Two-Line Poems Running Out of Steam!

June 18:

I forgot about that first day of kindergarten in the basement of the Presbyterian Church when strangers oohed and awed over an itchy cast gift from the boys in Florida and their pancake toss to the ground.

June 19:

The Club sounds like a golf outing, a martini, or a jump in the Olympic sized pool. Instead, it’ a Chilean film so brutal three dogs were killed during its climax.

June 20:

I have nothing more to say about church except that I’d never quote Romans to make locking up children (or putting families in chains) seem okay.

June 21:

A summer solstice, another rainstorm, and a towel, those are my tools for the day, coaxing terry cloth under an old dog’s chest, offering longer life to limp legs on the shortest night of the year.

June 22:

Bidford-on-Avon with its White Lion Inn where Shakespeare probably drank, near Henley-in-Arden and the Othello for squid and onion prep, those are the memories I hold of a place that no longer carries those names.

June 23:

“World Without End” a Gloria Patri ending, “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end. Or, Leigh-on-Sea’s Amen. Doxology meets Documentary.

June 24:

Unitarian Univeralism has its own space in the Wikipedia entry for Doxology, with words from Curtis W. Reese's adaptation of "From all that dwell below the skies" sung to the old 100^th “in every land, in every tongue.”

June 25:

What happens when we hold memories based on photographs? Blind men describing an elephant, projecting and ignoring partial experiences instead of building a whole truth.

Two-Line Poems, Continued

June 8:

Watching Megan’s sister study at her desk each night, she learns to focus on the sliding doors in the church parlor where Mrs. Freeman claims the overflow congregated hiding a stop on the underground railroad.

June 9:

Confirmed alone without training, she took the Bible her father gave her, watching white spittle slide down his chalky chin.

June 10:

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.

June 11:

She slapped at bee stings while she mowed, a brother on the church roof hoisting a pellet gun to a shoulder, aiming down across a parking lot toward the lawn.

June 12:

Determined, industrious, a pioneer breaking turf in a back garden near the Avon proving the value of American hard work and focus, these were the claims she heard that summer that made it so hard to stay.

June 13:

Presbyterian and Britney Spears, anagrams with double meanings like “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” turning the other cheek that Florida summer when my brother and I played duck, duck, goose on the church lawn.

June 14:

Connecting horror with the fairy tale opens a space for interdependence and what del Toro calls “beauty and love,” a “Once upon a time” opening and “They lived happily ever after” ending of most fairy tales meeting the monster.

June 15: running out of childhood churches   

Failing as director of a church latchkey day care, she set two alarms and a wake-up call to pick up milk so early her parents threw her into the basement, dark, damp, and cool.

*Uncle Boonmee: Who Can Recall His Past Lives*

June 16:

Bob Wassinger hated her church, its comfortable pews, lack of kneeling, and short services. A priest explained his focus on atmosphere, losing oneself in the ritual, while she thought faith, hope, and the greatest of all meant more.

June 17:

Why does he ask us to look at a cross or kneel at an altar when visiting Bitzy dog for my neighbor brings me closer to Go

Two-Line Poems for 100 Days of Writing

Two-Line Poems for June 2018

June 1:

What do you say when a pastor prays for you while you bow over a sprawl of skirt 

and clutch frozen meat in a throbbing hand on an uneven kitchen floor? 

June 2:

A stage, a fall, a distant warning echoed by a backyard dog’s howl triggering refrains from a two-year-old in red tights refracted like veins in the tops of her black patent leather shoes—molten, seamed, flaring.

June 3:

How do you sing with tears in your throat, so only your lips vibrate? A piano plays a medley of “Simple Gifts,” my freshman recital solo for Becky and Bonnie and an empty sidewalk at midnight. 

June 4:

I still don’t know why Santa changed his clothes in the women’s bathroom that December, crushed red velvet and cotton balls draping over a stall like the center of a cherry cream chocolate oozing into a shallow box. 

Modern Day Scarlet Letters: 

R—Roller--Rolls eyes when no one’s looking

O—Outsiders--ThinksThe Outsiders should have been about a girl gang

B—Breaker—Breaks too many bones for words

I—Ice Nayer—Drinks water, tea, and soda without ice

N—Nature—Loves nature more than cars

June 5:

Rolling eyes when no one’s looking, she thinks The Outsiders should have had a girl gang, breaking bones, drinking water without ice, draped in flowers after racing fast cars. 

June 6:

More than the broken lip and bumped forehead from a fall to a concrete floor, 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.
 

June 7:

She broke another tooth falling off a wall in a church yard, a brother’s push into more concrete turning white sharp and flat as if she were playing all three movements of Clemente’sSonatinahoping to come back to middle C.

Niece Allie's Graduation