Poetry

What a gift-packed month. Poetry has crammed my inbox daily. I went to a Rhapsodomancy reading at the Good Luck bar and listened to knock-you-off-your-feet lines from poets with poetry-spewing-volcanos where scalps should be. 1 day of NaPoWriMo left. So go on. Go write. You know you want to. Even if you did watch “Silver Linings Playbook” over the weekend and became all heated that Naomi Watts didn’t win the Oscar. I’m sure you also did something severely poem-inspiring—like take your son to the foggy beach, or stand on a sweetly tiled Juliet Balcony overlooking the side of the San Fernando Valley you never see, the side astonishing in trees, or you tried spicy, tandoori-style hard boiled eggs for the first time (with a glass of a startling malbec and even though you prefer chardonnay), or you had a nap. Good god. The nap! Go and write a poem about that.

Lines (I know: you can’t really do this—but I’m doing it anyway):

1. He knows I am a novice returned/for her purpose

2. Look: the face of each mountain is a tumbling sneer/in holy purple

3. Because to move felt like an invitation to chase; and why was the door/open in the first place

4. Snagged on the southside of the 101/miles from destiny

5. Summer is finer than Shakespeare, you said. Listen: everything/was mine to begin with

6. I viewed scandal as a privilege./My mistake

7. She plays schoolyard games with a lover we despise/because he is so obvious

8. We tend our wrist watches dawn to noon to twilight/marking the skies for simple signs/we share wordlessly, each to her owned/each owned similarly dealt/though discussion exposes/mixed wiring

9. May my bones knit/a cage around your frailty, glorious/glimmering cage—the bone cage—hugging/you, cream to curse

10. zzzzzz