A binding spell protects me
from the broken circling words
that fall chanting from the cave
of your mouth like fists
to pummel my repute.

Whispering a vow
while sewing a poppet,
my needle works through
the crook in its neck
where I stop to insert
your words in the space
between its nonexistent ears,
stitching them silent.

Hidden from the sun
your slander stops its drone
beneath Montana’s badlands
bound in a doll’s head,
buried in Makoshika,
a few hundred miles away.

Brenda Warren 2013

Process Notes: A good friend dabbled in witchcraft when we were younger. The word binding sparked a memory of a binding spell she showed me once. As the details were foggy, I did a search and found this recipe for binding. It fed my poem. Personally, I don’t dabble in witchcraft. Casting spells to control others goes against my core belief in self-determination.

Visit The Sunday Whirl

Singing provides a place for grief to move
through the thousand thunderous memories
that flash in bits and pieces
pulsing pictures of your son’s short life—
toothy grins and tomato soup,
grass stained whisperings,
your spit smudging dirt
from his soft pink cheek.

Days count themselves empty
since children and teachers lay crumpled
in red pools of dying self
on December 13.

As the media dish moves beyond Sandy Hook,
singing pulses its balm through crowds
massing movement through hearts,
transforming pain through prayers
that carry messages of love.

Your voices move like a river carving channels
through the spirit of our land,
creating conduits for hope’s flowing grace.

Brenda Warren 2013

Francine and David Wheeler lost six year old Ben in the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. This piece is my response to an interview with Francine, David, and Peter Yarrow (from Peter, Paul and Mary) on Bill Moyer’s show, Moyers & Company. You can see the show in its entirety here. The video above is Francine Wheeler and Dar Williams singing Family. It makes me cry every time.

Visit The Sunday Whirl.

1.
My dog’s tongue is a long pink lick machine.

2.
Victor Little Plume claims he’d rather eat
his grandmother’s dog soup than school lunches.
Any Day.

3.
Laying claim to Earth, Daystar masks
the bright shine of Sirius
engendering summer’s dog days.

4.
Joanie believes a recording
of vicious barking dogs
repels rapists.
Real dogs make her sneeze.

5.
Plains Indians refer to the time before horses
as Dog Days—honoring interdependence.

6.
The sociable docile beagle wags its way into lab experiments.

7.
Only a true dog lover masters the expression of anal glands.

8.
Beneath the city
in the morgue
the coroner pries the victim’s scalp
from the teeth of the Rottweiler
that shredded her pretty blonde head.

9.
If you lie down with dogs
you get up with fleas.

10.
Driving through Browning,
hub of the Blackfeet Nation,
we see more dogs than people.

11.
Corky, Floppy, Bruno
Becky Zent, Bearsy, and Belle
Hopper Doodle-Doo
and Piggy, too.
And BoonDog and Elliot
over in Mizzooo.
ow-ow- owooooooooooooooooooooo!
Howlers howling,
sing it to the moon.

12.
Four legged loyalty
adore me like royalty.

13.
Soother.
Companion.
Protector.
Friend.

Brenda Warren ~ August 2011

As the sun comes up
Hopper barks and turns circles
at birds on a wire

Brenda Warren ~ November 2012

Wagging his tail weakly,
when I walk through the door,
he lifts his head and lowers it.

I ease my body next to his,
as his breathing shallows
and I know, Hopper
is approaching the threshold
of “the other side”

You know,
rainbow bridge, that crap.

He entered our life
through a flyer
offering a deaf dog—
right after Thyra asked for one.
Kismet. Fate. Happenstance. Luck.
Hopper. Dennis. A dog who jumps.

Hopper.
Tonight he lies
dying by my side,
while Piggy, deaf,
cognitively impaired,
and significantly low vision,
whines and circles Hopper.

Feeling his compass fade
Piggy’s herding instinct falters
and he throws himself to the ground
in wait.

His anxiety is palpable.

How will each of us fill that space
Hopper’s emptiness creates?

Brenda Warren 2013

So we wait. I love my boy, rubbing his shoulder and his belly. His eyes tell me he’s traveling somewhere else.

You are a moon poet
standing on a hole
of dark stillness
forgetting how to write.
Slowly your emptiness
rises
to the heavens
in blocks of
freezing sea.

You are a drought poet
above a new
vibrant rain
starting dry, shriveled
poems. As you begin,
your poems quickly
come home
and stop outside
country roads
between grassy fields.

You are a shore poet
ridden by a
beach bum after
you forget to write.
Your poems walk home
and hate,
drowning with birds
in red shimmering
sand.

You are an outside poet
without floors
forgetting to write.
Your poems rise
from prairie grasses
and whisper secrets
to you.

You are an Earth poet
ridden by
trees, and stones, and people.
Your poems come
home
warm and glowing
discovered
in the present moment
right before your eyes.

Brenda Warren 2013

Here is the prompt for the final day of NaPoWriMo: “Find a shortish poem that you like, and rewrite each line, replacing each word (or as many words as you can) with words that mean the opposite. For example, you might turn “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” to “I won’t contrast you with a winter’s night.” Your first draft of this kind of opposite poem will likely need a little polishing, but this is a fun way to respond to a poem you like, while also learning how that poem’s rhetorical strategies really work. (It’s sort of like taking a radio apart and putting it back together, but for poetry). Happy writing!”

The piece I chose was written by a sixth grade student on the Utah Navajo Reservation. It is called “My Poems.” I found it in the book Rising Voices.

Jonesy wished for a monkey.
to run chutes and ladders
through her veins.

Riding away to wonderland,
she’d lie in the valley below,
sailing through nothing but nothing,
waking with no urge but more.

Brenda Warren 2013

Miz Quickly says “Change your name and one other thing about yourself. Begin a poem “(your fictional name) wished”…whatever this new person would wish for.

I changed my name to Jonesy and became a burgeoning heroin addict. Kind of a dark nursery rhyme of sorts.

Maya Angelou thinks everyone should have guns.
It’s never enough.
Geese are honking up a storm.
It’s always too much.

Coffee up boys,
there’s a bench with three princesses standing by it
and we’re leaving for Missoula Sunday.

They put their collars all up in their hood
and shot a bullet into a tunnel
it ricocheted back into one guy’s eye socket
he lived.
It’s never enough.
He can have his AK47 when he’s 30.

His shirt was soaked.
It was terrible.

Maya Angelou thinks everyone should have guns.
After she’s gone, we have to see what they say.

Brenda Warren 2013

Process Notes: Miz Quickly says, “Out in the world again. This time you’re just listening. Take a notebook and catch some of those random lines of conversation, trying to get the speaker’s exact words. What you do with the material depends on what you get. If you are very lucky, and get lines enough, you can arrange them into something like a cento. More likely, you’ll have been given one or two windows into someone else’s life. Or just a colorful phrase. Wherever you take it, remember that, here, what you see is less important than what you hear.”

Here are the lines as I heard them this morning at the Missouri River Diner(I did take a bit of poetic license in the lines of my piece):

there was a bench with three princesses standing by it
after she’s gone we have to see what they say
he can have his AK47 when he’s 30
it’s never enough
I’ve got my collar all up in this hood
he shot a bullet into a tunnel
and it ricocheted right back
into his eye socket
this soft part bothers me
I’m leaving for Missoula Sunday
those geese were honking up a storm
coffee up boys
it’s always too much
Maya Angelou thinks everyone should have guns
I fell on my nose in the dirt
it was terrible
sitting on a bar,
no hands, swinging down
right onto my nose
there was blood gushing everywhere
my shirt was soaked
it was terrible
It’s a waterslide that goes outside the building

*note:  My daughter babysits an 8 year old girl.  She came to breakfast with us this morning, and a few of these lines are from her.  She is the girl who broke her nose.

Here’s the scoop on Maya Angelou in a Chicago Tribune article.

Stitch me up with spirit
or my blood will burn snow,
melting molten rivers through your tongue’s silver flow,
Joe Cool atop your doghouse
ripping seams from my soul,
harrowing thin threads
transparent in the glow.

Eating tacos on the promenade
right before the storm,
your aviator spectacles reflect
my broken nose
(on borrow from your fisticles
and shriveled little testicles),
fractured in a second
beneath your mighty blow.

Salsa with cilantro marches
magic through the marrow
of the thin rare stillness
of the calm before your storm–

that second when I understand
there is no either or.

Stitch me up with spirit
while your blood burns slow,
melting molten rivers
that grub tunnels through my soul.
I saw my life flash frozen
and guessed that you should go,
stitch me up with sweet thin threads
transparent in the glow.

Brenda Warren 2013

Earlier this week, the first stanza of this piece came quickly, and then it stopped. I pulled it out again this morning, using the wordle words to finish it.  My goal was a piece that could be “rapped.” It’s day 27!