Q: Have you ever let someone else get punished for something you did?
A: You can’t pull a habit like a tooth or erase it with a keystroke. It’s not rooted; it’s integrated, blended into the spongy fabric of your brain. What you’re really asking here is, ‘Why does being bad feel good?’ and no one knows the answer to that one. Tape cactus needles to your fingertips, soak your cigarettes in vinegar, change your ex’s name in your contacts to SPAM RISK. If you think it’s rough now, just wait.
Q: If it's raining outside, what activity do you most want to do?
A: Clean sheets in a comfortable bed.
Q: What’s your earliest memory?
A: The human heart is about the size of a closed fist. Maybe of two hands clasped together, if the hands are smaller than average. An elephant’s heart is 2 ft by 2 ft by 1 and a half ft, larger than most people’s torsos. They can weigh up to 60 pounds, which is about 0.5% of their overall body weight.
Q: Do you, or did you in the past, have any strange habits?
A: It’s a kind of time travel. I have to remember who I was, what I knew before I knew this. Sometimes I think of it like an old-fashioned roll of film that I’m searching through, squinting at the tiny frames against the light and trying to make out the moment it began.
Q: If you could have any person become a member of your family, who would you choose?
A: Warm soup on a cold, wet day. The cat chirruping and melting into my hand when I pet his sleeping head. Water up above my knees. Being surprised by the full moon. When someone says my name midway through our conversation, like this is the part that’s just for me.
Not doing so well at keeping up, but loving this workshop. Here's a collaborative effort from me and three other women from my writing group. Such fun!
The crimson peony drips desire
Radiant doves drop their handkerchiefs
Riddles spout from the necks of empty suits
And weasels rip the flesh of innocents.
The lambent heavens rain silver cats.
Her black tongue licks the sugary berries
The naked image in the mirror speaks:
We are the same, you see; our glorious, gluttonous grief.
She draws back the purple velvet curtain:
Tortuous mountains tower into ominous turrets
Purple elephants cha-cha through a rugby pack
As a knobbly crocodile gobbles green hedgehogs in the pink river.
I won't share because my poem veered off the task (broke some rules) but I really like what I produced and am loving these lessons and the prompts. Thanks!
Your neighbor’s loud midnight music makes the ivy grow over the blue concrete porch. Only boring people ever plant big trees with email addresses. Eventually we succumb to joyful chaos viewing a short film about the search for meaning. Thousands of illustrious dead study hypnotism and lapidary work. Books are too sentimental. I cannot bear an open door or several varieties of woodpeckers.
Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts. Yes, I shared the results with them, my eldest cousin and my first niece. he resonances felt like our shared blood singing a soft song of us. We are in different cities and states and yet a something is there.
Red to her wedding, a touch of green her dream. The fire they walked, saptapadi seven promises bound for seven lives.The fire consumes her sindoor, soul. Holy ash doesn’t know her name from a screaming scapula.
Jeweled forehead for the chokrii
not
gauri means white the color of death the color of dismay. The phal dripping it’s tripping and she’s gripping and gritting, twirling down her sati.
Listen for lions in the jungle, the striped cat camouflaged, blurred. Macques on a tin roof of the marriage bed bled. It’s her only the mosquitoes, the muchhar know.
Autumn, your poem took me on a whirlwind journey of a lifetime and I loved every moment of it! I’ll confess to not knowing the Hindi (am I right?) words, but this didn’t hamper my experience of the poem at all. I am thrilled by how the images made me fall headlong into its internal narrative. I could still be falling, and I’d still be grateful 🥹
Having spent 3 years in Nepal, I really enjoyed the images you created in this. You wrote sati - which means friend. Did you mean saari - the traditional Indian dress? (They wore it in Nepal as well). No criticism -just looking for clarification.
Heads up – a content warning – violent death could be triggering for some
Sleepy thoughts [this shit haunts me – I cried over this – p.s. I worked as a tech in a pathology dept.]
the moon ate the walls
after my coma dreams
moon was an explosion
mulled red wine
served warm
beeping metronome
doll with stuffing coming out
Coma Dream
A siren song, a ghostly incantation cries in the deadly darkness to the naked souls in their shelters and those hanging in a death sleep interrupted by the funeral band sounds of kettle drums and bleating trumpets stalking nearer. Moonlight passes through the tattered curtains, painting our feet in white stockings. An escape portal clad in scraps of cloth. My satchel of aid slung over a knurled spiral bedpost circles up or is it down? An empty blue jar full of names on white petals chatters on a junkyard dresser of distressed pine leaned against plaster spider-webbed with cracks. The random death parade wanders near, an ululating chorus of banshee flutes whistling, a hungry sun blazes, eats the wall in a ravening burst. A ghostly band of pressure pinions me down, my body suddenly in sunburnpain, heimliched of breath. A straw-haired doll, lips of scarlet, lies, stuffing burst in a marinara display with my blue gloves soon cloaked in pulsing port sticky on my hands. Wandering flashing suns hopscotch around, feed my eyes with my junkyard repair now reduced to a screaming duet with a beeping metronome in a bedroom peopled with dripping bladders clear and claret, screens spying on my life with tubes and wires. Vainly, I search the room - my last scream for the damaged doll, a name in a blue jar.
Allison, I started writing prose pieces while I audited/paid for several MOOCs beginning in about 2016 but transitioned to poetry in 2022. I regularly think of my poems as a scene with a beginning - middle - end. So, yes I probably drag in some flash elements.
Mark, I felt my heart racing as I read your poem. Image upon image transfixed me with a despair I could only witness, and yet was no less familiar. The line “An empty blue jar full of names on white petals chatters on a junkyard dresser of distressed pine leaned against plaster spider-webbed with cracks” is so beautifully vivid, and to have the poem end with the “name in a blue jar”, I understand why you cried over this. I did too.
Robin, I have a blue cookie jar, from my late mom's kitchen, sitting on a bookshelf in the room where I write. I looked around as I was writing and poof it was part of the poem then I thought of it as a repository of souls delicately registered on rose petals, I left out that image and let the blue jar represent what the reader wishes. The color white, I think, is often used when referring to death/funerals.
Wow, I love the dark, tense imagery this evokes. I especially like the line "...an ululating chorus of banshee flutes whistling, a hungry sun blazes, eats the wall in a ravening burst."
I love how in Bob Hicok’s poem, the lines still flow but in a bizarre, comedic way. It was a delightful read.
Inspired by that particular flow, here’s what I wrote:
Last night I dreamt of water. When I woke up all was falling. Gravity wears a thong, feels sexy enough. I cry a typhoon into the wedding. Into the city. Cars crawl like maggots. I make a nest out of innards. I decorate with debris. Shake a loose hip, yes. The bed makes itself again.
Yours too, was a "delightful read". It's a strategy that allows those of us who require some sense of direction to enjoy surrealism. The gravity line in particular is great!
Totally agree with you, Gordon ☺️ and the gravity line got me too 😉
Toni, I loved the sensory shift from dreaming of water to gravity’s thong 😁 there’s something freeing about not demanding direct associations and just letting the poem hurtle us where it will.
Karan and Friends the Forever Workshop. I looked at the non-sequitur example in the exercise and then reviewed some previous improvised lines I had and added some new ones to the mix. Alas, it's more than 10 lines. Hope you like it or will comment. Thanks.
Finding the lines “or by joining Noses Anonymous or the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence” in the middle of your poem was brilliant 😁 i also loved the line about Superman failing to signal his intentions.
Your poem makes me think of that quote attributed to Robin Williams, about how those who know the deepest grief know best how to provide others with laughter 🥹
Thanks a bunch Robin. I was walking al line between humor an despair and how both can happen simultaneously. Thanks for getting this. BTW. saw Robin Williams live at one of his shows. Not a lot of poetry per se but so much humor mixed with troubled situations. Best to your own writing and thank for feed back. Paul
I just found out it was Robin Williams’ death anniversary on the day you posted your poem. The universe telling us something, huh 🥹 thank you again for sharing your poem with us!
It's summer and it's been summer too long. Peaches rot in their bins in the too cold store, fuzzy gray mold taking over furry soft peach skin, blotting sweetness out. Everything is a bruise.
And why is the lake so green?
Knife-white feathers skin the surface, what a bird's body can know. Hollow bones full of whispery smoke. My old ballet tights balled up in a flesh pink ball. Another peach you'll never eat. Another sigh.
Why aren't the swans afraid of the passage of time?
We ran out of choreography. We'll have to improvise. Put your hand on my hip and I'll steer. When the heat waves finally end, some things will rot and some things ferment. Which one will we be?
I agree with the others. Was the peach eating reference intentional? It popped up in my and one other person's writing so far.. We all must dare. The last paragraph has lines that generate alot of thought. Strong.
Thanks so much! I wasn't thinking about Prufrock when I wrote the peach line, just actual peaches I bought and didn't eat soon enough, ugh. But now that you point it out, it definitely resonates!
I agree! 'Grace' is a good word to describe this poem, with feathers and ballet and, my favorite line/question "Why aren't the swans afraid of the passage of time?"
Satoru.
---
Azure eyes and a greedy smile successfully hide a lonely heart,
closed off; my pulse dips and spikes in confusion
the cellar door was locked today, so I fumble my way to look for light switches
I learned nothing beautiful can be found in the dark
Escape is the path naturally chosen, I leapt to the moon by aiming for stars
Iridescence shines a light in the smallest of cramped spaces
Cornered, I push through rubble to make way for the rocks
but ice blue avalanches don't fall, they crash around me
I'm hopelessly plummeting to logic's solid ground
Shattering a stained glass ceiling, I look up to be greeted by the loneliest smile.
My saucepan sprung a hole of too many eggs.
Grass is greener on the other side of the moon.
The hole in my bucket was fixed with a sigh.
The shimmer in your pen reflected the twinkle in my eye.
My fingers debated the merits of meritocracy with the patriarchy.
The world sprang a leak.
I borrowed a towel from Douglas Adams.
There’s an ant in some pants that never learnt to tickle.
Sponges grace the ocean like failed submarines.
You can make glue with egg white.
Infatuation per se is the antithesis of yesterday's dream.
Today, I’ll wake and shudder with expectations.
Tomorrow, we’ll have strawberries and leave the cream for spreading in unseen places.
Adamant my foot, it’ll squeeze up between our toes and leave traces before we arrive back in pieces.
Place it all out in front.
Puzzle it together somewhat differently this time.
Look up and see the sky full of lost epigrams.
I kid you in knots of laughter and pain.
Work faster.
Walk out onto the surface of the moon and pretend you landed.
Take a deep breath and a birdie will catch you by the throat.
Just squirm.
Q: Have you ever let someone else get punished for something you did?
A: You can’t pull a habit like a tooth or erase it with a keystroke. It’s not rooted; it’s integrated, blended into the spongy fabric of your brain. What you’re really asking here is, ‘Why does being bad feel good?’ and no one knows the answer to that one. Tape cactus needles to your fingertips, soak your cigarettes in vinegar, change your ex’s name in your contacts to SPAM RISK. If you think it’s rough now, just wait.
Q: If it's raining outside, what activity do you most want to do?
A: Clean sheets in a comfortable bed.
Q: What’s your earliest memory?
A: The human heart is about the size of a closed fist. Maybe of two hands clasped together, if the hands are smaller than average. An elephant’s heart is 2 ft by 2 ft by 1 and a half ft, larger than most people’s torsos. They can weigh up to 60 pounds, which is about 0.5% of their overall body weight.
Q: Do you, or did you in the past, have any strange habits?
A: It’s a kind of time travel. I have to remember who I was, what I knew before I knew this. Sometimes I think of it like an old-fashioned roll of film that I’m searching through, squinting at the tiny frames against the light and trying to make out the moment it began.
Q: If you could have any person become a member of your family, who would you choose?
A: Warm soup on a cold, wet day. The cat chirruping and melting into my hand when I pet his sleeping head. Water up above my knees. Being surprised by the full moon. When someone says my name midway through our conversation, like this is the part that’s just for me.
Joined the workshop late, but trying to catch up! Here's some Automatic Writing:
Resurrecting time at the end of a duck's bill,
the intrinsic value of a slipshod notion,
all puckered and dripping
with the portence of the occasion.
An air conditioner pissing
into a red plastic pail,
the white towel recieving.
Highway tires singing lullabies
and elegies for rubber trees.
Me, standing six-toed on the precipice,
while cormorants in rowed electric towers
ignore his calls and leave him on read.
All of this compiled upon waking at the alligator getaway.
'standing six-toed on the precipice' - a find of a line!
Not doing so well at keeping up, but loving this workshop. Here's a collaborative effort from me and three other women from my writing group. Such fun!
The crimson peony drips desire
Radiant doves drop their handkerchiefs
Riddles spout from the necks of empty suits
And weasels rip the flesh of innocents.
The lambent heavens rain silver cats.
Her black tongue licks the sugary berries
The naked image in the mirror speaks:
We are the same, you see; our glorious, gluttonous grief.
She draws back the purple velvet curtain:
Tortuous mountains tower into ominous turrets
Purple elephants cha-cha through a rugby pack
As a knobbly crocodile gobbles green hedgehogs in the pink river.
I am a frog leaping backwards.
The old man spoke to the sea.
The house is most beautiful
at sunset. Lights light up the trees.
I will write you a love song.
Beauty birds sing to me.
Divine disillusionment is bred in the deep.
How might I write backwards?
What do things mean?
The stars stare back at me.
I like the impression this creates of our struggle to move on to a future while the past is the only thing that helps us make sense of our lives.
Interview
Q. How can long-term thinking become more important to people?
A. Mars.
Q.How can one make resentful people less so?
A. There are no street numbers.
Q. How can one get Americans to value education and the arts?
A. Cats.
Q. How & when do cultures lessen their self-destructive, self-impoverishing tendencies?
A. Help other people.
Q. When will the Dallas Cowboys get rid of Jerry Jones’ influence?
A. Sustainability is my current life goal.
Q. How do we increase opportunity without encouraging mediocrity?
A. Les Miserables.
Q. How will the present be seen in a couple hundred years?
A. Guilt, really.
Giggling too.
This made me smile and giggle! Thank you! I dug the one word answers. Cats are indeed the answer.
I won't share because my poem veered off the task (broke some rules) but I really like what I produced and am loving these lessons and the prompts. Thanks!
Something to bitch about
Your neighbor’s loud midnight music makes the ivy grow over the blue concrete porch. Only boring people ever plant big trees with email addresses. Eventually we succumb to joyful chaos viewing a short film about the search for meaning. Thousands of illustrious dead study hypnotism and lapidary work. Books are too sentimental. I cannot bear an open door or several varieties of woodpeckers.
Succumbing to joyful chaos is an unending series of tasks.
10 questions (Asked 2 people for 5 questions, created answers before I got the questions and applied in the order received)
What’s your favorite dessert?
Creativity is a gift, an art, a practice swinging at flying objects.
What was the last thing you dreamed about?
Rituals are a way of bringing ourselves back to ourselves.
Which part of your life needs a sequel?
We are our own authors of our records.
How are you staying motivated lately?
We are all at a Halloween party believing the costume is the person.
Who is the person you wish could always stay?
It’s a call and response dynamic informed by intention.
What would you do if migrants made a camp site across the street?
Inspiration is the prime directive of existence.
How would you react if cows could suddenly fly?
You can see their journey through each choice that they make.
If cats and dogs disappeared from the earth, how would you feel?
One person’s innovation is another person’s job loss.
You hit the lottery, what next?
You meld with that signal and are made coherent and hole.
Would your antennas go up if the irs said you overpaid on your taxes?
The Japanese stoneboat resembles a canoe, 800 tons of granite 33 x 24 feet and 15 feet high near a lake, which no longer exist
Love the flexibility of surrealism
I used a similar technique. It’s amazing how the random connections of these answers with their questions furnish food for thought and refllection.
Can I just say that I enjoyed every bit of your poem, but these lines, I felt them in my bones:
How are you staying motivated lately?
We are all at a Halloween party believing the costume is the person.
Who is the person you wish could always stay?
It’s a call and response dynamic informed by intention.
What would you do if migrants made a camp site across the street?
Inspiration is the prime directive of existence.
How would you react if cows could suddenly fly?
You can see their journey through each choice that they make.
Did you ever get to share the poem with the two people who gave the questions? I’m hoping they enjoyed this poem too!
Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts. Yes, I shared the results with them, my eldest cousin and my first niece. he resonances felt like our shared blood singing a soft song of us. We are in different cities and states and yet a something is there.
Third Eye
Red to her wedding, a touch of green her dream. The fire they walked, saptapadi seven promises bound for seven lives.The fire consumes her sindoor, soul. Holy ash doesn’t know her name from a screaming scapula.
Jeweled forehead for the chokrii
not
gauri means white the color of death the color of dismay. The phal dripping it’s tripping and she’s gripping and gritting, twirling down her sati.
Listen for lions in the jungle, the striped cat camouflaged, blurred. Macques on a tin roof of the marriage bed bled. It’s her only the mosquitoes, the muchhar know.
Spread the news
the fever
the love laughter, the last they’ll know.
Your language is luminous.
Autumn, your poem took me on a whirlwind journey of a lifetime and I loved every moment of it! I’ll confess to not knowing the Hindi (am I right?) words, but this didn’t hamper my experience of the poem at all. I am thrilled by how the images made me fall headlong into its internal narrative. I could still be falling, and I’d still be grateful 🥹
Having spent 3 years in Nepal, I really enjoyed the images you created in this. You wrote sati - which means friend. Did you mean saari - the traditional Indian dress? (They wore it in Nepal as well). No criticism -just looking for clarification.
No worries, Gordon. Sati is the (mostly) extinct Hindu ritual where a wife throws herself on her husband’s funeral pyre.
Thank you for the correction. So many cultural practices in that part of the world with similar names.
Three years in Nepal must have been an amazing experience!
What was your experience, given the cultural knowledge you shared in your poem? It doesn't sound like it came from reading a book.
My husband of 25 years is Gujarati. Gujarat is a region on the northwest side of India, above Bombay/Mumbai.
Heads up – a content warning – violent death could be triggering for some
Sleepy thoughts [this shit haunts me – I cried over this – p.s. I worked as a tech in a pathology dept.]
the moon ate the walls
after my coma dreams
moon was an explosion
mulled red wine
served warm
beeping metronome
doll with stuffing coming out
Coma Dream
A siren song, a ghostly incantation cries in the deadly darkness to the naked souls in their shelters and those hanging in a death sleep interrupted by the funeral band sounds of kettle drums and bleating trumpets stalking nearer. Moonlight passes through the tattered curtains, painting our feet in white stockings. An escape portal clad in scraps of cloth. My satchel of aid slung over a knurled spiral bedpost circles up or is it down? An empty blue jar full of names on white petals chatters on a junkyard dresser of distressed pine leaned against plaster spider-webbed with cracks. The random death parade wanders near, an ululating chorus of banshee flutes whistling, a hungry sun blazes, eats the wall in a ravening burst. A ghostly band of pressure pinions me down, my body suddenly in sunburnpain, heimliched of breath. A straw-haired doll, lips of scarlet, lies, stuffing burst in a marinara display with my blue gloves soon cloaked in pulsing port sticky on my hands. Wandering flashing suns hopscotch around, feed my eyes with my junkyard repair now reduced to a screaming duet with a beeping metronome in a bedroom peopled with dripping bladders clear and claret, screens spying on my life with tubes and wires. Vainly, I search the room - my last scream for the damaged doll, a name in a blue jar.
Oh yes, the horror.
Anna, welcome to the workshop.
Thank you Mark. I am baffled, but braving it.
I too loved "ululating chorus of banshee flutes whistling as I love to ululate and I could hear the image...
Akua, thanks. I first thought of a warbling sound but decided to punch it up to a more frighteningly dangerous description.
This had a lot of those Flash elements too. I liked it. Disquieting.
Allison, I started writing prose pieces while I audited/paid for several MOOCs beginning in about 2016 but transitioned to poetry in 2022. I regularly think of my poems as a scene with a beginning - middle - end. So, yes I probably drag in some flash elements.
Mark, I felt my heart racing as I read your poem. Image upon image transfixed me with a despair I could only witness, and yet was no less familiar. The line “An empty blue jar full of names on white petals chatters on a junkyard dresser of distressed pine leaned against plaster spider-webbed with cracks” is so beautifully vivid, and to have the poem end with the “name in a blue jar”, I understand why you cried over this. I did too.
Robin, I have a blue cookie jar, from my late mom's kitchen, sitting on a bookshelf in the room where I write. I looked around as I was writing and poof it was part of the poem then I thought of it as a repository of souls delicately registered on rose petals, I left out that image and let the blue jar represent what the reader wishes. The color white, I think, is often used when referring to death/funerals.
Wow, I love the dark, tense imagery this evokes. I especially like the line "...an ululating chorus of banshee flutes whistling, a hungry sun blazes, eats the wall in a ravening burst."
Autumn, thanks. As you can see from my notes I was going to use the moon again but
the moon/sun dichotomy gave it a much sharper contrast from tranquil to terrible.
I love how in Bob Hicok’s poem, the lines still flow but in a bizarre, comedic way. It was a delightful read.
Inspired by that particular flow, here’s what I wrote:
Last night I dreamt of water. When I woke up all was falling. Gravity wears a thong, feels sexy enough. I cry a typhoon into the wedding. Into the city. Cars crawl like maggots. I make a nest out of innards. I decorate with debris. Shake a loose hip, yes. The bed makes itself again.
Yours too, was a "delightful read". It's a strategy that allows those of us who require some sense of direction to enjoy surrealism. The gravity line in particular is great!
Totally agree with you, Gordon ☺️ and the gravity line got me too 😉
Toni, I loved the sensory shift from dreaming of water to gravity’s thong 😁 there’s something freeing about not demanding direct associations and just letting the poem hurtle us where it will.
Karan and Friends the Forever Workshop. I looked at the non-sequitur example in the exercise and then reviewed some previous improvised lines I had and added some new ones to the mix. Alas, it's more than 10 lines. Hope you like it or will comment. Thanks.
Paul Brucker
Hypbruck15@gmail.com
The Nose that always Knows
I was playing footsie with fate
when my nose for negative nose got the best of me.
From what dunghill did this fungus spring?
Another paradox masquerading as a yes or no question?
The wincing and mincing of words, which gives a sense of self
that others sniff and judge me by?
Almost everywhere I go, I see the nose on the loose
in a wilderness of scent. Wrinkled, rubbed, picked, sneezing.
And books on display, “The five secrets to improve your sense of smell.”
On sale at $20.99, with coupon in preferred locations.
With such knowledge, you may discriminate among the finest of wines,
even water that is supposed to taste like wine.
You may detect the most alluring and effective fragrances.
Then learn more by paid training with the nose patrol
or by joining Noses Anonymous or the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
I had a girl named Lisa who had the most exquisite body odor.
I thought she said she was in show business,
but it was the shoe business.
And, later, I slept with a girl named Habib who smelled
-- how should I put this? -- like rot
when her perfume wore off.
Of course, you have your own standards and sense of smell.
You may “utilize” feel-good, hide-the-odor candles
or disagree with my assessments.
But let’s both agree on this:
To wish them the best, knowing they probably
grew better off without me, and you and me, without them.
Bottom line: Let’s be humble, loveable and develop our sense of smell.
Maybe that’s why I’m not out looking at the night sky,
engaging in a staring contest with the moon,
bumping into Superman who failed to signal his intentions.
And why the babbling brook makes perfect sense,
why my nose is now in a pawnshop
being sold without coupon as a tambourine.
Wrinkled, rubbed, picked, sneezing, and Noses Anonymous. Love this!
Finding the lines “or by joining Noses Anonymous or the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence” in the middle of your poem was brilliant 😁 i also loved the line about Superman failing to signal his intentions.
Your poem makes me think of that quote attributed to Robin Williams, about how those who know the deepest grief know best how to provide others with laughter 🥹
Thanks a bunch Robin. I was walking al line between humor an despair and how both can happen simultaneously. Thanks for getting this. BTW. saw Robin Williams live at one of his shows. Not a lot of poetry per se but so much humor mixed with troubled situations. Best to your own writing and thank for feed back. Paul
I just found out it was Robin Williams’ death anniversary on the day you posted your poem. The universe telling us something, huh 🥹 thank you again for sharing your poem with us!
Why do the swans all have black eyes?
It's summer and it's been summer too long. Peaches rot in their bins in the too cold store, fuzzy gray mold taking over furry soft peach skin, blotting sweetness out. Everything is a bruise.
And why is the lake so green?
Knife-white feathers skin the surface, what a bird's body can know. Hollow bones full of whispery smoke. My old ballet tights balled up in a flesh pink ball. Another peach you'll never eat. Another sigh.
Why aren't the swans afraid of the passage of time?
We ran out of choreography. We'll have to improvise. Put your hand on my hip and I'll steer. When the heat waves finally end, some things will rot and some things ferment. Which one will we be?
Yessss. Gorgeous melancholy.
I agree with the others. Was the peach eating reference intentional? It popped up in my and one other person's writing so far.. We all must dare. The last paragraph has lines that generate alot of thought. Strong.
Thanks so much! I wasn't thinking about Prufrock when I wrote the peach line, just actual peaches I bought and didn't eat soon enough, ugh. But now that you point it out, it definitely resonates!
This line “Everything is a bruise” might have just made my heart implode.
There’s such grace to the imagery of your poem, and a musicality that draws me in as a thread of melancholy weaves through the verses 🥲
I agree! 'Grace' is a good word to describe this poem, with feathers and ballet and, my favorite line/question "Why aren't the swans afraid of the passage of time?"