Monday, July 30, 2018
Sunday, July 22, 2018
More Two-Line Poems
July 10:
Under dead vines I find a score of new potatoes, twenty Yukon gold rounds clinging to hair like the sleep curlers on Shark Tank, firm, smooth in the palm of a hand, waves of joy.
July 11:
In my garden zucchini form biceps, firm round upper arms after pushups through overlapping vines, a web of green clinging to tomato cages just barely standing on slim legs slicing into tulip skirted grow bags.
July 12:
Walmart at midnight brings out the recluses, pajama-clad and half-washed, like summer children gutter running after a rainstorm, but morning gathers them outside a library, waiting for fresh-showered librarians to open the door.
July 13:
Father loved vegetables as long as they came out of cans, salty rubber green beans with screeching skins, a schoolboy’s prank shooting spitballs into Roberta’s pigtails, latex rings for the janitor at midnight.
July 14:
I hated the canned peas more than almost anything, except maybe over-ripe cantaloupe, or that liver Mom made me eat in West Virginia, the taste so bad I ran from the kitchen into the back yard and threw up blood.
July 15:
Fresh green beans from the garden snap when you clean them, satisfying like a cork pop or leaning into dry leaves, ripe, woody, enough.
July 16:
Salmon came out of a can in our house, pink crumbles for fried cakes or an eggy loaf sliced and steamy, a fish bread pudding best served warm.
July 17:
That year I babysat for geometry tutoring, giving a math teacher mother time to date, a word problem somewhere as I ate foil wrapped salmon loaf and mac and cheese watching the one-year-old sleep.
July 18:
Amy called it the Misery Synod where babies carry their mother’s sins, a strange place that fools you with homemade ice cream setting even peanut butter in its ways.
July 19:
Milkweed pods like polished nails bend into breezes, drying just enough to open, white silk plumes in the center of the palm of your hand.
July 20:
Peanut butter by the tub, farm market apples, and leftover carrots from the salad bar, Doric columned defensive backs shifting sideways with circular capital trays that summer the Lions lived in my dorm.
July 21:
I don’t have a poem to write today, maybe because I ate black beans and rice for Donnas birthday dinner instead of food from the garden. Thank goodness I ate those ground cherries before I left.
Monday, July 9, 2018
The Fall--a compilation of Two-Line Poems
The Fall
A stage, a fall, a
distant warning
echoed by a backyard
dog’s howl
refrains from a
two-year-old in red tights
looking like veins in the
tops of her black patent leather shoes
molten,
seamed, flaring
She still can’t know why
Santa changed his clothes
in the women’s bathroom
crushed red velvet and
cotton balls draping
over a stall like the
center of a cherry cream
oozing
into a box
More than the broken lip
and bumped forehead
she remembers a mother
sewing a pink Easter cape
for a child who loved
dirt so much
she found it in the
middle
of
a white cotton sheet
She broke another tooth
falling
off a church wall, concrete
turning
white sharp and flat as
if she were playing
all three movements of
Clemente’s Sonatina
to
come back to middle C
Rome falls in the book of
Revelation
horsemen of the
apocalypse like that spring
in Bradford Woods when a
Sunday school teacher
thought teens needed to
learn about hell
instead
of Clint Eastwood painting a town red
She forgot about that
first day
in the Presbyterian
Church basement
when strangers oohed and
awed
over an itchy cast from
the boys in Florida
a
pancake toss to the ground
This is what you say
when a pastor prays for
you
while you bow over a
sprawl of skirt
clutching frozen meat in
a throbbing hand
on
an uneven kitchen floor.
More Two-Line Poems?
June 26:
I’m annoyed with my lack
of hand cleaner today, holding onto the door handle microbes with baited
breath. Why does Jean go on break at such an inconvenient time?
Fairy tales, horror, and
the pastoral add up to eco-horror in our view, but does it matter? Make the
message resonate more clearly? I continue to be skeptical about it all, and I’m
tired of writing in generalities, too.
June 27:
People wait for the
library to open here, sitting on a shady bench or listening to Leonard Skinnard
in a pick-up with a Rebel Flag bumper sticker while librarians fresh from the
shower slick back their hair and sneak in the back door.
Walmart at midnight
brings out the recluses, pajama-clad and half-washed, like summer children
gutter running after a rainstorm, but morning gathers them outside a library,
waiting for fresh-showered librarians to open the door.
June 28:
Some caterpillars
may gorge themselves on
parsley
Swallow butterflies
My mother’s blog offers a
“circle of life” from raised bed gardens to parsley-eating Black Swallow
Caterpillars; her mother
carried a birdcage and a newspaper filled with catfish across the river.
June 29:
Give me a concrete
image—an experience, a scenario, a setting full of meaning, like those green
leaves out the window waving at the class. Do they want to come in and write,
or are they inviting us to go out and play?
June 30:
They found light in a
darkroom in 1962, shining out of rocks in a river bed or the top three windows
in a Midwest farmhouse or that slurry pond at the bottom of a strip mine,
centering print, set, and frame on a white wall.
July 1:
Cashews and wine, salt
and mildly sweet snack for a 95 percent vegan, eating honey in my bread dough,
Halo Top ice cream, and an occasional egg.
July 2:
My head hums like rain on
the porch roof, rubber fading each drop into a pianissimo murmur, exchanges
without subtitles in a Sundance movie, their gaps remaining until it clears.
July 3:
The perfect sense, touch
as the movie tells us? Today I smell mowed grass, a green spring after the last
snow, the crunch of sneakers across white crust and that lone crocus beside an icy
downspout.
July 4:
Dolly hides in her crate beside
a vent of air.
What else is there to say
about this Independence Day?
July 5:
Zucchini on the vines, a
joke for our local paper, gifts for the neighbors when they start to overflow,
memories of vegetable dinners with tomatoes and onions, a pot of beans and
potatoes, and corn on the cob.
July 6:
I think I nearly became a
vegetarian in Michigan after Dr. Brown had to pull an abscessed tooth and fill
eight cavities. All I wanted to eat were mashed potatoes and apple sauce,
comfort foods I still crave during holidays.
July 7:
Joe’s father owned a
butcher shop and still loves the smell of meat. I hold my nose. He would cringe
to know I disliked meat so much I smothered sausages and roast beef in ketchup.
July 8:
The only meat I ever
craved was actually seafood, scallops and lobster to be exact, a special treat
my mother made in Ohio after we all grew up and left or on that Alaska cruise
my ex-mother-in-law bought us when we moved.
July 9:
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