Pantoum for Lingering Guests

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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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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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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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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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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

His Perfect Other

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Ophelia by Odilion Redon

She appears to him everywhere
in frozen snapshots of time.
Freeze frame gestures
capture her stoic form,
thin lips rounded into cherries
ripe enough to pluck.
Her neutral expression
stands unconcerned
her utter disregard for him
hanging beneath the surface
of his mother’s birdbath.
Her black hair, an act at play
against smooth alabaster skin.

He reaches out to touch her cheek
and like the reflection of the fox’s grapes,
she disappears.
He’s left with a handful of water-laden butterfly wings
and an intense desire to encapsulate her.
His perfect other.

Brenda Warren 2012

The photo at The Mag inspired The Sunday Whirl words to form an obsession. I think the narrator is a serial killer, but who knows? Visit The Mag and The Sunday Whirl both for some fabulous Sunday writing. You’ll be glad that you did.

I am a Trifectan

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1. What is your name (real or otherwise)?
People call me these things: Brenda, Mrs. Warren, The Great Brendini, Mom, undercaws, Teacher, and Hey Lady!

2. Describe your writing style in three words.
quirky, accessible, prosaic (I don’t know…you tell me.)

3. How long have you been writing online?
Three years— two years at Beyond the Bozone, and one year at undercaws.

4. Which, if any, other writing challenges do you participate in?
The Sunday Whirl–It is a prompt site I host that offers weekly wordles. Tess Kincaid’s The Mag is another prompt site I write to with some regularity.

5. Describe one way in which you could improve your writing.
If I went back and edited some old work…it’s that thing about looking at your work with fresh eyes. In his book, On Writing, Stephen King talks about looking at his work six months after he’s written it, so he can go back and “kill his darlings.” He edits at least ten percent of what he’s written. He cuts the stuff he puts in there for himself, not his readers. We all do it. Our writing contains extraneous crap that we keep in there for personal reasons. I need to kill my darlings and submit some work.

6. What is the best writing advice you’ve ever been given? “
“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings” Stephen King, On Writing

7. Who is your favorite author?
Alice Hoffman, Sherman Alexie

8. How do you make time to write?
The Sunday Whirl forces me to write every week. I started that prompt blog in April 2011. My responsibility to that a community of writers keeps me writing. Visit The Whirl. Join us!

9. Give us one word we should consider using as a prompt. Remember–it must have a third definition.
Whirl.

10. Direct us to one blog post of yours that we shouldn’t miss reading.
Because I love my friend David Arnott, I want you to read Watermelon Train Wreck. There is also a reference there to a poem on my first Internet home, Beyond the Bozone. That poem, The Dead Woman and The Mad Hatter, is my personal favorite. Read them both. Dave is gone. But somehow, he lives a bit in those poems.

Words are just passing air

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Falling through the looking glass,
your new life flashes backward.

Make it last.

Uncertain where tomorrow goes,
look to yesterday—
where petals open angels,
soldiers become toys,
and gown clad women
dangle like ornaments
anchored high
in the trees
by their hair.
Your mother smiles on a star.
Endings come from beginnings.

Make it last.

Black swans dance upon
the beaches of tomorrow
and every girl’s lips look puckered.

Brenda Warren 2012

Process Notes. I watched the video, “Thirty Three” by Smashing Pumpkins several times, then recorded a list of images(side-by-side…video/word document), as I watched the video. From those images, this piece arose. Make it last is italicized as it comes from the song. The title of my piece is a paraphrasing of the first line of the song—
Speak to me in a language I can hear.

A Trifecta Writing Challenge prompted this piece. Please check them out to read other entries.