I’m working a different schedule today because we are having a refrigerator delivered. Our 12 year old fridge has been on the fritz for at least the last few months, but we’ve been putting off the purchase, hoping I’d find some additional work. Alas, work hasn’t happened, and we are tired of the ice-maker and water dispenser malfunctioning so we gave in to the good deals of Memorial Day Weekend.

This week’s poem started on Saturday. I tried to write on Thursday and Friday of last week, but I mostly just babbled at myself in my journal again. So this poem went through handwritten revisions on Sunday and Monday before I typed it up on Tuesday. I have not worked on it sense, and I won’t work on it again until next Thursday when I take it down (along with any poems you guys post).

Pre-meditated

I’m trying to decide how to teach
comma splices. Instead of examples
my mind repeats: the cheese stands
alone. The cheese stands alone.
A simple sentence. An independent
clause. To get there the farmer
has to take a wife. The wife takes
a child by faking a pregnancy,
stalking, assaulting an abdomen
with a knife. Will her acts result
in only kidnapping or also murder?
Will the child, sensing her history,
feel she has to be on her best
behavior which means time served
playing along at recess even if
all she hears are the bitches cries
as she’s taken like the runt of the litter.
She’s always the cheese. Always
last to leave the circle. She is
the subject of a sentence that never
seems simple. It craves. She finds
it difficult to be independent, wants
the smallest pause possible which is
the comma because the colon
is a wall, the semi-colon a fence,
the period a moat. I want to tell
the class that sometimes the farmer
takes a husband, skips the child,
goes for the cat even though they are all
lactose intolerant and afraid of mice.
But, I also want the students to know
the rule well enough to break it.

-

I’m pulling some poems that I submitted in November of 2012 and marking them as assumed declined so hopefully I’ll have something to submit soon. I’m actually going to work on a submission packet this afternoon of poems from the last few months.

On the reading end of things I finished a book that I just picked up on a whim at AWP. I was getting books at the Sibling Rivalry Press table and I decided to add From the Belly by Virginia Bell, and what a terrific surprise! I kept marking poem after poem that I enjoyed. One of my favorites was “The Art of Displacement” where Bell writes: I might as well darn together the ice floes / on the lake with needle and thread // from my mother’s sewing kit, then set out / across them under a radiating sun.

Another book I finished, but didn’t fall in love with, had me interested in researching more the poetic device/form of aubade. Perhaps that could be your writing inspiration for this post?

Now I’ll be off to work on that poetry submission, cleaning out the fridge, reading, starting a new draft, and picking poems for the first reading I’ve given in a long time – Sunday in the Chapel Hill, NC area. Send your friends