Tag Archives: NaPoWriMo

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NaPoWriMo Poem #13: Pretending to Be Normal (Eye Contact)

If you try to look into my eyes
you might succeed, if only for a moment
until I feel your gaze incise
and my skin wires buzz with too much current.
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NaPoWriMo Poem #12: Wine

Your pomegranate eyes close,
sink under the surface as your lids
close shut to seal them from the outside. The black
on the backs of your eyelids are a screen,
ready for projection. Cut the film,
splice it together from all of those fleeting shots
you’ve captured at school. Multiple frames
of him. The smile, the laugh, the eyes.
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NaPoWriMo Poem #9: Razors

Bloodletting is a specific science,
passed from mouth to mind to hand. Tools
of the trade: leeches, or razors? Some choose
the sharper edge, for the blood to make exit
into something holier. Like a pure white porcelain basin.
Like the white bandages spoken of, opposite the red
in every barber’s pole.
Like the air.
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NaPoWriMo Poem #7: Creation

Some stories write themselves. Like this one.
There were no days, hours, minutes, or seconds
to count, to draw lines across this globe’s face with,
to make motorized machinery with strange faces and no mouths
to tell you how fast to go,
or how much of the day you’ve left to spend
like tired-eyed laborers with a pocket full of gold
and a gaping throat hungering for liquor. No years to
number your graying hairs with,
no decades to watch and count your children –
the ones that survived,
growing up like corn stalks until they gave forth their own fruit
and their ears blacked out the sun. No centuries Continue reading →

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NaPoWriMo #2: Lamppost Hierophant

for Sam Drezner

There are four of them.
Each day, the sun rises and warms our faces in the East.
Each day, we breathe out the smoke of our spirits until it is spent.
And each day, you are divining these lampposts.
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NaPoWriMo #1: Kindling

St. Rose of Lima

St. Rose of Lima, by Jennifer Walterschied

for St. Rose of Lima

I know how to make fire.
It is not I who makes it; I am the kindling. A
cut here, a jab there: and the flame starts,
unbidden. In one little corner of Lima,
an Everlasting fire blazes on.
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NaPoWriMo Poem #30: Letters to Alice

There is a crack in everything,
that’s how the light gets in.
– Leonard Cohen

I.

I first began to believe in darkness
when I was seven: it was made out of thirty minutes
spent inside of a closet. Thirty minutes
painted without light, the bowels of a mouth
that would not let me go. This was discipline,
Dad turned inside out, freeway nerves
too crowded and jammed to let little girl electricity
pass safely through. Sometimes, I am still inside,
waiting for the tongue beneath my feet to
roll me backwards down a rabbit hole –
and when I land, there will be no potion, no key,
no magic cake, and no door.
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NaPoWriMo Poem #28: Letter to My Father

Dear Dad: have you ever seen the
burning blade, the straight edge of a knife’s
tongue? From this, we are branded with bruises. This silence,
this tradition of disguise, is a generational curse,
a baton passed from Grandma to you to
me – and I am still running.
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NaPoWriMo Poem #27: Raven

Revel in the rising day
and in the dawn of the dark. You are
voracious, you trickster, an
empty diamond mine that wants its children back. There is
no doubt that you stole the sun,
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