A Poem in which I Try to Express My Glee at the Music My Friend Has Given Me

                  —for Patrick Rosal

Because I must not
get up to throw down in a café in the Midwest,
I hold something like a clownfaced herd
of bareback and winged elephants
stomping in my chest,
I hold a thousand
kites in a field loosed from their tethers
at once, I feel
my skeleton losing track
somewhat of the science I’ve made of tamp,
feel it rising up shriek and groove,
rising up a river guzzling a monsoon,
not to mention the butterflies
of the loins, the hummingbirds
of the loins, the thousand
dromedaries of the loins, oh body
of sunburst, body
of larkspur and honeysuckle and honeysuccor
bloom, body of treetop holler,
oh lightspeed body
of gasp and systole, the mandible’s ramble,
the clavicle swoon, the spine’s
trillion teeth oh, drift
of hip oh, trill of ribs,
oh synaptic clamor and juggernaut
swell oh gutracket
blastoff and sugartongue
syntax oh throb and pulse and rivulet
swing and glottal thing
and kick-start heart and heel-toe heart
ooh ooh ooh a bullfight
where the bull might
take flight and win!

Reflective writing prompt:
Write about a joyful riot.

Ichthyologist Lost by Sue Kenney

For Thomas M.

I remember your teeth, white and straight and large
your thick eyeglasses and your towering tallness.
Your unruly red hair, a stray curl
unfurling as you used your ruler to make
every line perfectly straight.
I remember your notepads filled with detailed sketches,
all of them fish.
You carried your marbled Barclay tomes under your
arm and pushed the bridge of your eyeglass frames up with your
middle finger when you spoke.
Your skin, pale as milk,
your cheeks flushed pink like an old fisherman’s
when the nuns called on you.
But you were no fisherman.
Your eyebrows auburn, arched in intelligent,
interested, incessant, inquisitive innocence.
We went to different high schools you and I,
no reason to stay in touch.
Years later, when they told me what had become of you
at only sixteen,
how your pallid body
still topped with a shock of red,
was found silent and still
at the end of a rope,
I felt the line snap between us,
the pang of loss, never really knowing
what caves and caverns you dwelt in.

Published in Intima, A Journal of Narrative Medicine

https://www.theintima.org/ichthyologist-lost-sue-kenney

Reflective writing prompt:
Write about someone you once knew well.

   From:
     Slaughterhouse Five
                       or
   The Children’s Crusade

Listen:

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day. He has walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941. He has gone back through that door to find himself in 1963. He has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all the events in between.

He says.

Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren’t necessarily fun. He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.

[Later]

He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again.

It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation. The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which struck the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were storied neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, the German fighters came up again, and made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them in the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again. The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed.

Reflective writing prompt:
Write about being unstuck in time

Parable of the Magpie’s Name

Pica pica

who was
it who

taught you
to want

what will
not feed

you that
you can

not make
a house

by eating
a wall

Reflective writing prompt:
Write about what does not nourish you.

Real 1 Scene

Reflective writing prompt:
Outline the next scene. Where do you think this story is going?

Renée K. Nicholson

Upon Watching North By Northwest I Am No Longer Young

                                                               for Derek McCracken

Cary Grant just dove

into a stand of corn stalks,

dust clinging to his sharp

gray suit, when I get a message

from a friend that lost

two siblings last year. One expected,

one not. This summer, my only brother

will be dead five years.

So much and so little

time. The Hitchcock Blonde

is never who she seems, perfect

cat-eye lid and pale lips. We move

between two worlds, celluloid flicker,

and the atmosphere here below, where

the cereal-and-steak lives march on.

I don’t know what to tell my friend.

Growing old feels thin. My brother and I

told jokes about becoming shuffleboard champs

at the old age community. Instead, I watch

Tippi Hedren run with Cary Grant across

Washington’s nose, or is it Eva Marie Saint

across Lincoln’s? All dead, along with my friend’s

siblings and my only brother, and yet some hope

glows brighter than my big screen TV, like an ember

lost from the underworld, or overworld, whatever

world exists beyond. I compose my response, vowels

all wrong, I’m sorry long and bland. Instead, I wish

to extend my hand to his, clutching our feeble dreams.

On screen, Cary Grant’s gestures say

what words never could.

Reflective writing prompt:
Write about what to do with grief

Watching Me

Reflective writing prompt:
Write about being watched.

KATHERINE SHERRITT SAGAMORE, 39 YEARS OLD,
AND 8 ½ MONTHS PREGNANT,
BECALMED IN OUR ENGINELESS SMALL SAILBOAT,
AT THE END OF A STICKY JUNE CHESAPEAKE AFTERNOON
AMID EVERY SIGN OF THUNDERSTORMS APPROACHING
FROM ACROSS THE BAY,
AND SPEAKING AS SHE SOMETIMES DOES IN VERSE,
SETS HER HUSBAND A TASK.

Tell me a story of women and men,
Like us: like us in love for ten
Years, lovers for seven, spouses
Two, or two point five. Their Houses
Increase is the tale I’d wish you tell.
Why did that perfectly happy pair
Like us, decide this late to bear
A child? Why toil so to conceive
One (or more), when they both believe
The world’s aboard a handbasket bound for hell?
Well?