Day 5 #Napowrimo - The Day We Wore the Wind as Masks

Here's my day 5 poem for #napowrimo. Today was a very challenging prompt, but I feel like I was awarded with the unique images that emerged from the exercise. 

The Day We Wore the Wind as Masks

Car tires ripen out of the marshland,

split cedar holds the musk of lovemaking,

and the Himalayan blackberry vines,

serrated along the paved trail,

prick

the wind into many pieces

of transparent material.

Use them

to cover your mouth with nothing.

The air tastes like winter and frost,

but the cherry trees keep blossoming.

And you told us that things are always

what they seem,

but the tires emerge

from the marsh as rounded animals

that burrow and hibernate.

Ashish’s bicycle keeps the earth in orbit;

the tines of our wheels twang and twong.

Life is short and life is long.

The blackberry tires of patience emerge

from the Snohomish marshes;

       all of them

wallflowers in the charred waters.

The marshes will recede in summer,

beaching

those precious morsels to ferment

in the sun.

In time, the tires will decide

to become the body of vinegar

or the body of wine.

No matter, we will sip from it

and hear with our tongue, the vibration:

                 Life is short, life is long.

Day 4 #Napowrimo - Dream Sequence

I was able to work on this poem during my Shut Up & Write meetup that is every Saturday morning. Shut Up & Write has been a great motivator to write for a solid hour. I glues me to my chair!

I wrote the following poem for #napowrimo for the day 4 prompt posted on the linked site. Have a great weekend and don't binge watch too much Netflix! Stay safe, healthy and sane. 

Dream Sequence 

This moment is cultural as I bend to take a sip 

from the alloy pool, the puddle formed of closures. 

Door knobs melted down, brass locks, silver keys, 

the sounds of deadbolts deadening. A foot, 

a finger caught between door and threshold, 

the pinch and bruise; my body parts wedged 

to keep the world open. I take the click 

of my car unlocking, its lights flashing, a warning. 

I melt that down until brass, silver, and steel 

burn bright and mercurial. Every automatic door 

that no longer opens and the empty parking lots, 

the shorter store hours, the street lights flickering. 

Closed gates in all of their wrought iron glory.  

I sip from the alloy pool, the playgrounds 

and monkey bars, wrapped in yellow police tape 

as if every park in the country held a crime, 

a murder, a mystery. I melt them down, too. 

All the tin roofs and mail boxes and pennies 

I find discarded on the sidewalks. All the handshakes 

not given or taken, my keys jingling a cue  

to hurry through the grocery stores, get what is  

needed. Don’t speak, don’t open the mouth, 

form fists, not in rage, but to stop 

the touch, touch, touch. I melt that down too  

and sip from the alloy pool. 

Day 3 #Napowrimo - Incubation

Here's my day 3 response for #napowrimo & National Poetry Month.

Incubation

My joints and bone marrow

lined with blood and freeze;

my spirit can find echoes

in my deep, point an arrow

to the start of disease;

tongue thick and swollen,

lungs rattled with panic.

I welcome this dark golem

red with heat and ash.

I burn bright with fever,

my body a nest for this virus

to hatch.

Day 2 #Napowrimo - Laying Down to Waste

Here's day two of National Poetry Month. You can find the prompt I used here.

Laying Down to Waste 

When it rained (which was (almost) everyday), 

the gravel road flowed like a river of mud; 

all the bits of fine rock washed away into the creek bed. 

What would be left was hard packed earth, boulders 

rounding out of the road like animal heads rearing, 

nudging the air. Born from the waste of the storm. 

Streaks of clay, like veins of blood connected them 

like a map. And I would walk, regardless of the wet 

dampening my socks and sneakers or mud kicking up 

on my pants. I would walk on the washed road beneath 

the canopy of leaning trees. I would brush by the shoulders 

of ferns and the bushes of sal al. My youth filled with acres, 

evergreens, lush and wet, dense forest. I knew it better 

than the city folk knew the cracks in their sidewalks 

or the flicker of the street light down the avenue. 

And even now that I live in the city, I still listen 

for the hoot of the owl or the rustle of racoon; 

I open my window, I open my ears, but all I hear 

is the roar of I-5, the sound of tires rushing 

against the gray barriers of the freeway. I cannot 

smell the resin of the cedars or redwoods rising; 

only the burn of asphalt. The laying down of tar, 

in the early morning. The men at work, hands 

clad in leather gloves, their signs that say yield. 

Yield the trees into wood chips; lay down 

the roots of bitumen; sow the fields with concrete; 

open the maw of mud and flatten it with machines. 

Not the rain, but a flood could wash all of it away.