitewater drowning my ears in sound just as the echoes in slot canyons have their own voices, their own stories, bodies of melody, each one with a mouth, a nose, and eyes. Sometimes moving forward feels like moving through mud and mush, but music comes through like the silhouettes of hoodoos and arches. They hum in the night, outlined in starlight, the milky way like whip cream and silence. It slides away into every horizon and the moon quiets its glow, its soft vibration like the sound of an ending chord of a song extending out its hand to the dawn.

Poetry is a collaborative effort!

 Hello all!

It's day two of NaPoWriMo and I've already written two poems. It's always so great to write with a community of writers. It's inspiring and helps all of us to stay on task and show up for our writing and ourselves. 

Writing with others in workshops, virtual or in person, can push us beyond our own boundaries and make us better writers. My own writing has benefited from a friendship with my fellow poet Kathy Szpekman. We have written and critiqued our writing since 2015. My writing never would have made it this far without her. And she is writing this NaPoWriMo on her blog hot coffee and warm laundry. 

You can follow her poems and mine this month of April as we both respond and write to the inspiring prompts on the NaPoWriMo website. Join us in our community of writing as we discover more of ourselves and our world.

With love and poetry,

Britt

Day 2 NaPoWriMo - Melancholia

Today's prompt we were tasked to make our own poem similar to Robert Frost's “The Road Not Taken.” This is my story.

Melancholia

I had a sadness that spoke with its own voice.
It ate food, wore clothes, brushed its teeth beside me.
Sometimes it would lift my hand to feed me.
Sometimes it would talk for me. I was relieved
to have someone to do the hard things,
say the hard things. And then my sadness
started doing my job and talking to my friends.
It would take long walks and it would take me for a walk.
It would take me out to eat at restaurants and it would pay.
It would shop for groceries and take my medications and vitamins.
It slept in my bed and it was good.
If I woke from nightmares, my sadness held me.

One day it wanted to take us for a drive east along the river
that winds below the great basalt cliffs. I said yes, of course.
It was a warm 70 degrees, just a couple of clouds.
I sat in the passenger seat as it drove.
It rolled down the windows and with its pale hands,
gripped the maroon steering wheel. The wind blew my hair,
tangled it around my face and neck. The river glittered navy blue
and white like a mirror left out in the sun. Evergreens dotted the shore.
My sadness, wove between the double yellow line
and hugged the solid white so close to the shoulder.

We drove in silence as it began to turn through the tight curves
with sheer drop offs into the valley, a thousand feet below.
I saw the tire touch the gravel of the shoulder. I glanced at my sadness.
It had no face, just blank, and I knew why it had driven me here.
Before it swerved, I grabbed the wheel from it.
I turned a sharp left into a gravel parking lot of an art shop.
My sadness slammed on the brakes. I was breathing hard,
but it didn’t breathe, so calm, so sure, so unafraid.
I cried and cried, slammed the dashboard with my palms.
It sat there like a mannequin, no words to be said.
I touched its shoulder and its skin was like winter.
I touched my own skin and it was warm and dry.
I got out and walked to the driver’s side,
opened the door, “Get out. It’s my time to drive.”

Day 1 NaPoWriMo - Caterwauling

Caterwauling

In a universe that has no universe,
a planet without planet,
human without human,
blood without blood,
the plants and animals
ate each other talked
over each other shouted
like trumpets over each other;
the planet was LOUD.

But a human that wasn’t human
was a whisper, a breeze
coming through the LOUD trees,
and the bones that were not bones
stayed put in the human spine,
mandible, clavicle, all the icle and ible bones
stayed put, never lifting an arm
or opening a mouth to make noise
never to be noticed, never to shout.

But the birds didn’t like the quiet,
they didn't like the human not human.
They thought human was like a black hole of sound,
the human was like a false wind under their wings,
the human was like falling with no air to catch.
And so they would perch on human’s shoulder
and shout, chirp, chip, chop, spout and spit.
They would hammer their beaks into the trees;
They would pop, tip, top, trumpet, and lumpet
out out out as if their sounds could drown the silence,
but the human absorbed the sound
like shadows blur into night.

Still they would chirp cheep, chip, beep
bop, boop, lip, leep, loop out to the world
that wasn't a world and one LOUD night,
the human grabbed a sparrow by its wing
and threw it to the ground.
All the birds stopped their cacophony and
flapped up into the trees, only the sounds
of their wings shuttering, the trees rustling.
They watched below as the human stood
and scooped up the sparrow.

It wasn't quite dead in a universe
that has no universe and the sparrow
had a soul that had no soul
and the human had no heart to give
the dying bird its breath, heartbeat shallow
tipping tip tipping its way to a death of quiet.
When the sparrow found its final breath,
the other birds saw the bird was like a black hole,
like the absence of wind beneath wings
and they knew the human that wasn't human
was death, the stillness and silence.
Human was the loss of noise, it was darkness,
eyes closed, a complete absence of absence.