Slow Poem 5

White Noise

There were things in the lake and between the sheets,
shadow and salt I could barely make out.
But it was clearer in the mirror
before I shattered the mirror. And after,
the baby had blood in her mouth,
lakewater in her hair.
But lakes aren't salty.
I smelled the salt anyway, and felt the burst
of a dream ending,
though I wasn't sleeping, wasn't crying.
I felt the milk drip on my feet.
For a moment, it wasn't winter.

-Collaboration with Kim at Question Air

Slow Poem 4

Russian Meteor Poem

He heard noises, like claps,saw a trail of white streaking,
and froze.
It was a burning freezing.
Then came taps on the glass
and a constant, shuddering wail.
Pinpricks of pain on his face and arms,
a taste like rust.
Peering from where once were windows
from what once were eyes,
his daughter's face, ruined.

-Collaboration with Traci Loudin

Slow Poem 3

Cold

Clouds floated out in the frigid air every time the dogs barked.
Her boots crunched the ground. It hurt to be outside, her eyes
cast down as she walked, counting each step.
She wanted to know why.
The ice crackled as she stepped onto the frozen lake
and began to undress,
the dogs looking on from the distance.

-Collaboration with Sunshine from Art, Art, Bo Bart

Slow Poem 2

Texas

When she pulled the knife from her chest,

the smeared blood illustrated

the shape of Texas in a splatter on the wall.

She used her finger to draw a star where Austin would have been

and started humming a tune from the jukebox at the old barbeque joint.

But she did not die.

-Collaboration with Sunshine from Art, Art, Bo Bart

Google Poem

I have such a hard time writing poetry anymore. When I was in my early twenties, and really, my whole life up until I finished graduate school, I thought of myself as a poet. I looked at life through a poet's eyes, always living in search of something to put in a poem.

I went to graduate school for poetry, and something about the process kind of took the poetry right out of me. I don't know if it was spending all the time honing the craft, if it was the insistence of my New York School-inspired teachers in taking all the "I's" out of my work, or what...but once I finished my thesis, graduated, and moved on, I really moved on.

I've had some luck in the meantime with narrative writing, and I think the years I spent writing poetry has served me well with creative non-fiction (not to mention in my career as a professional writer), but I do miss poetry.

One little assignment I invented a couple of years ago, though, that always bears fruit for me is what I like to call the "Google poem." I Google something, and I write a poem based on the odd things that I find in the descriptions that come up. If I get a good query, a little narrative will sometimes emerge from the disjointed articles and pages that appear. Sometimes, the stories are actually related, but more often, they are not. The little threads of unity that I find interwoven between them are simply serendipity.

I seem to be on some kind of roll with writing these days, with lots of different experiments going at the same time. I decided to try a Google poem today, so I searched for a line from an Alice Notley poem that is printed on a broadside a dear friend gave me a few years ago:

She wanted to know what the blood was for.

And here's what I made from the results:

She didn’t want to explain the fingerprint
found in the blood near the entrance to the hall.
She sat on the bed and hid her face.
When later, she goes mad, she sees blood on her hands,
understanding its critical importance.
Obviously, it felt like an eternity.
Why can’t she just be in love with him?

Slow Poem 1

Wisdom is Not

Husbands are very tall and filled with grief,
squirrels caught in mousetraps, nuts out of reach.
And day by day, the fruit in bunches hangs lower and lower,
growing pregnant with the heavy burden of juice.
But suddenly, from beneath the recycling bin,
a messiah. A message. An immaculate conception of truth
in the form of a small, brown rat, his beady yellow eyes
shining with the wisdom of a thousand years.
But really, wisdom is only hunger,
and the fruit bursts, rotten, on the ground.
Whatever. We grow weary. There is coffee.

-Collaboration with Sunshine from Art Art Bo Bart

Slow Poems

I'm working on a series of poems requiring email, text message, or other collaboration with some other friends who are writers or creatives. I think it will be a lot of fun!

The process is:

1. Solicit my mark. I demand participation from friends who are fun and write well.
2. Once cooperation has been demanded, send the friend 1 line of a poem.
3. Wait for the friend to respond with another line.
4. Keep going back and forth until the poem feels complete.
5. Revise the finished product. If the friend wants to, she can revise as well to make her own version.

I am extremely happy with this project. Poem #1 will emerge shortly.