Prompts

7 Deadly Sins: write a poem about one sin through the lens of another ex: a food poem about sex, a lazy poem about anger, a pride poem about greed. etc. etc.

A New York Poem: especially if you have never been there. Everyone writes about New York sometime. It is its own cliche, and its marketable

Write a poem as if you are in a cubicle, an office you can’t escape. Tell me how much you love it.

Write a poem that is actually a letter to someone you don’t know well anymore. Attempt to breach the distance that has settled between you.

Write a surrealist poem about macaroni and cheese.

Genderflip your poem. If you are a man, write a poem as a woman. If you are a woman, inhabit the male gaze, again. If you are neither, be both. If you are both, you already know.

Go for a very long walk without your phone. If there are flowers, consider kissing them.

Find a chatgroup online that focuses on a topic you are not interested in. Perhaps a topic that no longer has much attention brought to it. Learn about radios, Twihard moms, vegan weightlifting. Be thoughtful.

Write a listicle about eschatological anxiety.

Gather up all your copay statements from your healthcare provider and blackout as much as you need to find art.

Write about a news story that deserves it. Remember that poetry has been a call to arms. Remember Modernists, and try to resist the urge for Dada for today.

Avoid doing laundry by writing.

CD Wright Has Died

Poem Without CD Wright in It
“we’ll pick up at the next chapter.”

 
CD Wright is gone

Her brooms sweeping

Have swept the last

Of the dust across the floor.

Her doors are still wood.

Her spaces linger longer

Than a pause.

Poem at uutpoetry!

I am very honored to be published on uutpoetry with beautiful art by Mariano Peccinetti! Check it out. It was inspired by a prompt on the site, and if you are interested in finding a fun exercise to do, I highly suggest it. The prompt is here.

Bodega Publication

I am very honored that Bodega magazine has published two of my poems in this month’s issue, along with poetry by Megan Merchant, Andrew Koch, and fiction by Christine Hennessey. Take a gander here.

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It’s true that I’ve taken a bit of a break from writing on wordpress–I have been submitting more, and trying to post more writing on Tumblr, as it’s a format that I am a bit more comfortable with. I have started participating in a trend called the 4 minute diary, so if you are looking for more short little things, you can see some of my work (along with many other reblogs) there.

I had a dream I lived in a mushroom house I reblogged on tumblr and that I was at a loft party full of adults because now I am an adult and children are no longer friends they are responsibilities or dating tests disguised as minor annoyances so now I have to dream about talking to adults all day long and I am pretty sure we were on a roof that was maybe in Toronto and there was a fire pit on at this roof party and I was talking to no one but was having a good time and Ed Taylor was there and Julian Montague was there so it may have had something to do with books but this makes no sense because books don’t make money. Maybe we were burning them to keep warm. Suddenly we were in a sushi restaurant in New York and I knew it was New York because the bill was $2367.50 for sushi and an okay beer and I remember that the tea cost at least $60. I don’t remember who two of you were but there were four of us and one was my mother so there were two more. We must have been there all night because I remember trying to decide if I wanted orange juice and ever since I broke up with my last ex I only drink orange juice in the morning. Some things just drift into dreams like that. Last night was the first time in five months the rain helped me go to sleep. It kept me there too, when I woke up too hot I didn’t stop dreaming. I got dressed in the sushi restaurant with the rain pouring down and we are still there, the bill insurmountable. I am trying to figure out if $375 for tip is stingy. You are sitting next to me, leaning across the table and away from my shoulder, worried as always, and I cannot remember who you are.

Top Five Things to do on Sunday

Sleep in. Treasure your body, radiating beneath covers and blankets and half awakened hibernation. Your world is your bed and the world is good. It hugs you back and you are a cattail, fluffy and ready to bend to the wind.

Technically, it is advised that you spend today making food. As the weekend nears you forget this, among your many other things to do. You won’t go to a grocery store on a Sunday—to pass by the mother’s grabbing things for tonight’s dinner, for the game, bags of chips whisked off shelves and into infinite checkout lines. You’d rather be hungry than dead.

Sunday is for homework. You have rested on Saturday, and the Sabbath; it’s really a matter of perspective. You reward yourself handsomely for very little work. This is acceptable. Your dishes are piling up, and you know that you will end up with no lunch packed for tomorrow.

Read. It doesn’t matter if you read Peter or Margaret or The Wind In the Willows. Read trash cans. Imbibe something.

Sunday is they day you would be trite, or naive, or cliché. Be a part of a movement you’ve never heard of, be new in being old, sympathetic, erratic, overtly and overwhelmingly sincere. Be new sincere. Be worried about the amount of asphalt in Wyoming. Be excellent.

Summer Wasp Poetry Experiment

I trapped a wasp
I know that suffering between
window panes is wrong
but yours is less important
or maybe I have hands
you have wings and poison.
Latches and plastic and
I dont know I just had to
separate myself from this risk

Top Five Things to do on Wednesday

Eggs are by fair examination, ignored for their graciousness. Crack open yellow suns of hope and bubble in a fry pan on low. Make sure you eat the yoke, bear the yoke, be the yoke. Yoke. You know.

Re: go through and delete the meme emails you’ve gotten. Savior each, and discard. Cats should not plug up your virtual world. The virtual world is infinite, feline and impartial. Research suggests the internet knows you. It recognizes who you are. It just doesn’t care.

You’re already here bathing in the warm orange light. Down cracked sidewalks, sweating through a work layer, free. You know this is bad–forever, for all. You haven’t even opened a loyalty card, but here it is in your palm. And you want the Sierra Turkey. You’re here, with “work friends” who will one day be three-dimensional-non-holographic real friends. Someday you won’t need a baguette to talk. Panera. We are full and broken and somehow guilty.

Come back to work and sit down. Sit and tilt your head at a thirty degree angle. You are a plane of existence. This plane will hide your ambivalence, you are all and you are insignificant. Work, and do not check your social media for now.

Curl into your shell. Here is a couch and lie on it. Your comfort. You are a wounded animal tail to tip in your burrow. Try to find a corner in your body to hide in. A lump. Put yourself away from your fingertips and make sure there is enough for tomorrow.

Top Five Things to do on Tuesday

Reevaluate modernism. When is the last time you tried to draw? Last year? Second martini? Attempt to push something with your drawing. Flatten your perspective. You’re Cezanne. You’re Picasso. You’re all those nonwhite nonmen. No mention.

Forget your lunch. Today, you’re eating from the candy bowl. There is shame in that. Also, Jen pays for all that candy. You should take Jen out to lunch.

Daydream about another world–apply somewhere else. Somewhere they might just be terrible, but better and delicious. Make it somewhere no one wants to go. Somewhere that should be cheap, but isn’t. Make sure to try to go somewhere there are no foodies. If you get it, you can see if you can make it in the real world–where fries are on salads.

Read CAConrad. This is a plug. Everyone centers themselves somehow. Read CAConrad. Be, for a brief second, yourself. Love your dirt.

Do not make dinner. Avoid the concept of making food. Have it brought to you, on platters of grape leaves. It has appeared magically, from nowhere. There is no industry behind what you digest. You are divine.

I am still a Still’s

They won’t give me more blankets in the E.R. and the nurse pours ice around me. My sweat chills me and I am shaking, convulsing, moving the bed. My teeth don’t chatter I’ve clamped them down and they feed me drugs. Drugs–I am still cold, my sweat half-frozen on my neck from the ice. They say you float but it’s merely a device and my muscles stop and the pain stops and I realize I haven’t been breathing.
I think of french fries and I see green mold twisting their insides, my insides, a french fry is mold and ash. I am punished when I eat. If it doesn’t return, come up choking, it beats my intestines in a rock-‘um-sock-‘um game of gastric pain–pouring out at the end. I came in vomiting so they gave me diarrhea.  A doctor tells them not to give me tylenol. A doctor tells them I need to swallow the tylenol and keep it down. Each shift I have to make my argument, retching, that I need it pumped into me, a drip. I get a drip and the shift changes.
The nurse sees me and assumes, and lazy, does not wake me. I do not get my fever reducers. Cold, my dream is a soaking flannel suffocation. The temperature rises. I wake but I don’t remember much–a nurse checks me after waiting–a button–I pressed a button and waited–or did my mother get her? Mom is on a cot. My fever is 105 and rising. They put a mask on me. A doctor comes in I have told you already about the drugs. He pats my knee after I’ve stopped shaking and for the first time in over a year I do not flinch, there is no pain.
This is how I go to the ICU.