Freewrite 2, Week 7, Pet Euthanasia Part IV

The skin wrinkles like paper planes or Sunday shirts,
bulging between my fingers. It feels warm, like a
mama cat nuzzling folds between teeth on a morning
run. It licks my knuckles as my thumbs press tighter,
tighter. My eyes in its eyes blaze brighter as it
whimpers, and paw pads scurry against the dirt road.
It trembles, or I tremble, or the ground quivers
beneath its thrashing legs. I climb behind, straddling its
back and we flip like a sun-burnt beetle in supplication,
its belly stretched, my legs crossing its legs.
Now, with forearms indenting it into my chest,
it creaks and gurgles. Its tongue flops like the
nonchalance of my father, and I pant. Shifting, I stand
over it, its fur worn around the collar, and ease my toe
into ribs, easing, easing my father’s vodka and fists away.

Freewrite 1, Week 7

I’m starting to figure me out, he whispered,
sitting on the back steps of the house, his
right shoe (worn on the toe) scruffing the
concrete. I stood over him, watching him
watching me, and noted how the sinking
sun split his face into geometrics. His cigarette,
unpuffed, extinguished and the smoke that
trailed his left leg, untrailed. He glanced to the
woods shading that sun, and told me about
Jenny—that grade school friend that died,
her lips not yet blue for their first kiss. His
hand extended, I joined him on the steps,
my hand trailing the rail like jail cells or
monkey bars. We watched the sun dip into
treetops, and as his thumb grazed my thumb,
he said, I wish I remembered how to play outside.

Improv 2, Week 7

“Grounding” –Sandra Meek
By morning,
we’d mutinied, abandoned that broken plane
for a city I’d known only as a small
window of night, a bracelet of white lights
dissolved now by dawn.
--
By twenty, we’d mutinied, forsaking
parents and pastors, twining homework
with minimum wage and shower quickies.
Two years since I’d spoken to a father,
too discomforted to tell him I’m angry,
I don’t call you dad, I can’t love you. His
voicemails landed like birds, irritated with
the branch flailing between talons. He
taught me to fry onions and season venison,
but not to balance checkbooks or marry
once. I used to think cheating was hereditary,
but I acquiesced to social conditioning, and set
to breaking habits like knuckle cracking and
thumb suckling. Folding bed sheets beside me,
my boyfriend asked, Why won’t you call him?

Improv 1, Week 7

“The Mechanics of Failure” –Sandra Meek
beneath those noosed trees now
too easy to read in curling photographs
as caution, as remember’s thread
wearing each swelling trunk to that familiar
arc of pain.
--
The Klan, I told him, began with white men
protecting their families—from wifebeaters,
from Jews and immigrants, from blacks. They
invited my father, a Stone Mountain invitation
to retrograde. It must have felt like a social
noose, the Dragon’s breath bulging on his neck,
sweat swelling to the decency of good ole boys,
as my father curled in dissent. Was is the
bureaucracy of the Klan that drove him away,
the men’s wistfulness burning bright as a 50’s fire?
Or was it that, while pining for the slaves our ancestors
couldn’t afford, he realized he didn’t care for
robes or Christian values, or for protecting families?

Junkyard Quotes, Week 7

I wish I remembered how to play outside. –Matt
Sober me hid the cigarettes from drunk me. Sober me’s a tricky little bastard. –Texting While Intoxicated
I’m starting to figure me out. –Matt
The whisperings of the devil. –Dallas
We ate at the Mexican restaurant. Land of the green cards. –Kayla

Junkyard Quotes, Week 6

It’s overly neglected –Dr. Gordon
“I” is no less real –Dr. Gordon (In this case, originally referring to the imaginary number, “i”)
You’re cell phone service blows, next time you talk to the reps, tell them they’re adopted. –Matt
You go in your piece of shit gas guzzling fucking yellow car. –Matt
If that’s how you park your car, I can’t imagine how you move your life. –Jazzy Focker

Improv 2, Week 5

“Meditation at Lagunitas” –Robert Hass

We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous.

--

My sister and I watched The Butterfly Effect
last night, watched Kutcher kill himself,
twining cord to neck like some highway bridge.
Shocked and pleased, she guttered, How hard
to know everyone’s life would be better
without you. Her voice a thin wire of grief,
her eyes as yielding as a pendulum. Those eyes
like ice, So penetrating, everyone said. Of our
family they can spot souls through corneas.
We heard that at Johnny’s funeral, where everyone
questioned the OD. Suicide? they whispered behind
pews and widows, as his children chiseled
his picture and tried not to think of heroin or God.

Improv 1, Week 5

“Meditation at Lagunitas” –Robert Hass

There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence

--

When I make love, I feel the bones
beneath or above, pressing my inner
thighs like an airplane landing on
Eisenhower’s strip, every fifth mile the
alarm as pungent as sweat. How violent
this convulsion, this ramming and
ramification. The ease of holding shoulders,
hips, and wrists between cupped palms
waiting for that skin-breaking bite
and squeezing just a bit too hard. How
small this feeling of wonder, how small
the memory of fingers and floodlights, of
families crying for comforts.

Freewrite 2, Week 5

Digital skins caress and stimulate,
too virtual for my physical programs.
Alter yourself for me, stream your
images throughout Boston for my
algorithm. Do you feel lonely or
liberated, without the scratch of brick
and glass against your cheek?
Polshek shaved its legs for you first
but I understand your need for
human space—a chatroom nonchalance
feeds the partnership you desire.
You construct your maps and
material performances from simulations.
But my simulacra told me to wait, to
watch, to question. But no INTP can
resist the future space of form and radio.
Curvilinearity seeps from your consciousness
as readily as development from mine.

Freewrite 1, Week 5

Iwatake, sing to my of ukiyo-e and
harvests. Your skirts are as beautiful and
foul as a geisha. I twirl myself to your
rock ear and dream of your delicacies, as
I scent the smell of Kiwa on you. Kumano
embraces you now for reparations. Will
you recover from the slices of the
Kishu-Tokugawa? You peel yourself from
cave to basket, pleasing, pleasing. I
wish to taste you, Iwatake, you and your
wooden prints, full of the color you
never knew. Hiroshige abandoned you
for the supple curves like mushrooms, and you
wilted –out of season. Rest now, and I
will whisper tales to you of lichen,
mountains, and the west.

Junkyard Quotes, Week 5

I’m masticating a sad cow. –Kimberly
How open is your asshole? –Kimberly
Do not fuck with the erect hair. –Random person
Cause we've all been on that sketchy bus ride. –Amanda
I don’t have faith in my pen or in my orange juice. –Kimberly

Response 1, Week 4-Adrian Matejka

I find “Tyndall Armory” narrative, yet the language poetically challenging and interesting enough to avoid a prose sensation. The poem largely describes a scene of a Public Enemy and Terminator X performance in 1987 at the Tyndall Armory in Indianapolis. The details remain vivid and interesting, including “graffiti spray-painted jeans” (9) and “one night / after amateur boxing and one night / before bingo” (5-7). The poem details the cultivation of a new anti-establishment sect of rap music coined and supported by many of the black youth. This revolution constructs an empowering movement later to be reflected and influential to other rap sects (and thus imperative to the chronological evolution meshed within Mixology), strong enough to rebel against bureaucracy and whiteness, or to “make / any Tom reconsider his friendships” (34-35). I particularly enjoyed how well Matejka utilizes details and alliteration to swirl the language around tensions and cultural references, such as the lines, “refused wine coolers and wee, / white woman and white lines” (22-23) and “The Wop like the black maître / at the Highlands Country Club refused / to seat black people” (18-20). Matejka balances the passive language to contrast the otherwise volatile subject matters portrayed.

Improv 2, Week 4

“Haters” –Adrian Matejka
What have you done, Cornelius?
Never mind. We know what you’ve done:
marrying white, creating a child

of stuttered pigmentation from disco
and chalk.
---
My father once told me
he’d rather I were a fag
than a nigger lover. Without
passion or prejudice, I heard
tales of Indian hair and
blue gums, spiders crinkled
in scalps and calf muscles. I
was grounded in grade school
for letting the blacks braid my
hair, traipsing their fingers
past cheeks and ears, dipping
through the strands of my
mother’s injections. Those girls
later told me, white people
only learn the chorus of the song.

Improv 1, Week 4

“The Monticello Graveyard” –Adrian Matejka
It would be easier not to bury
the dead at all. No need
to round up wayward sisters,
---
My father once described how
Americans have a responsibility.
For the world, communism,
aerobics, and microchips. World hunger
could be solved if we canned the dogs and
cats sent to kill shelters every day. Jonathan
Swift couldn’t amuse an audience of
non-smilers. Pounds and tons of curried
flesh to feed the impoverished mouths
of poor economics, yet I read of Irish babies
and satirical British covers. But the British
smote too many countries and their pet bellies.

Freewrite 2, Week 4

Your deadline chameleons to shallows and steel,
no self-righteous dandelion slipping to theories and
imitations. Hazards of famine and tapestries eye your
collisions and dine above fantasies of allies and cream.
A slipper booms to the immunities of mites and hypothermia.
Their pools chisel into shrubberies and offend headlines
and muscle scripts. Twigs and twinges savor the pacifism of
whaling and children, coiling of casts and canopies.
Sodium taints the mirrors of your smack and crack
and bribery. Stipulations bop the exorcism of your
excitabilities and clamors. Ports and oxygen cajole
consonants and hobbles through the doorways of your palate.

Freewrite 1, Week 4

Memories of my childhood char with
Barry the Blades and Private Downeys.
Your you can’t handle the truth cringed
with echoes of car keys and my father’s
invitation to the Klan. Code reds and red pills
rabbited through lawyers, legislation, and
Louisiana beer cans striking the ten year old
flesh of your nuisance. Nothing squelched like
military leather as Southern twangs curved and
punchbuggies dissatisfied. I bleet of homemade
meringue, riddles, and your retribution, filing
riffles and beetles behind bedskirts. Your
addiction baits and flounces harmonies and
continuity as wisps of favors wrench courtesy
and cigars. That’s our code, sir.

Junkyard Quotes, Week 4

I have been re-hymenated. –Supernatural
He’s got a hodgepodge. –Davidson
What police officer would dare ticket Death’s minivan? Burroughs, “Magical Thinking”
Every church I’ve been in has erasable pens. –Classmate
Sex is the biological Russian roulette. Eventually, one will hit. -Hipchen