It's a Lulu

I've been thinking about putting together a small book, basically to give to my mother. I'm going to pick Rik's brain about Lulu, but does anyone else have any experience with them or other POD publishers?

I'd like it to look nice, but if there's a more economical way to get a nice result for a handful of copies I'd love to hear about it.

Just don't walk a mile...

... in Kevin Mench's shoes.

Dude wore shoes that were so much too small he got turf toe. Um, dude is obviously a weensy bit stupid. Dude.

And it's done

NaPo is over, and I feel nothing.

Something ghastly is happening in my kitchen

Steve is fileting fish.

Vegetarianism is so much more appealing. Rutabagas don't flop, for god's sake.

Steve Howe, posterboy

It's funny that the only times I've ever thought about Steve Howe were when I was defending him in relation to Pete Rose. Defenders of Rose like to argue that if a player like Howe wasn't kicked out of baseball, a player like Rose shouldn't be, either.

Steve Howe. Poster boy for drug addiction and second chances. He has died in a car accident at age 48. That's too young to die. The life of Steve Howe seems like a melange of wasted opportunity and bad decisions, summed up like this:

Steve Howe, the relief pitcher whose promising career was derailed by cocaine and alcohol abuse, died Friday when his pickup truck rolled over in Coachella, Calif. He was 48.

I don't want an obituary like this. My god, I don't want one like this.

Confession time

You Should Be a Romance Novelist

You see the world as it should be, and this goes double for all matters of the heart. You can find the romance in any situation, and you would make a talented romance story writer... And while you may be a traditional romantic, you're just as likely to be drawn to quirky or dark love stories. As long as it deals with infatuation, heartbreak, and soulmates - you could write it.

What Type of Writer Should You Be?

Yeah. They've pegged me. I have written a romance novel. One and a half romance novels, in fact. They are both on a broken hard drive, in a sleeve, in a box, in a desk, in Ohio.

I have a mystery, too, but that's not too embarrassing.

Of course, considering that I'm pretty freaking unromantic and I don't believe in True Wuv, I should stick to murder.

Internet watchdogs

Ginger over at Postcards of the Imagination has an interesting post about internet freedoms.

Being on the internet feels so isolated. It's hard to remember sometimes that we can be tracked, blocked, or cyber-poked with a stick.

A week of poetry review blurbs

My reviewing is a week old and it's harder than I imagined it would be. The few comments I've received directly and indirectly have been positive, so that's something. And I haven't gotten any nastygrams.

But I'm feeling a bit depressed about the whole thing. It's hard to feel that such an effort matters. Of course it doesn't matter. I want it to matter. It doesn't. I want it to. It doesn't.

Some days, poetry fills me up. Other days, I'm so hollow and brittle I'm like a burst milkpod.

How do I make it matter? How do I matter?

Giant frozen chickens!

My dinner will never be ready, as I started with Giant Frozen Chickens!

The package of chicken had the most ginormous chicken parts I have ever seen. Multiple giant chicken parts, requiring multiple giant chickens. Mutant chickens. We had too much, so I froze some and now am trying to thaw pieces of Giant Mutant Frozen Chickens, probably from Skull Island.

Soup. I think I'll have soup. This will allow me to shred the GMFC instead of contemplating their hugeness further.

WEE reviews April 26, 2006

Pangur Bán trans. by Seamus Heaney

It's a charming but slight traditional Irish poem. I like how this translated poem seems to be about translating something. Not much else to say.

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Terracotta by James Grinwis

I have to say that while I'm not blown away by James Grinwis, dude is never boring. Today's poem is very appealing to me with its piling up of off images, though I think the final simile of a siren twirling "like a kicked fruitcake" is just terrible.

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Testament by Megan Gannon

The first 8 lines are throat-clearing. I don't want to suggest rewrites for these poems. They are done, complete, not posted in a workshop, but damn. I'd cut those lines and start in with

You are learning

backwards. There's hardly time.

Those lines would have pulled me in. The current opening pushed me away.

Final Exam sent

Depending on the evaluation of my final, I am through the first module of my course. Woot!

As a reward, I'm going to the library. Woot!

I'll be in the kitchen...

... thinking of ways to poison Keith Hernandez.

Lots of women are baseball fans, probably more than any other team sport. So when Keith Hernandez gets all sexist and insulting, he isn't just insulting two or three people.

No, Keith. I don't belong in the kitchen. I'd do better in a dugout, though my spitting skills need work. Tell ya what, you stand right in front of me and we'll see how I do.

I walked line for the first time in a while

This morning, I walked a gas line. It's been a while, and I still like doing it.

I didn't find a leak, which is always a mixture of bad and good. Not finding it doesn't mean it isn't there.

WEE reviews April 25, 2006

Corsons Inlet by AR Ammons

I don't have anything against prose. Write it myself. I give a hearty thumbs up to prose poetry, generally, and have no issue with blurring lines between various art forms. But I dislike prose with linebreaks being sold as a poem. And this work by AR Ammons is prose with linebreaks and fancy pants indentations. It can't disguise the flat language and the lack of affect.

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Nerve Sequence by James Grinwis

Ever have someone tell you that if you didn't like a poem, you just didn't get it? Well, I thought this poem was okay, but the getting it? Not so much. Which means that my "okay" is a highly provisional one and that it's worth, well, nothing.

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Undid in the Land of Undone by Lee Upton

More prose, but this time at least the words weren't boring. There's cleverness here, perhaps the wrong kind, summed up by the final lines:

What I didn't do took
an eternity —
and it wasn't for lack of trying.

Yeah, that's cute.

Can't update WEE

I managed to get one test message through, but my attempts to edit haven't been successful. Bah. Oh well, tomorrow is another day.

WEE reviews April 24, 2006

Aubade by Idra Novey

Enjoyed the first four lines and then, er, no idea whatsoever.

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Wrapped in Dust Mites by James Grinwis

My read early this morning disappointed me. But since Blogger wouldn't let me post, I didn't bother writing a review. My reread a while ago pleased me strangely. There are a lot of things going on in this poem, lots of disjointed images that I pretty much liked without reservation. So, this morning boo. This evening yay. You be the judge.

Birthday!

I'm dreaming of all the ways I can be a slacker today, my birthday.

I'm not going to work. Slacker!

I'm going to sleep in. Slacker!

I'm going to try to do my WEE reviews, but if I don't, haha! SLACKER!

Pardon me while I revel in my laziness.

Ooh, reveling was tiring. Now I need to go to bed.

I gots nothing

NaPo has kicked me in the pants today. I can't gather any words and put them in little rows. Stupid stupid stupid.

WEE reviews April 23, 2006

We Argue about Regret by Laura McCullough

I was charmed by this poem, though it took a while to hook me. To be honest, I would only have skimmed it were it not for my new review shoes. Something about the way it sat on the page made me think of rigidity and I spied quotation marks (my nemeses!) right off the bat. But I did read it and was happy to have done so. Not a big flashy poem for certain, but one that captures something real. And it has a linebreak I love:

tell, the best truth includes one
lie.

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Keel of Earth's Axis by Mong-Lan

This poem has some lines I admire, but the whole ends up not striking me. Granted, I haven't had my caffeine yet today, and it's Sunday which my brain has claimed as a day of rest (along with the majority of the rest of the week). Strangely, I didn't get the sense the poem would reward further reads.

NaPo Day 22

Temptation

That's the tempting itch, the thought of death
that makes a bridge abutment whisper fly.
It's why I keep no toasters near the bath,
no rope stored on a rafter. Bottled lye
stays at the store. It's easy to eat earth
or bullets, but too hard to mention why.

Blog against heteronormativity day

Friends often think it's weird how obsessive I am about ideas of gender and equality. After all, I'm the whitest of the white breads. I'm a heterosexual woman, monogamously married, boring as hell.

But it started early. It started with my parents, really nice people mind you, who thought that I should do my brother's laundry.

I've been pissed off ever since.

I'm pissed off about George Weasel Bush. I'm pissed off about every idiotic Bible thumper who embraces Leviticus when it serves their purposes and who would say so around a mouthful of bacon. I'm pissed off about South Dakota (I typed North Dakota the first time and had to go look up which Dakota was pissing me off). I'm pissed off about Alito.

I'm pissed off about every idiot who has told me that my body isn't my own, that I secretly want children, that my husband's disability makes him less than a man.

I'm pissed that my queer friends of every stripe can't marry, can't "flaunt" their sexuality in public, can't trust people not to beat or kill them, can't be in the Army (though why they want to is an endless mystery), can't adopt in some places, can't win custody in some places, can't be safe in some places, can't be respected in most places.

I'm pissed at the Log Cabin Republicans for sucking up to those who despise them. I'm pissed at Hillary Clinton for being a female politican who embarrasses me with her sucking up to the right wingers. I'm pissed. I'm pissed. I'm pissed.

This blog is more about poetry than politics, but sometimes I just need to remind myself that I have a voice and I need to use it.

Cleveland baseball--borderline sucktastic

Cleveland's pitching? Can you say "iffy"? Can you say "it's going to be a long summer"? Boy, they sure can hit the ball. Reminds me of the Indians of the mid-90s--all hit, no pitch. With apologies to Dennis Martinez, et al.

Some NaPo highlights

With everyone so busy churning out poems for NaPo, at times it's hard to notice when people are doing something pretty special. And some people are truly doing special things this NaPo.

Paula Grenside's gorgeous Paper Dolls, posted at pffa.

Or Robtm's lovely Vicarious, also posted at pffa.

I have to plug Mike Snider because he wrote about me in his Clerihew for Julie.

Eloise tackles a dizain with Sekhmet Spots the Neighbor's Dog. I love dizains, and this one is charming.

I was a chicken

I felt a little trepidation about posting reviews publicly in a non-workshop setting, but I've heard nothing but kind words. I'm grateful.

Now I just need to find more crazy people to join me!

WEE reviews April 22, 2006

Hoops by Major Jackson

You can't unread a line in a poem, so if you encounter something amazing, it will irrevocably change the poem. I was pleased with this poem, and then I encountered:

the rusted

base of pole where life
snakes an open cut
up to center court, there lay
Radar enfolding his heart.

And I was blown away.

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Adoration is Not Irrelevant by Hayden Carruth

I can't say that I really thought this was a good poem, but I did enjoy the read, the over-the-topness of it. It was affective, effective, infective, even.

Why does napping feel so disgusting?

I know it's not true for everyone, but for me taking a nap leaves me useless the rest of the day. Er, more useless than normal, which is pretty damned useless. Why?

I was dozing all day at work, came home and crashed for three hours. Now I just want to eat a small mastadon.

POV

Is there such a thing as a great poem with a universal point of view? It seems that greatness so often lies in the other, in the things we couldn't have seen. I wonder.

WEE reviews April 21, 2006

Day two at WEE reviews.

Hotel Narrative (06 APR 1996) by Eileen R Tabios

Julie: For the second day, this poet ends a sexually charged piece with a bit of very "poetic" diction just sort of tacked on. It puzzles me. This poem puzzles me. Certain sections (2, 4) aren't pulling their weight. The airy formatting is trying to give it space, but it seems that the poem is equally about distance and shut-innedness. Like yesterday's poem, it has a violence to it that sours me.


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Tale by Emily Moore

Julie: Romancing a pony leaves me with a very discombobulated feeling. I assume from the ending pun that this is supposed to be taken lightly, and as such I think it works. If it went on longer, I would have become very bored but I wasn't yet.


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X at Sea by Tom Hansen

Julie: I've read this poem before. Not this exact one by this author, but very similar poems. I'm not really complaining about that. Lord knows I've walked on very well-trod ground myself. But reviewing it is hard. My exact reaction: "Okay." The same way if my husband said we needed to go to the store. "Okay."

The sorrows of Sudafed

I had to sign my name and show ID to get a packet of Sudafed. Sudafed is the only thing that keeps me from wanting to kill myself each spring, when the bones in my head decide that they'd rather live on the other side of the room than nestle in close to the others.

So I have my packet, but I'm hoarding them. I got them once, signing my name and getting my license photocopied. But can I get them again? I don't know. I bought the 24 pack. I could have bought the 96 pack but I was weirded out by the whole thing.

They say meth labs smell like cat pee, so I kept envisioning someone in a hazmat suit sniffing around the litter box. Okay, that's insane but you've got to understand that my sinus are the size of Tennessee and they are cutting off circulation to my brain!

WEE reviews, open for business

I shouldn't work in collaboration with Gabriel since

1. it makes me look bad, and
2. refer to 1.

You can see from our reviews that we approach poetry very differently. I am a visceral reader. I might change my mind after a few days, but I tend to form opinions about a work quickly and change them slowly. Unless a work grabs me hard, I find it problematic to say too much about it. I tend not to read a poem as a sequence of lines but as a whole unit.

Gabriel is an intellectual reader, an investigational one. He savors the reading, examines it and, obviously, generally ends up having much more to say than I do.

I hope the combination will give passersby a good contrast. We'll be Siskel and Ebert, only neither of us is dead. Yet.

Chicken? Egg? Chicken? Egg? Bawk? Bawk?

"Is the market for poetry so small that we have to limit publication, or is the market so small because we already have?"

Is there any way to answer this question?

Test canceled: "too hard"

It's a bit weird, really, having a test canceled for being too hard. Curve, baby, curve!

I always preferred classes not graded on a curve. I'm a rigid thinker. I want to know how bad it was, not how bad my classmates are.

But I want to take the too-hard test just to see.

Thereby proving, as if I need proof, that I'm a weirdo.

(Actually, I did take the too-hard test and it appeared pretty mundane. But since I don't have the answers, perhaps I royally screwed it in ways I'm not trained enough to see.)

WEE reviews April 20, 2006

This is our inaugural edition, so we're still working out our format.


The Segregation of the Senses by WR Weinstein.

Julie: I think the poet had an ending line and wanted to get to it. Unfortunately, the poem ends up treading water until then. It doesn't have any emotional pull for me. Flat language, blanket statements, few images. Not my cup of tea.

Gabriel: The language is flat and the linebreaks largely arbitrary. The disjointedness of the language is ineffective because it is not a series of fractures related to the segregation of the senses, as the title might suggest, but instead is merely random.

In terms of structure, there was little to write home about. Why “neuroscientist” (Line 4) deserves its own line, for instance, is simply because the linebreak is being used as comma and to force a 5 line strophe. The gimmickry used is uninspired and doesn’t really go anywhere. The ana/epiphoric sense listing in the second strophe, for example, serves no function and is punctuated by a lame joke in Line 9. This gesture winds up emphasizing the absence of touch and taste, the two senses that the poem problematically neglects.

The poem has a sexual/political agenda that is both obvious and mundane. The poem brings nothing new to the table, nor does it do anything particularly interesting by poking at, with purposeful selectivity, tired discussions that are not adequately explored.

In the end, the work mistakes its own perception for profundity and hopes that presenting the language in the form of “being a poem” will somehow help the reader to forgive the fact that nothing significant is said.

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From Epitaphs by Abraham Sutzkever, trans. by Jacqueline Osherow.

Julie: It's hard to say if the distance in the poem is from the original or from the translation. In a way, it works as something "written on a salt of a railway car" which is a pretty distant sort of communication. The poem ends up slight and bland, but with an overarching heaviness. The biography at the bottom was more affecting.

Gabriel: Firstly, let me say that I am at best ambivalent about the translator’s note. I think it is interesting biographical material, but set up as a companion piece to be read in reflection immediate to the poem felt like emotional extortion. Ah well, moving on.

I think that the language maintains a pathos that is amenable to the tone throughout. I have mixed feelings about the use of the dash, I think that it is an interruption that is sometimes effective and sometimes stumbling. On the whole I thought that the language couldn’t quite decide if it wanted to be simple or sagacious and so tried to do a bit of both.

I felt the openness of the conclusion was interesting. Structurally it behaves as a conclusion should and creates a “closed” sort of feeling, but the avenues for interpretation are really quite wide open.


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Cancer by Eileen R Tabios.

Julie: I find myself definitely not wanting to know how nipples might curdle. I have a weird dislike of direct quotation in poetry. It always drags me out of the moment. Can't explain. Shouldn't try. I find myself flailing a bit for something to say about this poem.

Gabriel: How to tackle this? Well, the sexual politics are problematic to say the least, and the language brings this to a point of crisis frequently throughout the poem. Consider for example the subtext of “anxious thighs” (L 5), which suggests both expectation/longing and also fear.

The male sexuality in the poem is rapacious. The violence of the male gaze in the third strophe was particularly troubling, as well as the themes of domination, objectification, and rape that run through the poem. The male sexuality in the poem is literally murderous. Clearly destructive throughout, as seen by desire to “tear” the female mouth, and every interaction which involves the male identity, in lines 18-20 the rationale behind the title declares itself. L 20 “as if life-generating air still flowed, between our bodies” which is to say that life-generating air does not flow. The male identity pulls the speaker into the absence of air, ergo, murderous. The male sexuality in the poem wishes to possess sexually by domination and violence, and in the act of possession destroy the thing (let's not mistake the objectification here) possessed.


What struck me most about this poem, even more than its pornographic nature, was the profound naïveté of the speaker. Whether it borders on or goes well past idiocy is difficult to say. But the idiocy of the speaker is required by the poem, for the most part. In order for the horror of the poem to be communicated effectively, the speaker needs to not only dramatically fail in the role of person, but also romanticize her own failure of personhood. This comes through in passages like the “Master, you always let me be so innocent / I could offer fearlessly, ‘Whatever You Want.’ ” (L 21 - 22) demonstrating how the speaker perverts the meaning of “innocence” to apply to that which is passively, perpetually, and most disquieting appropriately/deservedly violated.

The speaker is never the sole possessor of action in the poem. The only instance where she could be said to be an instigator in the poem is in the final strophe, which presents the apotheosis of the male aggressor (which has a whole mess of implications on its own), however the speaker’s explicit destruction subverts any agency her action might have afforded her.

At first I had wanted the language to be tightened up in some places, but on further consideration I wonder if the campiness of the romanticized language communicates the abjectness of the speaker more completely than more condensed diction ever could.

Following Greg's lead

I'm not going to do it daily, probably, but I'm going to start doing mini-reviews of the daily poems posted at a few websites like Verse Daily and Poetry Daily.

I love reading Greg's reviews, so I hope this will end up a meaningful exercise.

Gabriel is going to join me, so look for us over at WEE.

Beware of Geeks bearing gifts

My birth date was the date of Ye Olde Trojan Horse.

April 24 Events

* 1184 BC - Greeks enter Troy using the Trojan Horse (traditional).


It explains much.

Grumpy Teacher pointed out this aspect of Wikipedia. Type your birth date sans year into the box here.

Numfar! Do the dance of joy!

My test has been canceled.

My test has been canceled.

My test has been canceled.

My final test in this section of my course is no longer looming. Yay. I can be done by my birthday. Yay.

Today is a good day.

The silencing power of threats

I just stuck a toe in the female poetry blogging debate, and I realized that I tend to keep my head down ever since I attracted a vicious troll who threatened me with death, rape, and called my workplace to intimidate me.

In other words, terrorism works.

Yeah, I'm not exactly breaking new ground with that thought. But I always felt it was my sex, not my words, that created in me a target. I was the bitch. I was the woman, vulnerable. I could be threatened with forcible sex without anyone looking like a "faggot" (one of the favorite insults tossed around).

It influences me. I can't say it should, but it does. He wins.

I can't remember names

I try to read the blogs in my blogroll, and so often, especially when things get contentious, I can't remember who's who. Whose blogs do I read? Who is that? Is that someone I like? Do I know you? Helllpp.

There is an overabundance of poets with names beginning with J. Not enough X. I need one of those mnemonic devices. I need hundreds of those mnemonic devices.

But I remember you. Yes, you.

The spring circuit

We did the annual walk the other day, the circuit around the backyard to see if the plantings were still alive. It appears everything made it but one willow (drowned) and my beautiful bronze clover (choked). Choked or drowned. Tough choice. I'll choose drowned. It sounds more mysterious.

Even the poor laurel I ran over late fall with the mower is still alive. It's a single twig, but there are three shiny leaves on it and I vow not to mow it again.

I also mowed some of Steve's butterfly bushes, but I have an excuse. Those things look exactly like weeds until they bloom, dammit. He is unconvinced.

Should we plant tomatoes? Last year, we did heirlooms and it was semi-successful. I've never had a tomato as good as the Cherokee Purples we picked last year. Hideous looking fruit, all bruised and cracked and seeping, but the taste was like a hundred tomatoes, all packed into one ill-fitting skin. Dayum.

NaPo Day 18

Sprung

The yarrow died. He said the yarrow died
last year when I was too strung out on grief
to pace the yard. I couldn't bear the fat
cartwheeling clouds, the soil like fudge, the shit
of too damned many birds. In winter, death
is like an earthquake. It's not if but when.
But June's no time to die, too many flies
will gather friends and dot like berry seeds
along your face. This spring, he touched my wrist,
told me the yarrow died when you were dying,
told me its skeleton in brittle grey
was still footing the yard. I pulled it out.

Rung

The truck was bitter with Pall Mall
and coffee, smears of blue-green grease
a heiroglyph in the bed. All the men
looked like Dad, with winter
hatting his burning hair. The derrick poled
up the draping sky, the crisscross timbers
bubbled with ancient tars. He sent me up,
up the ladder shaky. He'll catch me,
catch me if my too-short sneakers slip
the knobbled steel. He stood straight down
to catch me, straight down in a pool
of men sockcapped generic.

Up. I don't remember
if he had plans beyond seeing a child,
seeing a climb, putting the one on the other,
watching me churn the first ten feet
lungwhistling in the cold and then
I couldn't look down to see
if he looked up. He'll catch me.

And there was a crow at the top, staring
down like a tourist, and I was kicking higher
where a mist buttered the rungs.
If I reached top, I was jumping, a soft leaf
floating down to the pool. If I reached top
where the crow glittered beads and I stopped,
screaming. Didn't stop screaming.

Weeeeeee're off to see the surgeon...

... the wonderful surgeon for Steve.
We hear he is a surge of a surge
if ever a surge there was.
If ever a wonderful surge, believe
the wonderful surge, the surge for Steve...

Aw hell. It's not working.

Let's try this one:

Slice, slice, slice goes the surgeon,
tick, tick, tick goes the clock,
bang, bang, bang goes my heartbeat,
I have forgotten my Glock!

Backlog

As you can see, I didn't post for a few days, which makes me a bad person.

I have repented and posted and ask to be forgiven.

NaPo Day 17

Greenling

The first mow of the season. I'd forgotten
the way the bank falls sharply down to stone,
the way the vines chunk in the blades, the rotten
planks that lid the cistern. All the known
and unremembered plans that spring has grown.

NaPo Day 15

Untitled Dreck

My mother hit a pony with her car.
He rolled the hood, stuck four hooves through the glass.
He walked away. She walked away. The car
did nothing, Buddha in a pool of glass.

NaPo Day 14

Glow

This Sony monitor draws moths like flame
to dance, distract me from my poet debt.
That's my new excuse for not posting yet.

Good Friday

I can't complain. It's still a day off work,
no matter that it storms and my belief
abandoned me in ten long years of grief.

Pinball wizard

I'm having difficulty locomoting. I seem to go in a straight line and can only change direction once I bounce off something, like a doorjamb. Or, in the case of the office kitchen, the garbage can. Fortunately, it's heavy. Fortunately, I wasn't wearing my sandals.

If I careen off the forklift, do I get worker's comp?

Toe paranoia

I don't wear sandals.

I don't go barefoot because I hate the feeling of weird textures on my feet. I don't wear sandals because I'm paranoid that someone will step on my toes.

But I bought sandals on Friday and wore them Saturday. I walked around Target feeling like a, well, target. My toes! They were vulnerable to attack! They were pink and helpless, like baby mice!

I also discovered that I walk weird, but this doesn't shock me.

In any case, I made it through the day. This morning was in the 40s, so ixnay on the andalsays until it's armerway.

Rube Goldberg, eat yer heart out

I want my very own weird Japanese Rube Goldberg machine video, but until then this will have to do.

I don't know what they are saying. Probably "Drop dead, Julie." But I don't care!

My love for TiVo, where has it gone?

Crushed under the fascist bootheels of nonexistent customer service!

Wait. Can a nonexistent service have fascist bootheels? Damn. Hoist on my own sucky metaphor.

I hate you, TiVo! Hate! Diediedie! Oh wait. You already did!

*sob*

NaPo Day 13

Bomb

Bird corpses burst into feathered confetti
when struck by mower blades. At least it died
so long ago it was completely dried.

Melonhead

I think my earlobes are trying to meet
somewhere in the middle. Headphones squeeze
while sinuses push back. Please god. No sneeze.

My head is asploding!

Combine a sinus headache with squeezy headphones and you have a recipe for disaster.

On the weird side, there's a salt shaker on my desk and I don't know why.

NaPo, baseball, and a dearth of time

NaPo shouldn't be as hard as it is. But it is.

The Indians are 6-2, but they got their asses handed to them on a bright green platter last night. Bad bad baseball.

And my studies are slacking like a giant slacking thing. I am a bad bad person, watching bad bad baseball.

How to bore a cat

Halley the gigantocat had a lump on her tongue. It may be back, but we can't get a good look. Anyone know how to get a cat to yawn? I've tried my poetry, but no luck!

NaPo Day 12

Blue Boy

The cows ache in their bones, rapped on the ribs
by a dour boy with bitter, cracking sticks.
They low their discontent, nagged past the ricks
of haying green, nagged from the sweetfill cribs--
hard cobs of broken corn. The fields are grey
with dust, the crumbling stalks of grass like ash.
Boy drives them through the gate that carves a gash
through clay. The cattle wander anyway,
and eat strategically, sapping the walls
of every mow. He wiles his days in sleep
until the urgent mealtime bells could ring.
The cows were patient, immune to the calls
for quick revenge, until the boy lies deep
beneath the toppled haystack, smothering.

NaPo Day 11

Mow

It's always frightening, the way the first
spring cut reveals a winter's killing pass.
Blades crop dead circles through the too-tall grass.

Labwork

Her blood is blossoming within her veins,
showing pretty petals on the slides
a slow cascade of roses where they dried.

Anemia

The doctor smiles, suggests she eat a cow
or Cleveland, something chock with iron ore.
But I suggest she stock up Rebar now
so she can beat him with it.

You could have mentioned that, eMachines!

Over the weekend, I couldn't get wireless internet to work at our hotel. I needed to access the internet to find the solution for why I couldn't access the internet.

I love my laptop, but eMachines just annoyed the crap out of me. Bah.

TiVo v. Vonage, the battle continues

I was warned before I got Vonage that TiVo might not work. But it did work! It worked for a month! And hasn't worked since. And I weep copious tears.

So we're going to break down and network the bastard. Which costs money, of course. Even so, Vonage costs 1/3 of what SBC/Ameritech/ATT/Ohio Bell/whatever their name is today.

Slacker!

I didn't write anything over the weekend.

I did get a sunburn.

And the Indians swept the Twins.

Cleveland rocks. And I don't even mean that ironically!

Aaaaand we're off

If you watch any of the Cleveland games this weekend, wave apathetically toward the right field upper level. And look for the purple sock cap!

I knew it!

Most Studies Find Nothing, Study Finds.







(Yeah, it's satire, but it's too too true.)

It's a good thing I'm getting fired up...

...because otherwise I'd freeze.

Cleveland.

Early April.

Temperatures in the 40s.

Julie and Steve.

At the Jake.

Three games.

Oh, we're going to regret this, aren't we? Brr.

We've got those heaty packets for our frozen phalanges. I've got my purple sock cap that makes me look like Jay of Jay and Silent Bob.

And I'm gonna eat fries with Stadium Mustard because it's important, dammit. Important!

Brr.

Using the power of the internet!

I love when people can use the internet to make a poem that couldn't exist otherwise. Jessy Randall has a charming one here.

NaPo Day 5

Just under the wire.

Enough

The only place the spiders never thrive
is deep inside the fireplace, though a flame
can ash four hairy legs before it lames.

Twinkle

When star-nosed moles stare with their raisin eyes
at arching vaults that sky their rocky lawns,
whose faces do they choose to wish upon?

NaPo Day 4

Surfaces Await a Smaller World

That which does not kill us makes us bores,
comparing broken bones and surgery.
Skin is for waiting, not for breaking free.

A Moveable Faust

It wouldn't take that much to make me sell.
Just let me sleep at night. Just let me hold
my lover close. I'd never miss my soul.

While Waiting in Line for a Filet-o-Fish

We spent the time comparing broken bones--
who last feared death, who last had found a hook
pierced through some tender skin. You won that one,
could show a thumb web scar; we couldn't look
at mine, tight in my Keds. No shirt, no shoes,
no sandwich, dammit. But my collarbone
is lumped all sideways, my patella took
a year to heal. Consider gauntlets thrown.

On being pitied

Another trip to the doctor for Steve's wrist. At one point, the doctor said something, I don't know what, but I could feel the muscles in my face trying hard to hold still. And then the doctor looked at me, and I could feel his pity and I hated him and Steve and myself. It passed, but I am unsteady on my feet. I want to lash out at someone, to shriek. I want to be single. I want to curl up in a ball and stop thinking about a wound that won't heal and pain that won't go away.

Blame it on the rain

Goddamn it!

I got my NaPoing out of the way early. I had popcorn. I had an ice cold Diet Coke. I got to watch the first 3.5 innings of MLB, and then there was rain. RAAAAAAAAIIIIN!

On the up side, the interim programming showed Barry Bonds dressed as Paula Abdul. That was entertaining.

However, RAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIN! I sob quietly onto my keyboard. Baseball been berry berry bad to me.

NaPo Day 2

Daughter

She drifted off to sleep before he died,
like dozing through a punchline. If he cried,
stretched bulbing fingers out, weak as a kitten,
no matter, she had his last words pre-written.

C-PAP

I breathe too much, too quickly, when the whirr
of your machine goes pumping air through you.
I gasp, lung-stretched and chirping, and the blue
soft edges of my sight close in. Frogs birr
another alien rhythm from their trees.
I'm ichthus hooked, Apollo leaking space
as you relax behind your Vader face.
Apnea's an infectious disease.

NaPo Day 1

Kodachrome

He gave a boost up to his broken girl
so I could show the world at squirrel height
without the climb. That photograph is curled
papyrus brittle, thirty years of light
dim brown my moonface bruises and the bright
red crinkle of his hair. I can recall
the angry snap of bones, the headfirst fall
through branches, yowling like a kitten. Skinned
then hoisted up triumphant, like a tall
flag waving, waving in a paper wind.

Last year I started with a dizain, so I'll just be consistent.


And, as it turns out, another poem came bumping along right after the first. Like twins in a sitcom.

Catkin

She is the thinnest covering of bone,
a paper lantern crumpling. He waits
pietà for a cat who suffocates.