2/30: Common

You were a crescendo
                                of epiphanies
                a high mark, a far goal
You were
                                exhausting.

After you,
                the urge to be common.
                       pork rinds and Family Feud
                       mouthfuls of expletives
                       margins of red ink
                       one-night stands
               loving my babies
                               more than anyone else’s.

After you,
                    merely, only,
just.

1/30

I’ve stopped attending church.

Now, each Sunday at Denny’s,
my husband sugars my coffee
and I sugar his, sacramentally.
It’s all a great relief.
And yet some days I catch
myself still trying to be
the right kind of asshole
to get into heaven.         



Prompt:  an excerpt from “Curse # 7” by Sherman Alexie,
provided by Bibliomancy Oracle via NaPoWriMo.net. 

Hipster on a Second Date

He was shocked.  She didn’t seem

like the type of person whose home

would contain paintings of empty

tables at Sicilian cafes,

but there it was on the wall,

blighting her integrity. 

Women, Stop Apologizing So Much

My boyfriend told me

I apologize too much

I said, I’m sorry

River

River: a ribbon

wet with dye in a hundred

colors with no names

Honest Sadness Makes for Bad Poetry

Sadness, like

faint stars or hard truths,

is better seen sideways. Your

reading glasses are

telescopes.

I guess I'm on a haiku kick lately. The form combats my tendency to ramble :)

Poeming!

Hey, everyone! April is approaching, and it's National Poetry Writing Month. Participants aim to write 30 poems in the 30 days of April. Many of us are listing our websites on http://www.NaPoWriMo.net in order to share what we're doing with the challenge.

Normally I don't post much of my poetry online, mostly because I'm hoarding it and submitting it to literary journals and such in hopes of getting some published. But I'll make an exception for April. That said, in order to keep up I'll have to post a lot of drafts (eek!)

In that spirit, here's a small poem I don't mind sparing from my hoard:

 

 

The Yellow Pansies

 

Broken pansy bloom.

I think: How brazen to bet

one's fate on something so paperlike,

looming, wind-tilting, on such

a slender stem.