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Tag: read write poem

iCoyote

January 28, 2010 • • 18 Comments

After days on the road, Robbie ran out of numbers for counting road signs and clouds, which was fine since he’d already counted all of them anyway. He switched to counting things that weren’t there and ticked imaginary numbers off in his head whenever he didn’t see something.

He thought he didn’t see a motorcycle but the absence was only a mirage, he realized when a black-clad biker gang rumbled past, stirring the desert to thunderous life before returning to the kind of silence that inspired Robby to consider counting things he didn’t hear as well as things unseen.

He thought he didn’t hear a coyote, so he eased his pickup off the highway to make sure the animal wasn’t there before adding it to his tally. Robby was scrupulously honest with himself about all things and wanted to ensure the accuracy of his count especially since the coyote, if it wasn’t there, would be the 500ith item on his list.

When he stepped out of his truck, the wind tore at his hair and clawed his jacket. He looked around trying to see if there was nothing there to count, but the desert, much to Robby’s disappointment, was full of things and besides he wanted that coyote to be the 500ith thing that wasn’t there. Nearly i0 hours from the road, he didn’t see the coyote, which wasn’t sitting in a three-legged chair. He resisted the urge to count the chair’s missing leg.

He approached iCoyote slowly and knelt before his absence, staring up at the thin clouds in the sky where iCoyote’s head would have been.

“I thought I’d be able to see you,” Robbie whispered, his voice nearly lost in the wind as he added iCoyote to his tally.

“Divide out the i’s,” iCoyote didn’t say.

Robbie thought back to half-remembered math classes, wondered if i worked like a variable, could be solved like x. “I’d have to do that to both sides of the equation, wouldn’t I?” Robby asked and noticed that he’d lifted his hands like an equal sign between them. “To balance it out, right?”

iCoyote didn’t say, “You’ll get your proof.”

Robbie divided out the i and saw the coyote grinning at him from the chair. The coyote hopped down, walked through Robbie as if he were a mere fraction reduced to the lowest terms of what he had been, and trotted off in the direction of Robbie’s truck.

Robbie looked around and saw all the things that weren’t there. He subtracted frantically, his list cratering before his open eyes. In the distance, he didn’t hear his engine start and he didn’t hear it drive down the highway without him.

—

This is a response to Read Write Poem prompt #111, a picture of a guy kneeling in front of an empty three-legged chair. It’s a remarkable photo.

I never know what to label stuff like this. Short story? Flash fiction? Prose poem? Prose poem feels right since that’s the intention I started with.

I have no idea if I got the math right. As with Robbie, my math classes were a long time ago.

Be sure to read what others did with this prompt.

The Test

January 7, 2010 • • 22 Comments

She stood with hands on hips,
rosaceous hair pulled taut
and twisted into a psyche knot.
Her eyes’ prism revealed
an overglaze of reason as she
watched the numismatist’s
logical fingers trace over some
ancient artist’s vision captured in
the obverse engraving. They lingered
on the junk’s rounded sails carving
paths through southern seas.
“These sails should be square,” he said.
“I’m certain this is fake. I’d be happy to—”
Her lips curled in satisfaction.
His eyes followed the incorruptible
ecliptic of the coin’s path to her purse.
He watched her walk away, dull heels
clicking against stained tile, a music
soon dampened by the snow
and city streets. Listening to her fade,
he wondered how she knew the
master forger’s work was worth
much more than the original.

—

This is for Read Write Poem’s latest prompt (#108). Click here to read what others did with this prompt.

I picked two words salmon and binocular and flipped backwards through the dictionary letting my eyes fall on random words between the two I’d initially chosen. I had decided to use 10 words and have them appear in the poem in order of discovery.

Those words were: rosaceous, psyche knot, prism, overglaze, numismatist, logical, junk, incorruptible, ecliptic, and coin.

In other news, as a holiday gift for family and friends, I made a chapbook out of the micro-poems I post on my other blog. I saved a few to give away here. If you’d like one, use the contact form to tell me where to mail it and it’ll be on its way. First five Next three callers.

Pomegranate Surface Features

December 3, 2009 • • 25 Comments

If I could study these spheres long enough
to see canals as Schiaparelli saw,
or invent for them tragic civilizations
like those dying while Lowell watched,

these pomegranates might reveal
the wildest tricks of the light.

I’d stake my rep on pomegranate people
living out tiny desperate lives,
their doomed world sure to be destroyed
for the jeweled seeds inside.

—

This is for Read Write Poem’s Image Prompt (#103), a picture of two pomegranates. Inspired as much, I think by my recent reading of Mars: The Lure of the Red Planet by William Sheehan and Stephen James O’Meara, a fascinating history of our understanding of Mars.

Where there were pomegranates, I saw planets. I suppose we’re all a bit like Schiaparelli and Lowell in that we often see what we want to see.

For those who may not know, Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835-1910) was the Italian astronomer who first reported seeing “canali” on Mars. It was a trick of the light and the human eye as well as, possibly, his colorblindness, but the name “canali,” which in Italian means “channel” was mistranslated to “canal” in English. American astronomer Percival Lowell (1855-1916) took canal to mean artifical channel and reasoned that Mars was populated by a dying civilization building canals across the surface to irrigate the deserts with what little water remained on their doomed planet.

Read what others saw in those two pomegranates here.

Update: Don’t miss Angie Werren’s “planet pomegranate” at woman, ask the question. She too saw Mars in those fruits and wrote an amazing poem.

Apocalypse

October 30, 2009 • • 3 Comments

The day the desert was destroyed, water
sucked from distant rivers sprayed through the sky,
and cars bore pilgrims, dreamers to Mecca,
sedated by slot-machine lullabies.

The stars all tumbled to earth, outshone by
neon casinos and fountains of light
while roulette chances to change everything
spun against the darkest of desert nights.

Now, unheeded prayers to dollars drift down
from the mouths of those ghostlike survivors,
mumbling dreams into urns full of quarters
as taillights depart in night’s brightest hours.

Boys with flyers for prostitutes jostle
the stars, shouted down from celestial heights.
Barely burning, they stagger slow down the Strip
cursing this blaze, this apocalypse of light.

—

I tried to come up with something for Read Write Poem’s latest image prompt (#98) which involved writing a poem based on an image of swirling lights at a fair. I fixated on the lights and kept thinking about this poem I wrote back in April (I think). So this one is sort-of off prompt, but I offer it anyway.

I wrote it for a (not-quite-there-yet) chapbook of road poems called Highway Sky. I’m still tinkering with some of the poems, but two have been published at Bolts of Silk and Ouroboros Review #3.

Some of the lines are lifted from the manuscript of my novel A Short Time to Be There. In the novel, the characters are driving into Las Vegas after a week on the road and find themselves alternately overwhelmed, excited and disgusted by the city.

Read what others did with the prompt at this week’s Get Your Poem On at Read Write Poem.

Scene from a Bar that Closed Ten Years Ago

October 1, 2009 • • 24 Comments

I swear to God it happened in slow motion
the way you walked in that night, like a movie,
like Jimmy Dean, like a record scratch jukebox
breakdown—
or maybe it was just me
someone, anyway, no one could believe.

Dark walls and faded posters of traveling bands
from years gone by seemed somehow fresh alive,
the smoke of years dissolving as you smiled
and dropped quarters on the table—
even Jesus stopped to stare
a shining pile of silver for anyone who dared.

At the foosball table, your hands clutched the levers,
red and blue pinwheels spinning to your command,
counterclockwise against the nature of my heart,
you were kicking ass—
I sipped my beer, losing time
you took every name but mine.

—

This is for Read Write Poem’s Prompt # 94. It’s an image prompt. A detail shot of the red and blue players on a foosball table called “My Angel and My Devil” by Thomas Hawk. Check out other people’s responses to the prompt here.

The Crow’s Lesson

September 17, 2009 • • 16 Comments

A multitude of hungry words, scribbled on a scrap of paper, begs for just the merest pittance of the greater meaning bestowed by syntax. I stare and hear their cries, but next to hip, husk just looks like flask, for crying out loud. Besides, it’s clearly an empty one at that. The cat suggests that swilling single-malt could be the remedy of meaning that might make these words conform and stand in ordered lines.  Then he knocks a bottle off the bar, which is irksome, but not critical. I mean, what good is a cat’s advice on writing anyway? Sure, they’re decent spellers—everyone knows that—but for paragraphs, they don’t have much to offer. He looks at me with something like pity in his green eyes and asks if I’d like to help him lick up a puddle of Oban 14. I shake my head—not now, I’m working. I clean the broken glass and wrestle those words, but like scofflaw dreams on fitful nights where sleep, forgetting its starring role in the late show of my mind, lurks beyond the limelight in the shadows by the curtains, the words just lie there, scattered on paper, plum forgotten and ignored much like the clover extending across the lawn, dotted as it is with the wrappers of some confectioner’s dreams, reduced now to just the faintest sparkle, piquing only the interest of the passing crows who pluck them off the ground,  take them back to their nests and read the lists of ingredients to their children warning them away from words they don’t understand and can’t pronounce.

—

This is the result of staring at the word list from Read Write Prompt #92: Word Gems. I think I used them all. Go here to see what others made of the same list.

Gasoline, Meet Match

August 19, 2009 • • 29 Comments

The bustling elocution of
the eight-track saints

rattles nerves like diodes
hitched to an electric chair

Rancid impulses coagulate
around anger, another rant
blares from the radio

Car racing homeward
lizards skulking among
dead armadillos on the shoulder

One last chance for a course change
flinging into the driveway

desperate to say, I understand,
forgetting reason frothed to static

going instead for the gun

—

This is for the latest wordle prompt at Read Write Poem (#88). I like these word list prompts because I generally approach the writing with no preconceived notions of what the poem is going to be about. I just let the list of words play and try to see where they land. This one kind of surprised me.

Summoning

July 30, 2009 • • 7 Comments

We hadn’t been walking long when I stumbled over ivy-covered stones. I bent to have a look. Found names and dates from the eighteenth century. Other stones, each with familiar names from the island’s past and dates long gone, lay scattered and toppled, poking up through centuries of leaf litter, soft soil and faded old beer cans.

We learned the difference between
boneyards and gardens of eternal rest
in the hours before the sun went down

Where faces fluoresce in ultraviolet light
stories             leapt                from stone

two broad-winged hawks
circle overhead and a little
girl calls for help, her voice
coming from, disappearing into
slow-moving creek water

An incandescent spark
between two wires reveals

dead snake
spiders under a bridge
raccoon scrambling away
water               full of memory

screams

submerged
washed away
generations ago

resurface

You knew this would happen,
my inscrutable friend.

You knew.

—

This is for Read Write Poem’s Prompt #85: Spooky, which asks participants to respond to a picture of two guys in a graveyard. It’s a cool image and you can see it at the RWP site.

Transcript of a Recording Found in a Briefcase Abandoned on the Plains (c. 1977)

July 1, 2009 • • 11 Comments

It’s hot here.
I don’t mind.

Was it in Memphis?
Hot?

No. You know. Where it happened.
Not Memphis. No.

Where? If you don’t mind.
Tucumcari.

Tucumcari?
Yes.

You thought it would be somewhere else,
but things can happen anywhere.

You left there and came here?
Pretty much.

Is it true you won the lottery?
Just a scratch-off.

But you did win.
It was cursed.

Don’t laugh at me.

Sorry. Cursed how?
I see people as they really are. Their true faces.

What do you see when you look at me?

What?

Please.
Is that really what you want?
You’ll understand what… happened…
better than you might really want to.

Tell me.
Can I tell you a secret first?

—

This was inspired by the latest image prompt at Read Write Poem (prompt #81). To see the photo (“XX” by nwolc), which is really cool, follow the link to the prompt or go straight to its Flickr page.

Waking for the Descent

June 17, 2009 • • 14 Comments

We grabbed sounds from the air,
stuck them together, draped
language around actions,
tethering ourselves to history
inscribed in vellum, barked
and trumpeted for all to hear.

All this tonnage… it seems like magic.

We learned to tell convoluted
tales, twisting facts like
movements in a bellydance,
sapient and seductive.

What is that mist out there?

We carved the world like onion slices
to be devoured one-by-one,
ignoring the other passengers’
wrinkled noses.

Hold my hand.

Thumbing through the final pages, I skimmed
the moribund bibliography of My Heart:

Bark, Vellum K. Tether the Bellydancing. New Drape City: Moribund Hand, 2003.
Trumpet, J.J. “Tonnage.” Devouring Convoluted Onions. Mistburg: Sapient & Sons, 1993.

Fasten your seatbelt.
The plane will be landing soon.

—

This is for Read Write Poem’s wordle prompt (#79). The idea is to write a poem using a given set of words. All of those words comprise the bibliography portion of this poem.