Riffs

As inspired one evening alternating reading Twyla Tharp and Joy Harjo.

Title: The first stack of trash

I walk into a white room. It is my first apartment in three years and four months. Mine. Everything is gray and harsh yellow between the January pissing sky and every light in the three rooms burning up my electric bill already. The walls were white, the carpets beige. My dog waited until the week before we moved out to pee and shit mark the rug. There went my pet deposit, after all.

To Grieve

Wrote this while at work, following loosely connected ideas. There are blanks to be filled in as you read, implications that can’t be stated because the story is effectively a conversation through intimacy.

Title: Perfect Pinch

 

I don’t like to read, but I would sit and listen to you all day, telling stories. I like the one about the old raven who became a man and couldn’t remember how to change back. In my childhood, he never died. I liked the one about the girl who cried so hard, so much for the soldier who didn’t know he loved her. She became a stream, and when he came back, realized his loss, he sat on her banks until a witch took pity, turning him into an apple tree. Tales of transformation, you know?

Gutted

There is little explanation that can be given for this piece, it is wretched raw as it is and does not bear modification for purpose.

Title: Glacial

 

A revelation is not necessarily a clarifying moment; as new knowledge, unrecognized, it is rather the more confusing. You will never see this, so I should be able to be honest. I brightened the moment I saw you. I could not recall clear particulars from memory, least of all your name, but I knew you, knew you were good.

Indulgence Imagination

One of these days I’ll post regular-like.

 

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Title: Breathless

Pretty girl. Am I a pretty girl–it doesn’t matter. Do you see a pretty

Glass Man

This is another deviantart migrant, and while rather old, suddenly relevant.

Title: Glass Man

He’s a glass man to me
Forged from something earthy

Whose Wasteland

An edited and updated version from a few weeks ago. Read at an open mic, seemed to go over all right.

Title: Whose Wasteland

I. Worlds in Collision

did you see the yellow
streak pale in array behind the clumping, crying blue,
dying it salmon and rose and ash and leaving cherry spatters.
Across, almost transparent, the watch.
There was a moment. Venus in the morning through the pane.

1800: Week Eight

I read it last week, but I didn’t post about it. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf was a form establishing novel, a one-day stream-of-conscious focus on characters revolving around the titular Mrs. Dalloway.

1800: Week Six

But also, a response poem, to T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” It is not line for line or theme for theme, it’s a mash up of what was inspired in me by it. I’m fairly certain this meets the requirements of “something about the class” since it’s a material and original result of exposure to the coursework.

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Title: Whose Wasteland

1800: Week Five

“Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:

1800: Week Four

This week, we were asked to read a poem among five, titled “Say Over Again” by Emily Browning, a sonnet.