Week 16, Response

Week 16, Improv 2

In conversation with the spirit of Chad Davidson’s (who’s that weirdo?) poem, “A”

Some -sshole once told me -ll letters f-ll
-w-y. He thought only vowels could be sexy,
succulent. Conson-nts -nd educ-tion
-re pouting, disconcerted. Disconcerned.
I wish I could h-ve known the “T” before
you double crossed it, topping it like some
Greek pedest-l. Or the “Y” before it le-rned
h-ndst-nds were for im-gin-ri-ns. I thought
“S”s were some dropped pretense, -nd would
stick to fingerprint cr-cks like sp-ghetti noodles.
Those letters were -lw-ys my f-vorite, but not
so much -s the “B” th-t lends to both bitch
-nd benevolence, to the best hump in the word -lph-bet.

Week 16, Improv 1

From a selection by A.J. Collins

"But to say"

first something about the shoes wouldn’t be right.

The whole thing started with sunrise, getting there,

a broken fog sifting birch limbs, an owl tucked, full of shrews,


-----
But to begin a story with the end
wouldn’t be right. Sure, it would smell
of tangerines, and you could imagine
your own fingertips circling those peels,
your tiny tips dipping to dents. But no
manner of strength of knuckles during
ripping could satiate that frenzied bloodlust
as you pop that first peel between teeth,
your tongue bobbing it to mouth-roof.
Your family physician warns of pesticides
and congeniality, but nothing quite says
Fuck you like licking fruit tendons off
the underbelly of your wrist, trails of that
sickening yellow-orange rivering your cheek.

Week 16, Freewrite 2

The Egyptians used crocodile dung
as birth control two thousand years before
Jesus. I was afraid my IUD would set off
airport security, as I inched between
metal detectors and tasers. My doctor told me,
in the Stone Age, women shoved pebbles
to keep from getting pregnant. But what’s one
more mouth when you’re a scavenger? It’s
nothing like being some child-slave
in Africa, wading through marsh to hunt
for piles of dung, rolling it between fingers
test for freshness, for impurities. Nothing
like juggling agendas and asps, exams
and trials. Nothing like my grandmother,
who in the fifties, used Lysol to purify
and preserve, to secure her husband.

Week 16, Freewrite 1

Lethologica

It’s this big, I whisper, parting hands
to frame air as large as a loaf of bread. It starts with a
B, or an D, or an E--the soccer part of the alphabet. It means
to see me the way you see me and I see me, and how
no one sees me. Double consciousness? you cried, and I
exclaimed, YES! That’s it. and I run to some table
of a nearly empty library, and pick for scraps of paper
that are too short to hold my loaf of bread—which is,
now that I think about it, more like the size of a Volkswagen.

Week 16, Junkyard Quotes

I don’t know if I’m hot on that. –Trista
My mind’s everywhere. –Ryan (common, I know, but I’d never really thought about the phrase void of meaning).
If you’re gonna be broke, it’s a great place to be broke. –Davidson
Don’t think I don’t think about it. –Darius Rucker
Don’t forget you’re only the top of the pedestal. –John von Eschenbach
These kids have a war-sense. --Kamal D.
I wanna leave you with that stoned-third grader ending. -Hipchen
Why do people spoon-feed each other? There's no need for that unless you have cerebal palsy. -Kayla

Week 15, Response 1

Week 15, Improv 2

Once again, a brief improv in the spirit of Brigitte Byrd

--
On steeping a single-serving bag of tea

Sure, your self-consciousness dips and pours as easily. But no hot water could boil something useful from you. Your herbs were never primed for the picking, never dried or sun-baked. No, your sap and genetics rebuke any healing, any aromatherapy—hell, the only therapy you ever heard of came at two-hundred an hour.

Week 15, Improv 1

Improv, in the spirit of Brigitte's two-liners


On folding a towel

Crease edge to ruffled edge, shaking wrinkles from middle as easily as composure, as an affectation, as an amusement. Smooth those filial, finicky fibers—to the left—and impart your measures like some archaic journaling, like some river will bore your colonialism from bank. Fold in halves or thirds? you ask, as if closet space will also evaporate. As if your efforts, like water, will part to air and in part, air.

Week 15, Freewrite 2

My mother came home to peel shoes
from worn feet, to sink to bed, to water
her county-fair roses. Rather, she stumbled
on a dead bird in the living room, right wing
swaddling left should across belly like some
bow, some retreat, some submission. Had
it fingers, I imagine they would be graceful
and smooth, slightly curled at the last knuckles.
Did it fly in through window or basement door,
through your carelessness or mine? Whose
fault to blame for some feather-wearer’s
trepidation, trespass? Trace your steps to
Tuesday last, when you heard some peeps in
the chimney, some bleeps or beeps, cell phone
or smoke alarm? No kamikaze mission, this one
must have flown from door to window, living
room mantle to bookcase lined of all those
classics mom told me to read. Where was it, that
crown met end? Where feathers did not shield,
yet carpet muffled, like some interjection, intervention.

Week 15, Freewrite 1

In a bed of the Mountain Valley Inn in Missoula, Montana, reading the Fire Safety manual.

When you check in…
• Find fire exits in your corridor. Make sure they are not locked or blocked. Count doorways between your room and exits.
• Learn layout of your room and know how to unlock your door in the dark.
• Put your room key closest to where you sleep.

When the room door is not hot or there is no smoke in the hall…
• Check if the hall is clear of smoke. If it’s clean, it’s probably safe to leave your room. Grab your key.
• Walk down to the ground level holding on to the handrail to protect yourself from being knocked down by someone in a panic.

When the room door is hot or there is smoke in the hall…
• Stay calm. You can stay in your room and still survive a fire.
• Fill the tub with water for wetting towels, sheets, etc. The tub water might also be needed for cooling down the walls. An ice bucket or wastebasket can be used for bailing water.
• If the phone works, call for help.

Week 15, Junkyard Quotes

Oh melt my heart, I love this song! -Kayla
You should get a fish and put it in their car. That shit will smell up in three hours. -Mom
My bed looks like a lumpy woman. It has the muffin top and everything. -Kayla
I'm really good at suffering. -Kelsey
My heart is hummingbird. -Mary Kay

Week 14, Response 1

I found Melanie Jordan’s poem, “Parenthetical,” absolutely fascinating and daring. I have never encountered a poem quite similar to its style—a commentary piece about punctuation and its role within language, writing, and thereby, society. My fascination with the poem began with the title and structure of the poem as a text within parentheses. The poem begins and ends with the particular punctuation marks that namesake the poem, and the inside poem functions as I imagine text within parenthesis (when normally outside the context of a poem). The small affectations of the punctuation marks and not capitalizing the first word—as if the poem were a continuation of some larger work—provides some elaboration of a social construction, a scenario, where the action described is muted or whispered to the reader. The effect provides a more intimate reading of the text, and the content depicts a slight movement almost unnoticed or unrelayed to readers—an afterthought. When I created my improv with the em dash, I attempted to attribute the same perceived characteristics—by describing details that, to me, seemed to serve as appositives to some unknown material.

Week 14, Improv 2

A really awful improv in the spirit of Jordan's "Charlie Brown in the Dead of Night"

Ariel

No one told you the truth. The song.
You may have heard I was unruly, disrespectful.
They may I have said I wanted legs or the right
to shave. Some squabble over fires and loves.
No, I just wanted the damn salt out of my hair,
to comb the grit and krill from locks untrimmed.
They may have told you of forsaking friendly
fish and turtles—no such thing. They’d rather
groom themselves and sculpt rock formations.
No games of tag or political debates. No musical
endeavors or warfare tactics. Us, we’re lower class,
some trash—One Fins, they call us. It’s not that
I disregarded my home, my waters. I just wanted
to feel the dryness of wood beneath toes and to
throw wishes to the dregs of ocean bottoms.

Week 14, Improv 1

Improv from Melanie Jordan's “Parenthetical” (the style, not a particular line)

Em Dash

—That yellow heel that clumps on the
sidewalk, but not in that inexperienced way
when toes are lightly lifted and slender sole
crammed to cracks, but in that yes, I know
manner. Sally is a name for any children’s
story writer that forgot what a y means.
Sally is the name of the left leg striding
down the center lane, straddling yellow
lines in shoes that scream impractical and
fresh, somber and reclamation. Recurring
as swift as punctuation is the clack of
bipedalism, Sally’s knees creaking. No one
told her, when she stood, her heart would fight
gravity, would block and bleaken with each
upward stride, each horizontal beat. No one
told her pulses and women should walk on knees.—

Week 14, Freewrite 2

Parasites like Oestroidea

Hold housefly or rodents firmly. Rotate
to advantageous position. Deposit eggs.
Eggs will stimulate from warmth, drop onto
skin, will burrow underneath. If licked, egg
will fester in digestion. They feast on rodent
population control. It must be that ovarian
crunch that drives them. Later, when dropped,
they turn pupal in soil.

But freedom is not with
flies and rats, not with the manure of cows and
horses. No herds for you. Squeeze spine to
painful sub-epidermals. Avoid raw meat and nail
polish—that’s removal, reversal, regression.
I watched them suffocate mine, some sap.
Matatorsalo was never simply ‘bot killer.’
Rather, it’s the fading of Costa Rica, some
colonial conquerment, some parasitic endeavor.

Week 14, Freewrite 1

Attics (based off a wikipedia article)

For me, no garret, no loft, no sky parlor. Only
some space below pitch. Fill my space
to slanted roof. I am known for being
awkwardly shaped. I have exposed rafters and
am difficult-to-access. To assess. To accentuate.
Convert me. I can be your window, your staircase,
your neglected, hard-to-get storage. I am no
mass of unmoving air. Rise from lower floors,
get trapped, compound my reputation: Inhospitable.

Don’t insulate, decrease my cost. I am no boarded
floor; I have no ceiling. Windows and skylights
pale to my chester drawers and failed projects.
Those pieces of the carousel you had begun
to build, creaking in stale whirls of fans. See
how they glimmer in the filtered light.

Week 14, Junkyard Quotes

I am a plant cell and molecular biologist. -SRAP paperwork
My timeline's a little jiggly. -Jazzy Focker
He voluntold me. -Kayla
In an asymptotic fashion. -Gordon
Don't tell me if I'm dying. -Thriving Ivory

Week 13, Response 1

In Jillian Weise’s poetry collection, The Amputee’s Guide to Sex, she typically refrains from formal structures. However, she seems to prefer certain stanza formats—usually two, three, or four lines. In several of these pieces (“Notes on the Body (1),” “Below Water,” “Notes on the Body (2),” “During the Reign of the Alter Ego,” “The Old Questions,” and “Ode to Agent Orange”), the majority of the poems fall under couplet forms, but the last line is single. This maneuver simultaneously salutes the poetic cannon of couplets, while also subverting and refuting those traditions. Weise alters the traditional, base form of couplets to support a non-regulated, imperfect (by traditional poetic stanzas) format in a contemporary fashion. This structure also forces the reader to place emphasis on the last, resounding line, a tactic Weise uses to further hone political importance. Her political avenues are multi-layered, but focus on altering contemporary society’s opinion of perfection. Though largely about the body, these directions may focus on the political perfection, as referenced before. Weise utilizes the single line in a couplet form to reflect the content of the collection that concerns the body. The couplets begin reflecting two people or partners (most often lovers), and then trail down to a more introspective, singular look into the narrator’s voice and physical representations. Furthermore, with several references to being half a body, or only having half the limbs necessary, Weise demonstrates her poetry masterfully with half-stanzas.

Week 13, Improv 2

Selection from “Laundry”
I do not need much: Someone
to kill the scorpion hiding
under the cabinet, someone


I do not need much: Someone
to scrub baseboards and showers,
to proofread papers, someone

to wobble on a stepstool,
reach with both arms to
fixture, swipe bulbs and lint,

return both to me. Fall to carpet
for earrings and runaway pens.
Someone to call to waiter,

This steak’s underdone. This
list’s underdone like women
and films and doctor exams.

Like exotic vacations and the faint
bruising alongside the left ribcage
like last years checks and

the philosophies of next.

Week 13, Improv 1

Selection from “The Arrangement” by Jillian Weise

Why are you writing what you are
when you know I do not like it?

--

Why are you what you are,
when you know I do not like it?
You like to find abandoned schools,
rip toilets from walls, expose pipes
like questions, shatter porcelain.
I prefer to drive to corner country,
find a half-bloomed tree, swerve to
roadside and snap pictures, my face
grooved to ground for better angles.
When you threw desks to ceiling, a
tile fell to sear your back. I disinfect,
say, you deserved worse. You cringe,
but whisper, you remind me of home.

Week 13, Freewrite 2

My city suffers from penis envy
and renovations. All I’ve had
lately is a bad idea.
Nostalgia seeps like Italian oil,
like orthography, like oafishness.
Ghost résumés fill with nominations
and almost there. Almost, like a
double darkness, like the lost art
of loafing. It was, always and everywhere,
the same. They think all I do is
drink and whore around. They’re
overly neglected. They’re no less real.
Imaginary is no number, no value.
I just need you to fight it for a minute,
just need you to move your life. We’ve
all been on that sketchy bus ride
through down-and-undertowns.