Original Post 2 Week 8

I wish I could start this with my face disappears into the Fountain of Four Seasons,
but it's the Fountain of Four Rivers, and my face has nowhere to go.
It's 1 o'clock in Rome and I'm sunburnt. I'm gelato.
Somewhere behind the Nile lies my reflection, eying the fake Prada bags
and Ray Ban sunglasses. I turn that way--towards Danube, touching the coat of arms
I don't believe in. And that way--Rio de la Plata showing the abilities of America, riches
no one really sees. Somehow, I'm facing Ganges, navigating the water myself
if the sun shines at the right angle. I track only one obelisk and a couple
of missing thumbs, half expecting to see myself swimming in one of the puddles.
I can't get close enough to touch, two Indian men selling scarves stop me, try to wager
a guess on how low they won't go. I see Bernini laughing at me, waving
at me to leave his statue here, untouched by the other. But when I blink, turn
to walk away, it's just an older Italian couple and a child, laughing at a bird.

Memory 2 Week 8

A few years into college, I stopped going home as much. At 19, 20, I became too engrossed in a campus ministry retreat than hearing my mother cry herself to sleep at night, even when she thought we wouldn't know. I don't remember the exact day, or month, that I stopped wanting to go home, but I just remember being out to dinner one night with my sister-- we enjoyed sushi with coworkers on certain weekends--and she looked at me, asked if I wanted to ride around for a little while.

My sister's not one for talking. When we'd go out to dinner with my father and stepmother, she left the talking to me, as I could talk to anyone, anything. She's better at confrontation. At brooding. At knowing exactly what to say at the exact moment to say it. So, in order to not bother her with the same funny stories about whatever class I was taking at the time, ones I had told her three times that night out of awkwardness, I offered, "we should go buy a CD from Target. One that we've never heard of."

Ten minutes later, after two right turns and a stop light that took too long, we parked next to some banged up Chevy on the Entertainment side of Target. Somewhere between Childish Gambino and Eminem sat this band I had never heard of: Depeche Mode. The English major in me stopped working as I asked "who's Di-petch-eee Mode?" My sister stared at me, the laughed so hard I almost saw pee dribble down her jeans.

We debated between fits about that, AWOL Nation, and some now famous country singer, and Depeche Mode won. While we argued about who was going to buy it (as that person got to keep the CD later), my mother called, wondering when we were going to be home. I told her not for a while, we were still out, and she sniffled quickly and said okay. Hung up.

We ended up skipping every track but one, a song called "The Child Inside," and drove along 92 watching Taco Loco turn off its lights, turning down the road that led to the house our father was trying to sell so he could move closer to the office he stopped working at four months before.
It was all so coffee table. Something you flip through when you're bored or avoiding conversation.

Junkyard 4 Week 8

If I had an out of body experience right now, it would look something like this:

A girl, dressed in black polyester blend pants with a purple stripe down the side,
alternates between picking at a small hole in the right thigh and plucking lint clumps
off the Arkansas pullover she stole from her sister.
In front of her sits a computer, overheating and angry, sticky from apricot juice.
To her right, a water bottle with a chewed cap and a list of lists
in handwriting too tiny to read. Her stomach growls once, twice, three times
before heating up two day old leftovers in a faculty lounge, hoping no one sees.
The spinning rainbow wheel in the middle of the screen makes her start scratching
her scalp, running fingers along her eyebrows, prodding at a blood blister
from slamming her finger in the frozen car door the other day.
The same day as the leftovers.
Finally, an email sends and the wheel stops spinning. She takes a bite of food
and the phone to the left rings. She crosses a note off her list.
There's something subtle about February.

Junkyard 3 Week 8

Yesterday, before the rain came, a woman with a cotton sack
like a pillow case came to my door, not begging,
but asking. For lint, she said. I looked at my belly button,
and back at her. From the dryer, she clarified.
I asked what for. She said she's a lint weaver.
A weaver of lint. She said they take lint and spin it to yarn.
Even Google doesn't know.
As I pulled out the lint catcher, she smiled, explained
she was going to make a sweater for her sister's baby,
a girl named Jane. She likes pink and horses.
I handed her the bag, saw her out the door, and while I watched,
she walked up the hill and across the street, ready to ask again.

Junkyard 2 Week 8

Someone said it would snow, but out my window
is a stony sky pebbling rain.
My sister calls, Birmingham has rain too.
When my roommate tries to walk down the porch stairs,
she almost falls, because whatever landed, froze.

Memory 1 Week 8

In his Oscars acceptance speech,
Graham Moore writes about being weird
and later, says there's a part of him that's Chicago,
and Chicago "just wants everyone to like him
and hates conflict and hates yelling
and wants everyone to get along and be nice."
I don't think I heard a single person yell
in the suburbs of Chicago. Instead,
a lot of children running
through freshly tarred driveways
and narrowly missing telephone poles
while sledding. My neighbor, a five year old
girl with a last name that sounds like a pasta,
jumped on the igloo on my front lawn
because she was bored. I, and my sister,
spent six hours, two rounds of shoveling,
and four pairs of gloves building
that three tunneled house.
My mother brought us bags of carrots
and graham crackers with juice boxes.
I was thirteen.

Junkyard 1 Week 8

On Twitter the other day, someone wrote "I feel like I just installed Facebook's
retarded 3rd cousin from Alabama." But we can't say retarded anymore,
or eskimo, because they're not politically correct. Or polite.

Original Post 1 Week 8

This is the challenge from the end of class--to rant like Ruth Stone in "Translation"

Il Duce

Fifty six years ago, BigDddy1, owner of a white Cadillac
made in 1982 in Michigan or Kentucky but sent here to be sold
to you courtesy of Carl Hogan off 45 in Columbus, Mississippi,
you learned to drive on your daddy's Oldsmobile on the gravel
behind the farm, running over chickens and chasing sheep
when he wasn't looking. Are you paying attention, ex-farmhand?
Did you know I passed you up on that two lane, following
a blue Mercedes instead? Ten minutes later, you're behind me,
still on going south when the one stoplight turns red and we all wait
for no one. I told you to drive faster. You flipped me off in the rearview.
I should have smiled. I needed gas to continue to follow the Mercedes.
Your car spluttered, called me baby, bambina. Sometimes, I imagine
you to be my Italian lover, staring at luxury cars driving by after
some soccer team beat another. BigDddy1, fig of my road rage,
plum of profanity, did the war take all of the good cars? When you
shipped off to London to make bullets, did your father sell the original
for war bonds? Are you awake?

Somewhere between the Alabama line and death, you passed me,
shaking your fist, and my eyes flashed. Those hours playing back and forth
between dotted yellow and solid, how you wanted to slow down
for every curve, brake sharply for a pot hole easily missed by just a turn
of that stiff wheel; the same when the Italian ran his hand over my hip,
explained the motions of a soccer player in sounds that felt like rain.
The crossing of knees and pointing the foot before contact, falling
the elbow after a sideline kick, he blinked slowly and for a moment,
I saw your right blinker, a inch into a ditch. The Italian never needed
to check his gas cap mid trip. But what can he tell you about death?
Even your long lost wife's knuckled hands that used to make you happy,
kneading like you knead the wheel--I watch you hunch over, as though
being closer makes you see. Where were you in 1938, in May, when Rome
was adorned in death and some Cadillac drove two dictators down a new via?
Did you celebrate or act aloof? Are you that pact of steel? Were you kicked
like a soccer ball into a common goal of unchange? Would you die in that ditch
you drove in BigDddy1? Will you be incarnated in my lover?

You believed in rules, following a sign until the end. That's why you drove
45 until a small child graffittied a nine and told you to fuck off, old man.
Or was that me? May you forgive me, and yourself, BigDddy1,
for passing Driver's Education the fourth time because you couldn't hear turn directions.

Original Post 2 Week 7

There's a difference between mayonnaise women and salad dressing women,
the way they drink their tea. "You're from the midwest, dear," one says
when I brush away sugar, "you don't know any better,"
and she might as well have been wearing a hoop-skirt. It's Wednesday,
but the way she walked, it was 1990 and a Saturday pageant for Miss Mississippi.
I smiled and pushed back from the table,
I exude Chicago, apparently.
Long A, the incorrect pronunciation of "theater," and the inexplicable
knowledge of train systems. In Italy last summer,
I woke up before cafe owners, tracked the A train on a map.
My Italian resembles Aunt Martha, perpetually drunk from Olive Garden, carbed up
and too big for her Penne Carbonara, which isn't a thing.
There's no Alfredo in Italy. That's America becoming an ethical slut. At least,
that's just what I read on a shelf in a bookstore.

Memory 2 Week 7

I don't remember the first time I met her, my future stepmother.
But I tried to keep an open mind, I'm sure.
Because on the last day of Thanksgiving break,
when you asked mom if we'd travel with you to Montana,
we said no.

Part of me already knew, when I received a candle
and perfume in September, you were dating.
I just wanted to be part of it.
My sister, mad you lied, didn't.

I just want to talk, half the time.
More awkward than that one legged duck
in the pond outside my house, or Grandma on a scooter,
I remember just talking about nothing. I think she smiled.
I think we talked about school, hobbies, and what I was going to do
after graduation. That's all we still talk about.

That summer, my sister, mad I didn't stand up and argue
about where you were going and why, resented me.
I can't confront, not face to face.

But now, snide comments and a blackout later,
I'm forgetting things. Forgetting what I said, what I meant,
what I want to say. Forgetting how to be mad, how to hate,
but I'm learning what it means to be a good sister, and sometimes,
it means being a bad daughter.

Junkyard 4 Week 7

This morning, after making spaghetti carbonara last night, I brewed tea in a kettle and watched a cat climb up the tree hanging over my back porch. Using its paws, it pulled itself over the wall and onto the wicker table where a squirrel would sit if it were warm. Kelsey reads out loud a BuzzFeed list on 27 pasta recipes to keep you warm this winter, and carbonara doesn't include pepper, apparently. I think about the pasta maker under my cabinet and wonder, also out loud, if I should have taken a class on getting the dough right.

Junkyard 3 Week 7

"My Trix came up in a rainbow in the shower," my roommate said when we started talking about fruity cereals this morning. Apple Jacks don't taste like apples, but cinnamon. Fruit Loops taste the same, but French Toast Crunch tastes like the 90s. "You asked, it's back!" she reads off the box when we stop at Kroger, plucking the last box off the shelf in a fit of excitement. She didn't buy milk. She's prepared for snow week, so it won't happen. I wish for a minute I had bought Reese's Puffs.
In the kitchen later, she smells her milk, dumps it down the drain, and says, "I'm glad I smelled it before I poured the cereal."

Memory 1 Week 7

We picked the restaurant that night. Eating popcorn out of a wood bowl in the middle of a dimly lit table in a building made out of a castle, you asked us if we wanted to play Hangman. I was twelve, too cool for crayons and games, but my sister, eager for your attention, grabbed green.
I hadn't entered my stress eating phase yet, or the age where I hid bowls of pretzels under my bed out of shame for snacking, but I still downed the appetizer to share. Just like yesterday, when I devoured a bag of jalapeno jack kettle chips. Except this time, you didn't tell us we were moving. Or have a grin. Or clenched fists. Or even tears. You're a gargoyle sometimes, and I'm just Quasimodo, tending and caring more than he should.

Original Post 1 Week 7

This comes from my sestina work from last week...I decided to strip away the form and focus on something different:

Remaining Unmarried

At the stop sign my mother squints at a statue
I picked out from SkyMall. Somewhere,
a truck crashes into a tree, unleashing ravens,

and it's Apollo and Daphne, holding on.

She married young, to my father in a church
outside a small town of trucks.

Her mother ordered a statue of ice--
not quite Bernini, as it seems.

It shipped on a truck, bedded in hay
and something red, though it wasn't important
to my father, who just wanted to build mild winters. 

Apollo could only watch, as Daphne treed.

My grandmother told my father to button up his pants
and sit on a throne of ice because he was not yet a king.
He spoke in tones that bled words with -ing's, and when
tomorrow rode in on that truck, morphing asphalt to water,

a laurel whispers to my father, not Zeus.
Someone stood up, and with a gunshot of branches,
the beds of fledgling truckers laid to rest in the bottom
of something that never knows decay.

Like Eros, gold glistens darker than the summer, dipped
in something trucked in on a Tuesday, from the underbelly
we only see through the eyes of a raven. It's almost yelping
to be understood, our desire for a fathering.

Junkyard 2 week 7

The reason this is a junkyard: I found the phrase: cultural plastic and silence, in a book I was reading and just had to do something with it. 

The reporter everyone trusted

Wasn't pretty, but coiffed. 

And I imagined careers busted 

in cultural plastic and silence. 

When she stood at the front of the podium, 

talking to herself and some kind

of weathered pandemonium, 

I swallowed the scum rising 

from the back of my throat, almost calmed 

by the cut up the stomach, 

the peeling of the skull, embalmed 

in the moment she points to curvatures 

with her pen, marks beatings that tore 

apart the cerebellum, frontal lobe,

and his confidence. A man of lore,

will, and something not quite human.

She speaks with insistence, as if proving 

that somehow we all wanted him

lying on the slab, accomplished. I listen 

for another minute, above the dim

essential singing of a feathered bird 

and the dead puppeteer who loved them. 

Like I loved Formaldehyde 

and gasoline, poking at a hem, and staring. 

Junkyard 1 Week 7

This afternoon, as I turned into the parking lot, a bearded red-head sat on the back of his compact and pulled a ukelele from behind him, and I can almost hear his strumming. His half buttoned lumberjack thermal blows in the wind and I laugh to myself when no one comes to join him.

Junkyard 4 Week 6

On the television, a race-car circles a track three times,
and you're on the grad-school road with me again,
but in three weeks it'll crash and burn like the car outside
Chateau Marmont where two girls in pink waitress uniforms
pole dance to the Foo Fighters and
a James Van Der Beek look-a-like splays hungover on the bed.
Four high-heels are in the air
and a balloon deflates from the corner. But life isn't
a Sophia Coppola movie and cars don't drive without gasoline.

Junkyard 3 Week 6

In the upstairs two girls in tutus run through the halls, shouting at each other to run and wake up.
The heavy breathing comes from a blonde in braided pigtails, who gives me a scrunched up nose and a nod with her folded flower headband. Smiling, the girl behind, in a purple sweatshirt and pink cheeks, power-pumps her arms with each stride. Two others run up from around the corner, shoeless with straightened hair, stop and yield to oncoming traffic. Purple stops, picks at the lip of a wax cup she picked up from the lounge, filled halfway with water, asks in a voice that smells of playdoh where the potty is.

Memory 2 week 6

When I read, "can I call you," it's the moment you lost a sock

somewhere between the washer and dryer. And I already know

about fumbling fingers and whispered "is this okay?"

"I love you." And "I don't want to hurt you."

But you're five when you sob through the phone, as I lap the coliseum,

Once, twice, before lingering in the UTeach hallway and wandering outside,

Because the girls basketball team won, and you don't know if you did something wrong. 

He hugged me when he first met me, the day I stole your guacamole

from that burrito bowl and his car, sprayed in skittles and not exactly silly string,

sat in our driveway. His not quite an ex, your best friend, brought asphalt down

to vindicate herself. But it was before that-- when he brought roses for a day date 

and thought I was mom, when you barreled out of the garage,

stating, mom knows, as though I would tattle. Because I'm eight, and jealous.

But now, you call through my front door and I'm chopping squash,

Secretly happy you want me and not mom. Ready to fire icicles at him,

because science solves most problems and I'm not good at violence. 

You sit cross legged on my kitchen table, eating a yellow piped balloon, 

explaining why you couldn't leave and I wonder for a moment,

if you put a wilted petal in water, will it sprout again?

Memory 1 week 6

I remember a stench of backlogged drain hair and yeast stones 

when I walked in the door that day, in the middle of the Dallas December, 

and you smiled out of the side of your mouth, 

gray hair cut high and tight, said the lion fish died. 

When four boys no higher than my waist come running through the door, 

time fast forwards without me. 

My mother never calls when I'm with you. 

Somewhere, milk spoils, but in your kitchen, there's only beer 

and day old breakfast sandwiches. Somewhere, behind the cement wall 

and indoor fountain, a little voice hollers for you, except he calls you dad,

almost accidentally, but not quite. You think I'm okay because you 

can hear me smiling. How could you know the science of spoiling milk?

Junkyard 2 week 6

"Some kind of sick joke" the caption under a Russell Stover's coconut chocolate reads. 

It's almost appetizing, something only Elle Woods eats when watching romance movies in bed. 

Or me, when my roommate walks in at 6 pm and I'm too lazy too cook, but more hungry than a Siren. It's Wednesday, so Valentine's Day chocolate isn't on sale, and in my hand lies a mix of failed dreams and sucralose, or so the package says. My roommate grabs the paradise of hell demons and baby farts, crinkling like a woman accidentally stabbing herself in the eye with liner or a wand. 

Original Post 2 week 6

Sestina Practice (without the correct word pattern)

At the stop sign in the middle of Atlanta,

My mother stops, looks at the statue of stone,

and her eyes squint like when she laughs red.

She married young, in California, to my father

In a church outside a small town of trucks.

And her mother ordered a statue of ice

Shipped, as it seems, on a truck,

Bedded in hay and something like red

clay, though it wasn't important to my father,

Who just wanted to marry her and run to Atlanta.

To the home they will build of brick, ice--

And the mild winters lacking snow and fireplace in stone. 

My mother's mother wanted one thing, told father

To button up his pants and sit on a throne of ice 

Because he was not yet a king, not yet stone.

He spoke to her in tones hinted in red,

Bleeding words with -ing ends and forevers in Atlanta.

They only stopped when tomorrow rode in on a truck

Sweeping asphalt into the water and stone.

Someone stood up, whispered to my father,

Who ended the tirade with a gunshot of icicles

And the beds of fledgling truckers, 

Laid to rest in the bottom of something reddened

By madness and the underground of Atlanta.

My mother's ears glistened darker than blood red

Oranges in the summer, dipped in something trucked

In on a Tuesday, from the underbelly of a Kroger in Atlanta,

A melted, not yet evaporated, puddle of ice.

It's quiet, yelping to be understood and not stoned,

Her desire for the end. After someone, I think, fathered

Another strange occurrence of something with ice,

With my mother's strict diversion from Atlanta 

And blushing anger, the crashing of trucks

Into the drunk. It's uncanny, the way someone's stone

Faces the other side of a yesterday filled with my father. 

The way an eagle engulfs the nothingness of red. 

My father exuded nothing but red that day, he says When I ask 

about my mother, the trucks, and my grandmother's ice sculpture.

Tomorrow is yesterday, just covered in stone, curbed in Atlanta. 

Junkyard 1 week 6

Driving home last night, the jeep two car lengths on front of me stopped quickly, allowing me to notice the bike attached to the back. The tires, spinning with the wind, seemed to keep time with the song on my radio. I wonder briefly about my ex, and his 1962 Camaro that he jacked from his father, that night we snuck out and drove down 166--me singing to Riptide and you, staring blankly out the windshield. Contemplating, not life, but something more Poe-like, prophetical. 

He turned, saying, "it's never about money, but it's always about money," squeeling the corner into the grass, needling through asphalt. We are stamped, still, almost hyperbolic. 

Original post 1 week 6

This started out as the money post from class today...then turned into something totally different.

Operation Fishbowl

1962, that day when your father shot an armadillo

with twelve gauge and slapped his crotch in excitement.

Meanwhile, somewhere north of the equator, to protect

from flash-blindness or cancellation, a man in a suit 

hollers at gas masks to inspect and load. Fire. Launch. 

Your father watches this later on tv, after mounting

and soaking in the tub. He scoffs only briefly at the lack 

of mushroom clouds, saying "the soviets done better,"

sipping on a Budweiser. Tomorrow, the president

would announce the end of testing, and your father 

would be drafted, leaving you with a twelve gauge and fear. 

Junkyard 4 Week 5

Sitting cross-legged in front of a Lite Bright, piles of green, yellow, pink pegs
around my toes and knees, listening to the whirring of the sewing machine
in the next room. Grandma's patching someone's jeans. The insides of my Levi's
wore away. The carpet puckers where someone's picked over the years,
blue threads twine with green. The sewing machine stops; Grandma's dropped a needle.
She bends over, pants stretching, knees popping. Her right foot steps ever so slightly
to the left, too close to the other foot, on top of the needle, slicing up into the heel.

Memory 2 Week 5

When I turned 13, my parents checked me out of school in the middle of World History.
We hadn't gotten yearbooks yet, but the girls in my class crowded around me and started crying.
It was the last time I saw that school.
It was May. It was raining.
We sat on dull hardwood floors on empty pizza boxes while the moving men unloaded into different rooms. There were three upstairs and a basement still above ground.
The horizon broke with four mounds of dirt in our backyard, and a empty park filled with oak trees
where the neighborhood hid plastic eggs on Easter, begging four year-olds to fight with teenagers over candy.
I shared a bathroom with my sister. At night, we would scramble to the vents and whisper to each other about how mom wouldn't let us stay up to watch Nick @ Nite because it was too adult.
And on the weekends, I would count footsteps across her room and mine, making sure that my room was bigger.
One summer afternoon, I perched myself on my desk chair, mulling over multiplication tables in a bridge workbook, eavesdropping about my father.
That would be years before he sat us down on another summer afternoon, in a different town, and clipped the fraying thread of our family.

Junkyard 3 Week 5

The light splices the red and creme couch arm.
A green blanket lies balled on the floor.
A coaster sits under the table and the cat scratches at the underside.
Andre the giant laughs as he lobs a boulder off a mountain.
The cat leaps to the windowsill.
A dog from across the street, wanders into our front yard
and leaves a nice pile in the leaves.
Ewan McGregor goes square dancing in limbo.
My roommate pours quinoa into a bowl on the counter
and mixes butter into the pan on the stove.
And my sister, in Alabama, buys sunglasses off Amazon
for herself for Valentine's Day.  And tomorrow,
Heath Ledger skateboards with sixteen year-olds.

Memory 1 Week 5

He said I've gotta have a routine.
But I watch James Franco play Darl
and cannot take Anse Bundren seriously--
Tim Blake Nelson's got no teeth,
and all I see is Dr. Pendanski.

She said she'll be okay, but not right now.
And I smiled to myself, thinking of you,
swimming to the bottom of the lake,
hat floating above the ripples, bobbing
with that sniffling grin, too selfish to say
you were wrong.

He said whiskey was lucky, and shoved
the glass under my nose, burning by gut
and throat for a minute. I said I didn't want
you, or him. I remember the cats outside
my window, whining. The blinking lights 
of someone's car. A half pulled down sock.

Junkyard 2 Week 5

So It Goes

Someone told me fear was a sin.
Well, baby, watching you crash
like a telephone pole in a lightning
storm, and wishing in my gut
that instead of splintered wood,
bone crushed on pavement. Asphalt,
mixed with brain matter, my shoes
splattered crimson. Fear,

unless the fear of God or some shit said
in Sunday School, means more
than a piece of stuck gum on the bottom
of new sneakers. The blue ones,
with white stripes on the sides, that you
bought for my birthday that year.
Less than the jumping off buildings,
or the petting of a feral cat in the backyard.
Baby, your fear kisses ass and sits
in the back of my head like calcification. 

Junkyard 1 Week 5

Beforemath

The thing is,
I feel about average. The inextricable
relationship, Greekless reader,
between articulating phenomena
and the day the Bastille fell,
is a crime. Unfortunate lower clerk,
a minor nation celebrated,
the horizon yawned, and no refund
removed. Instead, it drifted back inside you.
Back inside the mass if unobtrusive. 

Original post 2 week 5

The Ten Commandments of self love sit on a bench outside the TLC lecture halls, repeated in the minds of the girl in purple upstairs, who printed them out before leaving the house this morning. 

1. I shall lovingly accept myself as I am right now. 

2. I shall regularly give thanks for all my blessings. 

3. I shall appreciate the beauty that makes me who I am.

A boy in black understands nothing, but sits in class discussing his personal life, using it against Emerson and Thoreau, or Morrison and her book Beloved. Because he's beloved by his mother and forgets to set his alarm each morning. 

4. I shall trust in my ability to take care of myself. 

5. I shall not criticize others. 

6. I shall forgive myself when I make a mistake. 

My mother drinks to forget my father, her mother, and the empty beds downstairs. Her car leaks fluid in the garage while my father drives around in the backseat of a man in a suit, sucking on a mint, discussing children he barely knows. 

7. I shall not criticize myself. 

8. I shall be kind to others, without sacrificing my own needs. 

9. I shall take responsibility for my life. 

My sister pulls into my driveway in her best friends truck, lugging a duffel. She sits on my kitchen table, cross legged, eating a piece of chocolate cake with yellow balloons. 

10. I shall love myself to the best of my ability. 

I almost fall asleep to the sound of my hamster running on her wheel, while a bottle of apple flavored wine sits half empty in the refrigerator, echoing something I can almost hear under the silence. 

Original post 1 week 5

This came from the pre-workshop prompt put on the board using the lines: "to take the wrong road/is to arrive at...." 

To take the wrong road

Is to arrive at the end, where a man 

In a dark red hat smiles with crooked teeth

And those crooked teeth smile at each other

And no one knows where to look to find the beginning again. 

We wish for frost. For a yellow summer

Where responsibility doesn't quite absolve who we are

And who we are contains an other beyond the marks 

Of seagreen white. And nothingness is a hollow ring 

Thrashing the air, like a pelican caught in plastic. 

To take the wrong road

Is to arrive with a man who frowns at nothing,

At everything, and to whom tears are the rivers

On a map in his closet. Forever is an ember

On the asphalt of infinity. And the road, 

The right road, takes us on a dotted line.