Monday, July 9, 2018

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:

It took a while for me to understand the title My Life as a Zucchini. It’s not just the name of the main character but the vegetable everyone wants to give 

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