Freshman English

Image from de.wikipedia.org

Robert Frost, I stopped loving you when I started hating him—

the professor who wore the same polyester slacks to every class,

and ranted about his stepmother and dot matrix printers

(he loathed them both in equal measure),

who said listen here missy when he didn’t like my questions,

and collected our papers but never returned them,

who dismissed Dickinson as useless,

and found shampoo pointless—

It was all his fault. He filtered all your images

through the pool of sweat on his upper lip

and the green stuff stuck between his bottom teeth,

leaving only snow and bugs

and cows with shriveled udders

and boys who have no business using buzz saws

and middle-aged men who wander in the woods

worrying about walls and whining about apples.

I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have let him sully

your pristine New England verses. But I was too tender.

I was only eighteen. And you seemed so old.

And he was so mean.

On the Table

For you it was never

in the cards it has always

been too hard to keep them

straight or find them flush

the strain can be too much when

you are more likely to blush

than bluff even when you

played poker for pennies

with your grandma and

all the cousins seemed to

be having fun you shifted

in your seat at the intensity
and wished for go fish
a game of polite requests where
no one tells you to up your
ante and in the end

everything is paired up and tidy

and though you now see

the value in stashing an

extra one up your sleeve

when your only aim is

to please it can be so hard to

choose so you wind up feeling

like you are just shuffling the deck

chairs on the Titanic

trying to remember the

words of that damn Kenny Rogers

song praying to get to the part

where you can walk away

or please God

maybe even run

Venus of the Little Spokane

Sculpture by Rick Davis

Image by Jesse Swanson

You may think you can

Ride her or

Float on her surface

But she rises

From the river

Flips your kayak

Right over

And laughs

At your plans.

 

Emblem

photo credit:gizmodo

Beyond the wood

an elderly woman

seems to seek a son

killed in the battles.

Down the street

the men dig,

remove the cloth,

embrace.

Among ordinary things,

she becomes

an emblem, takes

nothing.

***

NaPoWriMo prompt for day 21: Write an erasure poem. I took mine from Virgina Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. The original text is below. Rather than hold the non-erased words in place, I chose to move them around and re-arrange them a bit:

Such are the visions.  The solitary traveller is soon beyond the wood; and there, coming to the door with shaded eyes, possibly to look for his return, with hands raised, with white apron blowing, is an elderly woman who seems (so powerful is this infirmity) to seek, over a desert, a lost son; to search for a rider destroyed; to be the figure of the mother whose sons have been killed in the battles of the world. So, as the solitary traveler advances down the village street where the women stand knitting and the men dig in the garden, the evening seems ominous; the figures still; as if some august fate, known to them, awaited without fear, were about to sweep them into complete annihiliation.

                Indoors among ordinary things, the cupboard, the table, the window-sill with its geraniums, suddenly the outline of the landlady, bending to remove the cloth, becomes soft with light, an adorable emblem which only the recollection of cold human contacts forbids us to embrace. She takes the marmalade; she shuts it in the cupboard.

               

“There is nothing more to-night, sir?”

Gem State

image from skywalker.cochise.edu

Child support goes unpaid. Baby sleeps
safe from Sharia law, fills her belly with freedom.

***

For context, click here.

Courting

He brings her buds that have barely bloomed

She sees how tight they sit in his fist and is afraid