Monthly Archives: July 2012

Visiting Heaven

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25

When I arrive in Virginia, I sing
to the graves of my ancestors
resting in the grasses of Northside Park.
Over hedges, children race in gunnysacks
and sail in swings. The monkeys are gone,
but their castle remains. Its stone moat
protects us from the poo monkey ghosts fling,
screeching their protests sideways through time.

Later, when I stand on 8th Avenue
facing Grandma’s house,
my spirit jumps from my flesh
and spreads itself into the creaks and corners
of that old house whose arms
embrace the early days of me.
Steam pours heat into Virginia’s houses,
filling up wood pores in floors and walls
with its deep wet scent, wafting wisps of
ancient we.

Spirit filled with steam,
I turn toward Wake ‘em Up Bay.

Forsaken through years of dis-connect,
my aging body weeps as it enters the flow
of Lake Vermilion, rejoicing its reunion
with the waters of its womb. A desire to
float into eternity toys with my senses.

I picture heaven as a sauna in the sky
on the shores of an ethereal Vermilion
shimmering early days of me.

In heaven, Grandpa tosses cups
of the lake, dipped from a barrel,
and we watch water
dance its sizzle
on the pearly stove’s rocks.

Everybody’s here.

Len laughs and his eyes mimic the glimmer
in Grandpa’s eyes, two peas in a pod,
hyucking it up in the sauna.

Dave Arnott asks if we’re sure it isn’t hell;
it’s so damn hot in here.

Grandpa chuckles and throws
more water on the rocks.

The waters of Vermillion lap my back
and pull me back to the present moment,
rocking on the surface of my youth,
imagining heaven as a sauna
where everyone I love
jokes while Grandpa throws water on the rocks.

It holds my childhood’s blood,
this water,
this receptacle of story and time.

I pull myself out onto the ladder of the boat
and up into the rest of my life.

Vermilion drips down my skin ‘til it dries.

 

Brenda Warren 2012

~~~~~~~~~~~
Process Notes:
I wrote this piece for a Trifecta challenge. We were prompted to write 333-3333 words on any theme, in any style. Not counting its title, this piece is precisely 333 words long.

A week from today, I will be on a houseboat on Lake Vermilion with my husband, Len. We will have the boat for four nights. It’s been over 30 years since I’ve been swimming in Lake Vermilion. We’ll visit Virginia before we head to the lake. I have not been there for 17 years. This poem is my imagining of my upcoming trip with my husband. Lucky we!

We are going to a folk music festival close to the Mississippi River following our week on the water. Life is good. Yup.

Notes on heaven: David Arnott is a good friend who has passed already. Len is still living, but I can’t imagine that it would really be heaven if he were not there with me.

one giant leap

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8

When Joyce told us that burning her bra on the steps of the capitol was the proudest moment of her life, I thought it had something to do with Aunt Barb’s breast implants.

Brenda Warren 2012

Here’s the prompt from Trifecta:  
Forty-three years ago today, Neil Armstrong became the first person to ever walk on the moon. In celebration of Moon Day we want you to write 33 words about someone who took a giant leap. It can mean whatever you’d like, just make sure you write exactly 33 words.

after the fallout

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22


Crows choreograph infinity
against a cinder sky
until black feathers unfurl
beneath their screeches
and float to the pale open
hands of a girl-child who
inserts them into her snaky
red dreadlocks
whirling a dervish
to flash the crows’ audacity
back at them,
to make them take notice
of her power.

Brenda Warren 2012

Visit The Mag. My immediate thought when I saw the picture was fighting crows.  Then I read Infinity, the piece that Tess wrote this week.  The idea of infinity in the picture added inspiraton.

Life is Good

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19

Clouds powder the mountains with mist
until the sun’s slow erotic warming
dries the sky, dissipating droplets
into the blue.

Our gaze strays over gold grasses
that rustle like silk covering earth’s sweet curves.

We sigh in morning’s lazy swing
while the melancholy river
whispers its currents through pale logs
where turtles bask off evening’s cool flow
beneath the sun’s ardent spray.

A rosy finch flings her voice scattering it
through the branches of a proud ponderosa,

and we look up at the sky
rimmed by mountains
convinced that life is good.

Brenda Warren 2012

Visit The Sunday Whirl.

Pantoum for Lingering Guests

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6

Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days
They arrive in a whirlwind bearing whiskey and grins
Drinking and promoting an intoxicated haze
Their booze-embellished stories spin a convoluted spin

They arrive in a whirlwind bearing whiskey and grins
Two nights up past midnight setting words ablaze
Their booze-embellished stories spin a convoluted spin
Fabricated stories of our lives rephrased

Two nights up past midnight setting words ablaze
Redundancy, indolence and attempts to chagrin
Fabricated stories of our lives rephrased
Their stay begins to wear swimmingly thin

Redundancy, indolence, and attempts to chagrin
Drinking and sustaining an intoxicated haze
Their stay begins to wear swimmingly thin.
Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.

Brenda Warren 2012

This piece is written for Trifecta’s Trifextra Challenge: Week Twenty-Four. Check it out for a community of writes on the same topic:

This weekend’s prompt is borrowed from Benjamin Franklin, who once said, “Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.” We want you to tell us a story about a guest, invited or otherwise, who begins to smell, metaphorically or otherwise, after three days.

The guests in my piece come and they drink too much, repeating embellished stories that bring them too much delight, due no doubt to alcohol consumption. I used the pantoum form for its repetition, as it suits the topic well.

grittled syllables

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31

Cat bites my tongue
holding onto words
like gravity keeping my feet on earth
invisible but effective,
relishing silence on this dreary gray day.

As cat’s tail flicks,
a garbled refrain of grittled syllables rises
from cracks in the swell of my purloined tongue
(something about eating canaries
as antithetical to humility).

Perseverating on yellow,
chains disappear like teeth.

Cat lays claim to feathers
triggered by a spray of syllables
whose sarcasm blooms,

freeing my tongue to bleed the story
down this empty white page.

Brenda Warren 2012

Process Notes: We are having a dreary gray weekend, and nothing worth posting came for me yesterday. This morning, when I made writer’s block my topic, this piece came. Initially, “whose sarcasm blooms” was “whose planted sarcasm blooms,” but alas, I like it better without planted…. Plant is the only word I don’t use in this piece.

Visit The Sunday Whirl to read more pieces using the 13 words in the wordle below.

three more days

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14

Water laps the sides of Cold Bottom, my family’s aluminum canoe, as I dip my paddle into Holland Creek and navigate her shallows to nestle against the logjam where turtles spend hours basking in the sun. I want to let them know. I want to tell them.

I want to be near them.

A school of minnows lingers in the shadows of undulating underwater foliage. Their little bodies shimmer in the shadows, flickering in endless currents. Tiny lily pads remind me of rusted round sunglasses, and I sing John Lennon’s Imagine, a concert for unsuspecting minnows. When I finish singing, loss runs its current through my solar plexus.

—Imagine there’s no people
or minnows, or turtles, or woodpeckers
or ravens, or ponderosa pine—

Halfway out into the logjam, three turtles rise, one after another. We sit and blink for a while, listening to the woodpecker’s tap tap tapping, and then, I thank them.

I thank them for inspiring stories of wisdom.
I thank them for their shells.
I thank them for their flesh.
I thank them for their blinking turtle eyes.
I thank them for being here year after year,
for grounding me on this planet.
And then I tell them that in three days,
everything we know will vanish.

Cold Bottom looks like a giant minnow from below, and the turtles think we are one. We will spend the end together until our home is gone.

Brenda Warren 2012

This piece was written for the Trifecta challenge, Trifextra: Week 23. Here it is:
For the weekend challenge, we’re playing the ambiguity card again and leaving interpretation up to you. Give us 33-333 words with this as your inspiration:

The world will end in three days.

Imagine ~ B. Warren / July 2012

Earline’s Daydream

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33

Months turn to years while housewives scrub floors and remove little balls of lint from the collars of their husband’s suits.

On the rind of Earline’s husband’s suit, lipstick appeared. Eddie, of course, was ignorant of its origins, never being near the sort of woman who wore lipstick like that. He rubbed the stubble of his chin, looked up at the sky, and said, “Except for … uh … the jostling in the elevators every morning—we’re like sardines in a can, Earline.” It was the skyward glance and the way he added, “Yeah, maybe that’s it…” that made Earline think of subtracting Eddie’s head from his body. She pictured that little ball of lint rolling into eternity, like a gutter ball spurned from scoring anything but the sting in its eyes when it sees the machete coming—the one Eddie bought her at the thrift shop to round off her pirate wench costume last Halloween.

Course, that’s just Earline’s dream. Housecleaning thoughts, as she rifles through her husband’s drawers.

Brenda Warren 2012

Visit The Sunday Whirl.

Airstrikes

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She opens the door and steps inside.

The tainted air seethes,
its teeth still gnashing.
Flinty sparks of syllables whirl
through an aftermath of fireworks
that seeps into her bones.

Some nights are strategic airstrikes.
Each parent bombards the other
with a blaze of semantically
driven soul missiles that
they think she never hears.
Meanness lingers.
They teach her that.

She tiptoes out the door,
then bolts before anyone notices
that she ever came home.

Brenda Warren 2012

This is my response to a writing challenge at Trifecta, which is to use the third definition of fireworks in a piece between 33 and 333 words in length.
fireworks
1: a device for producing a striking display by the combustion of explosive or flammable compositions
2: plural a display of fireworks
3: plural
a : display of temper or intense conflict
b : a spectacular display

Triumph

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16

I am a maggot.
A poet in larval stage.
A caterpillar in waiting.
A snail.

I secrete invisible shells.
My triumph is my abalone solitude
With its polished and glistening opalescence
And this little spot
Way at the back
Where dinginess prevails.
Sometimes, I stay here too long
Eating composted memories
Digesting them into alphabet tracks
That drop from my caterpillar ass.
I can see you peering in through the cracks,
Deciphering my dark ideas.

Stop noticing my dirt.

Notice instead that
Words ride in triumph over emptiness.

Brenda Warren 2012

Trifecta honored my writing with a second place win, advancing me into a final round of writing this weekend. The prompt for the final round of this Trifecta Challenge is to use the third definition of triumph in a piece that is between 33 and 333 words.

TRIUMPH (noun)
1: a ceremony attending the entering of Rome by a general who had won a decisive victory over a foreign enemy — compare ovation 1
2: the joy or exultation of victory or success
3 a : a victory or conquest by or as if by military force
b : a notable success