Tag Archives: January 2010 Read Write Poem Mini-Challenge

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Read Write Poem Mini-Challenge Poem #6: Endgame

This poem is the sixth one written for January 2010′s Read Write Poem Mini-Challenge (to write six poems about starting over in six days). It was also written for Read Write Poem Prompt #111: Broken Chair. I ended up going back to the theme of alcoholism with this, the last poem in the series with the theme of “starting over” — perhaps because I knew someone who struggled with it and didn’t survive. I guess I keep hoping for redemption. I hope you enjoy the read.

-Nicole

P.S. To see the other mini-challenge poems that I am writing this month, click here.

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Electric, my burn and buzz brain
has brought me down to a broken chair,
the latest in a series of holy visions
bequeathed by delirium. This is how
you die of thirst in the desert with nothing but a
busted-up, empty-bellied ’71 Cadillac Fleetwood with a
crowd of empty beer cans lying scattered on the back seat. The beast
died three days ago, coughing out gas fumes and
retching out a death cry of metal scraping on metal from inside its
ancient steel throat. The sky echoes its paintjob in
faded, teal sick covered with rust. And there’s dust in
the breath of this desert, playing a dirt smoke harmony with
the sweet and sour stink slowly pouring from the mouths of
the beer cans. It’s a perfect, white trash sendoff
for a sweatshirt and steel-toed fool – which I am,
now kneeling in worship to a
figment with three legs.
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Read Write Poem Mini-Challenge Poem #5: The Shaman Speaks of Alchemy


Wisdom of the Shaman by J.D. Challenger

This poem is the fifth one written for January 2010′s Read Write Poem Mini-Challenge (to write six poems about starting over in six days). For this, I went symbolic — the shaman, the myth of the Phoenix, and the concept of alchemy snuck into this poem. I hope you enjoy the read.

-Nicole

P.S. To see the other mini-challenge poems that I am writing this month, click here.

Note: You can listen to this poem on Podbean.
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This is how I work. First, I tell you about the
last time I journeyed into the nightmare, how the
sky hummed like it was going to seize me by the wrists
with lightning bolt hands and
shake me loose from my body. How it
shoved its face down to mine and threatened to shrink itself into
fuzzed rainbow serpents that would slide into every orifice, into
every pore. How it
demanded the right to divide in two and
wind up my spine in demented double-helix fashion and then
curl itself into a cosmoramic expanse, smoky-skinned and diamond-dotted,
inside of my neck. It would have been
a perfect replica of night itself, with
black zephyr pushing the air out of my trachea and
stars scratching their names into the walls of my throat,
ripping away tiny letter lines made of red velvet and
leaving blood monograms in their place. Next,
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Read Write Poem Mini-Challenge Poem #4: Angels

Apparently, my muse decided to go in a different direction for this poem, the fourth one written for January 2010′s Read Write Poem Mini-Challenge (to write six poems about starting over in six days). We went to Haiti for this one. And I’ll say no more.

-Nicole

P.S. To see the other mini-challenge poems that I am writing this month, click here.
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Death makes angels of us all
and gives us wings where we had
shoulders smooth as ravens’ claws.
- Jim Morrison

When the earth shook, the dead shuddered off their skins while
their hallowed breath escaped them in
invisible ribbons of night and day. Dust-covered angels
now wander incognito through the backbone and veins
of Port-au-Prince, trying to reconstruct their minds
from the rubble –

crumbled concrete souls in sundered pieces
like a broken open chest where the heart bursts out and
the ribcage lies behind, scattered
in ribbons of bone. Now,
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Read Write Poem Mini-Challenge Poem #3: Naked

This poem is the third of six written for January 2010′s Read Write Poem Mini-Challenge (to write six poems about starting over in six days). For this poem, I borrowed from the story of Akka Mahadevi, a 12th century sanyasini (female saint) and poet from Karnataka in India. Her entire life was spent in a search for the Divine, to the point where she refused the proposal of a local king (but then was forced to marry him). One day she left home, renouncing even her clothes, and traveled until she found an ashram. She remained there, writing a few hundred poems, or vacanas which tell of her journey, her struggles, and her devotion to the Divine (in this case, Shiva). If you want to read more about her, check out this article on her and this post from Read Write Poem profiling her and her work in their obscure poets series.

To see the other mini-challenge poems that I am writing this month, click here.

So read on, and enjoy.

-Nicole

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You’ll probably think
that it’s the old story of the woman and the snake, claim that I
took in strange fruit like a foreign cock, think that I
shed my robes of loyalty for something
on the edge of the forest with drumbeats that might
make you smile like death in a clean red curve
across your neck. But the truth is,
you never knew the breath beneath the brass, the chimera
unfolding in a time-lapse burn under
layers of gold trophy paint. You shined my skin, checked
your reflection in my mirror, and moved on,
our lives burned on to the back of your eyelids like
you and I were the Ten Commandments written in
rock. Thou shalt be beautiful, and I shalt
never be home. I, your trinket goddess,
an Aphrodite in blond and curve. I was always
on your shelf, at your table, and in your
bed. And now I
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Read Write Poem Mini-Challenge Poem #2: Chrysalis

This is the second of six poems written for January 2010′s Read Write Poem Mini-Challenge (to write six poems about starting over in six days). I think I’ll likely follow the theme of “shedding skin”, since it seems to be where my mind is going, with these poems. This is no different — I chose a chrysalis for this piece.

To see the other mini-challenge poems that I am writing this month, click here.

Enjoy.

-Nicole

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I see the descent of daylight
smoking up ahead. Inviolate azure, streaked near its bottom
with red, violet, and tangerine evening. Behind me,
my car, ruptured open, deliquescing smoke and
bleeding suicide flame Hallelujahs into the air as it
reduces itself down to lowest terms: ash, glass,
and rubber. Next to it, a concrete cylinder, an elephant’s leg,
stands streaked with my blue paint signature while
it and its brother bear a freeway overpass upon their
shoulders. I
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Read Write Poem Mini-Challenge Poem #1: Sycamore

Note: If you don’t want to read the introduction, you can skip down to the poem.

This is the first of hopefully six poems written for January 2010′s Read Write Poem Mini-Challenge (to write six poems about starting over in six days). It was also written for Read Write Poem Prompt #109: Beg, Borrow, Steal, which was a Wordle prompt. I managed to use a good percentage of words from the prompt.

I normally edit as I write (or try to) — but for this one, I found myself writing without an editor, from the more unconscious part of my mind (and perhaps, by extension, my heart), and then going back and editing later. If this seems less linear, that’s why. I also ended up taking my “ash golem” from my poem “Ashes” and bringing her into this poem. I hope you enjoy.

To see other poems for this mini-challenge, click here.

-Nicole

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Drawing blanks and blood,
fertile-thighed, skin scarred, I am a
whalebone artist, carving my dreams in bone apocalypses
and shoving them behind my jaw. Wake up
when I’m twelve, and try rescue those school-day reveries
running in tape-loop, dream-sequence repeats before they
waterfall down my throat and slice vocal chords
into confetti as they fall for their own enjoyment. Thirty-three years old,
whipped into a existentialist froth, I now dare to seek
my old suit of skin that’s been hanging from the
low-bending branches of some lonely sycamore that
the steel mill in town forgot to poison. I see that it’s still wearing
pink, which I forgot how to be
a long time ago.
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