April

NaPoWriMo Day 29, poem 31/30: I was thinking today about everything that's happened this April. The last few weeks of March were some of the worst days I've had in a long time, but as I've written these poems and carried on things have gotten better and better. I owe NaPoWriMo a lot. Here's the last poem, barring some stroke of inspiration.



April

April, born
in baffling cruelty,
sleeps soft tonight.
She waited locked
in her room while March,
that bitch sister,
lingered vicious.
She wrapped her cracked
skin in poetry,
stanzas like bandaids,
stitching the wounds with
long strings of words,
crawled into the open
of spring.
Born a fragment, she is now
some sort of sonnet,
a little unconventional,
her eyes to the future.
Her room is unempty
when she returns,
not retreats.

space

NaPoWriMo Day 28, poem 30/30: I feel like it's a cop-out to use a haiku as poem 30, but I felt like there was no better form for a poem about small spaces. Regardless, I'm probably going to aim to write poems for the last 2 days!


space

small, I don't take much
invade and see me up close
no space left between

Perfect Perfect

NaPoWriMo Day 27, poem 29/30: Today's prompt was a nursery rhyme. While I didn't want to follow that literally, I did take inspiration from the description: "Most nursery rhymes have strong rhythms, use rhyme and repetition extensively, and aren't overly concerned with making sense." That really spoke to my feelings this week - things don't make sense but I'm not concerned, and every day is full of rhythm, rhyme, and repetition.


Perfect Perfect

if we're looking for
nonsensical
here it is-
I don't know when
I stopped
believing but it's been long
enough to forget-
now after years cowered in the dark
anonymous
can I trust in this
rom-com princess story
this instant's connection
a pair of perfect
perfect strangers-
flesh bone and hair
realer than God
too substantial for dreams-
I don't take much
convincing
to close my eyes and leap

Why do you sleep with girls?

NaPoWriMo Day 26, poem 28/30: I skipped a found poetry prompt from earlier in the week, so I thought I'd go back to it. I combined text from the April Vogue (pages picked at random, some articles and some ads) and Jeanette Winterson's gorgeous short story, "The Poetics of Sex" (I started at the beginning and picked one line per page until the poem felt done). The title comes from the Winterson story, and the text I found kind of fit perfectly with my current situation.


Why do you sleep with girls?

Like fairy princesses, false
eyelashes still in place,
you don't need to be
Rapunzel
to let down your hair
without ruining
your look along the way.
I feel I should call up
Film on the phone and
say, I've met someone,
her breath is blue
in the cold air.
Tempt, tantalize,
and enthrall,
I took her by her pony tail
the way a hero
grabs a runaway horse.
Imagine having nothing
to hide.
We are in our igloo
and it couldn't be snugger.

Born Green

NaPoWriMo Day 25, 27/30: I've been having a bit of an Elphaba week, so I decided to write today's poem about her and Glinda, and also a little about me.

Born Green

I was born green

and like all green things

I grew.

I grew silent

to hide away my

thinking.

I grew sharp edges

to keep out strangers.

I grew long hair

that I could braid

my secrets into.

Most green things

fear

romance,

which all too often cuts

them down in their prime

in the name of bouquets

and corsages.

I, too, grew scared

but still you've knocked

me from my roots

and plucked my petals.

Loves me, loves me

not.

You didn't expect

to unearth me,

the raw and the real.

I'm small inside,

small from disuse

and endless crouching,

but you bring me bread and water.

At night, I have no sun

to grow for

so you turn on the light.

Sleeping Stone

NaPoWriMo Day 24, poem 26/30: There was a creationist Texas school board member on the Colbert Report last night. I don't agree with anything he said, but there was one sentence that popped out at me and would not let me go. "What does a sleeping stone dream of?" (It might have been "rock," but I like the alliteration.) He was talking about atheists believing in nothing.

Well, I believe in a lot of things, and I dream a lot of things, too.


Sleeping Stone

What does a sleeping stone dream of?
She dreams - not
in color or grayscale
but in epic poems -
of hands,
warm soft hands to pull
her from the mud,
brush her clean, hold
tight.
She dreams of eyes,
ears, and lips
to take in the world
fantastical and real,
to see and adore
her earthbound savior.
She dreams that
deep within
there is a gem,
a geode, a trilobite,
magick.

We were born swans

NaPoWriMo Day 23, poem 25/30: Second poem for today. I came across the line "we were born swans" in a book and just needed to play with it.


We were born swans

We were born swans,
two by two,
beautiful and deadly.
We were born swans,
me and you,
deceiving at first glance.
We were born swans,
two by two,
we were built to love.
We were swans,
me and you,
although they called us
ducklings.