Response to Isaiah Hinsley's Junkyard 3 Week 2

This is a response to Isaiah Hinsley's post Image Junkyard 3 Week 2.

What I wrote:
Isaiah,
As I’m reading your junkyard posts, I find myself both intrigued in your subjects and wishing that you would allow yourself to take a couple more minutes and lines to really expand upon specific sensory details. For instance, take the line: “Every time I hear a trumpet I just get in a good mood” can turn into something so much more: Every time I hear a trumpet, my face morphs as though (and you insert something that makes people happy that is surprising.) In this way, you’re not telling the reader how you feel, but more showing them. I love the line “The trumpet is like a good joke,” because it opens a lot of doors for the piece, but following with “it’s going to make you smile” seems expected. I’d love to see a little pushing of the limits as to what makes the trumpet a good joke. Is there a punch line to a trumpet? Is there a science behind a good joke? Could there be a science behind a good joke? Allow yourself to take some risks, especially on something as cool as a trumpet as a joke because I have never heard that before, but I want to know more.

Junkyard 4 Week 2

Around the corner from the nook in the library, a kid in red sweatpants and an oversized gray hoodie untied his shoes and began picking at his toes. Every so often a squelching sound echoed from his corner, followed by a muffled sorry. On his screen, a semi blows up and his phone rings. Grabbing a pair of pants and his shoes, he walks off talking, leaving everything else at the table.

Later, while driving home, a women with a bath towel wrapped around her head sits in a white compact at the entrance to a barn house once hidden by spring.

Junkyard 3 week 2

My roommate rolls out of bed and starts a cup of keurig coffee before she opens her eyes. Standing at the four shelves acting as a pantry, she parses through two bags of ramen and a roll of bagels, looking for mold. She disappears for a moment, comes back in a bathrobe and pours her coffee from the M hand wash only mug that I accidentally put in the dishwasher last Christmas into the owl mug she keeps on her desk. Outside, some kind of bird starts chirping and the pregnant cat from down the street parks herself at our front door. A squirrel crawls down a tree limb that hangs onto our back porch and she spends the next fifteen minutes in a staring contest. My roommate won. 

Junkyard 2 week 2

Parking at the university before eight in the morning mirrors the inside of a choose your own adventure book, where nothing is off limits and no one watches a terrible parking job. 

It's still dark when my roommate starts rustling around in the bathroom, a not so silent remind that we're going to the gym. I almost wash my face with toothpaste but realize it right around the time Facebook sends the birthday reminder email. 

Memory 1 week 1

There's dodgeball at recess, two girls in pink shrieking 

after uncovering a dead snake in the sand pit 

around the corner where the big kids go to smoke and 

yell at each other, the smell of tangerines.

In the car home, I recount the day to Meagan's denim-clad 

grandfather who insists my name is Trailor. 

The grandmother smiles from the rear view mirror

as her oxygen tank bumps my knee for the fifteenth time.

We stop just before the lilacs 

outside my parent's stucco. 

He calls me Trailor. 

Meagan laughs. 

The door is unlocked. 

On the couch, my mother watches tv. On the tv, two towers are burning. One falls. 

Junkyard 1 Week two

In my lap, a pink bowl of spinach pasta with sausage and mushrooms. My knee hits an open folder of German 1002 homework assignments and Netflix asks how frequently I watch Dysfunctional Family dramas. In the back my hamster emerges bleary eyed from her gray- brown bedded burrow to lick water from a blue bottle. A FRIENDS episode begins to play. My bowl tips over onto my crossed legs and my hamster begins gnawing at her wire cage. Outside, my roommate's car alarm beeps. Her three week old kitten chirps along with the whirring washing machine.

Original Work 2 Week one

This is based off the unrhymed couplets and the images in the piece "The Stalin Epigram" by Osip Mandelstam. I borrowed a couple of things, shifting them slightly.

My body no longer feels the air around it.
After two minutes under water, I can't breathe.

But whenever I listen to those men in suits,
someone shifts talk back to that Islamic militant,

and the ten thick worms his fingers,
his speech like measures of lies,

the huge, white, looping mound on his head,
the graying of his beard.

Covered with the inconsistencies of homeland media,
his people ride the idea of amusement parks and the way of Allah.

Someone nods, another sniffs, one holds back a chuckle.
He waves his hand and someone else goes boom.


His decrees roll like metered poetry,
he writes them all for the waiting fellows back home.