allegro

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Eight lines in one minute using the word allegro has me
spinning like a top let loose upon a rimless coffee table
coming mighty close to the edge only to rebound back
to center scrying the underside of my insides for
words to enter this ominous whiteness and make it
feel like they just might matter to someone who reads
them as light pulls them up to their eyes where the top
spins then settles into the cracks of their souls.

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In an imaginary garden with real toads you will find more pieces using the word allegro and written in a minute. I cheated and wrote for almost two minutes to hit a point where it felt finished (1:48). A stream of consciousness dictated the piece…then I moved the margins over until it was in eight lines and here you have it. Thanks for stopping and for sharing your impressions.

Death of a Mermaid

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Writhing white against the foam
300 years flash before her eyes.
Foam has no recollection,
murmuring mermaids it froths and roils,
settling into sands of salty seas.

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Check out the prompt for this piece at imaginary garden with real toads.  It is my first contribution to the site.  The prompt itself is an interesting read.  Thanks for being there you beautiful toads.  The title of my poem is taken from the title of the picture.

itty bitty titty ditty

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Buttery sweet and birdlike the pallid women perch
quivering at Hell’s Bar studded with hordes of goofy bikers
who bloom like Dakota oil wells in the seventies
hitching their bikes, each to an old lady
lubed up and eager to crawl on back and rumble their
bodacious racks through rural Dakotan by-ways,
working their way to Sturgis where all the little white girls
line up at the bar and pretend to be bad ass biker bitches
but later cry about injustice underneath the stars
worried that the evening air will never salve the wound
of bikers and their bitches seeing straight on through their ruse.

 

Brenda Warren 2011

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Process notes:
With little editing, this piece came through quickly. In my early 20s you could say I was a little white girl, greatly intrigued by bikers and their “bitches.” I had some biker friends and got tattooed, but never quite fit the mold. I always thought that it was okay with me to watch their world from the outside, but after the speed with which this piece came, maybe the wound runs deeper than previously imagined. 😉

My diminutive rack made me certain that I’d fall short of biker expectations and that led to the title. I have driven through Sturgis, but never during the rally.

This piece was constructed around words from Jack Kerouac’s refrigerator. For more info on that visit my other blog, The Sunday Whirl, where you’ll find more pieces with Kerouac’s words waiting for your eyes to devour them.

***political aside (a balm for my conscience)***
The playground white America has made of South Dakota is a slap in the face to the Lakota and other American Indians who consider much of the land sacred. It’s kind of like an ongoing circus in a church parking lot.

Worse yet: Mount Rushmore is named for a white American male, and has the likenesses of four United States presidents carved into its face. Prior to the name change and its desecration, the Lakota called the mountain Six Grandfathers. Where are their grandfathers now?

sin

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The magician’s assistant strums her lyre
as ghoulish shadows flick like fire
snapping as a whip snaps
stinging as a bee stings
Damnation’s light show
glides beneath the altars
of her stone black soul.

Plucked strings mesmerize
lascivious strings,
delirious strings,
wicked and impure.
Millions of victimized innocents fall
plundered to the Under
as they heed the Dark Soul’s call.

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This piece is a response to Brian’s prompt at dVerse – Poetics — Third Eye Open. Thanks for the prompt, Brian, I’m not sure why it plunged me into darkness.

residued truth

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Lemony moonlight turns through the room
ivory smooth and silent
while this day’s residue settles like a dust of breeze
congregated in a fervent sweep of sparkling
that filters truth through perception
into moments embellished like tattooed skin.

Our trunks become vessels for stories
cloaked in ink, symbols to invoke
our life’s residue, ivory smooth and sighing,
as needles filter truth through matter
conceiving and breeching
a human veneer.

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This piece was born from a dozen words offered up at The Sunday Whirl. Visit the Whirl for other pieces that these words inspired.

grape indulgence

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So much depends upon
the feet that stomped
the grapes that fed
this wine.

Let me lick them clean
gently spreading each long toe
expressing gratitude for
slight subtleties aroused within my palate
completely bereft of jam
swallowed liquid elixir.
Take me back to the stomp
that freed the flavor
rippling through this heady red.

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This is a bit of a joke, although my husband keeps shoving his feet in my face. LOL Here it is G-Man, a 55 word poem contributed to your Friday Flash 55.

these hands

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for Len

Grooved hills and dales crease time
through the palms of these hands.
Bluish channels create graphemes
under skin, fine-lined with cells like leaves.
Tendon’d talons morph into fingers—
one ringed with gold-crusted meteorite
billions of years old, binding flesh unto flesh.

From the stars
to the Earth
through my heart
to your hand,
with this ring, I thee wed.

These hands we share.
These hands that imprint discourse
commit to boats that arc through air.

These hands that canoe upstream
twist j-strokes,
swaggering against an enigmatic
current of handshape that transfers
directional verbs in space:
help me,
help you,
paddle to perception.

These hands that flutter lotus
blossoms traipse longing
spelled out in gently ridged
veins rising anew
bringing my hands
from the air
to you.

Brenda Warren 2011

Shout out to Margo Roby at  Wordgathering. for the prompt that brought this piece.  Check out the link for yourselves.  It was fun to write.  I also posted this for open link night at dVerse.  Both sites are worthy of a visit. Thanks for reading my words.

Background:
Len and I chose wedding rings from Chris Ploof’s meteorite designs. The italicized words were part of the vows we wrote for our wedding. There are several sign language references in the piece. American Sign Language, ASL, has several directional verbs….the direction you move your hands determines or enhances meaning. Len and I have been married for 7 years. My daughter teaches him 10 words in ASL every few weeks.

hunger

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Blister hot highway sheens black
around glossy cracked sheets of rusty patina
sheer against the Blackfoot’s cool spitting foam
where the river salivates, imagining
slippery-limbed cliff jumpers
tickling its low places
as they eddy and weave
through its succulent flow.

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Victoria provided an interesting prompt at dVerse Poets Pub. Visit the link for more contributions to the prompt. We were to use texture as a tool in our poems.

hey bully

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hey bully
you coward
you strange wasted slouch of humanity
screw your cheap revolution
stop pulverizing people smaller than you

spinning cracked ideas of power
weakens your granite façade

exile desperation to the streets
stomp on the disenchanting garbage
you spread like ash

cleanse the hollows of your soul
clear some space for light to shine

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School starts soon. That and this week’s wordle words at The Sunday Whirl, got me thinking about bullies, I always have at least one.  There is a big poster in my classroom that starts with “Bullies are sad little people inside….”  It engenders some interesting discussion with my seventh and eighth grade students.

Fish Food

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I.

Warden is married to his keys –
keeps them on a cord
snaps them back to hip.
Chink, step, chink, step–making rounds.

Twenty years, I worked these walls.
Last month, finished a forest,
a world blooms in my cell.
Swirling clouds cover my sky.
Branches beckon above my bunk.
Eyes of squirrels and other critters
peek from the umber of brush.

Chink, step, chink, step.
Today I rise. Warden pulls his keys
unlocks my cage.
Sschllup!
Back to hip.
Sending me home—
Sending me where I began.

II.

Home.
Forest insists I visit.
In twenty years,
pine trees stretch,
trails disappear.

Tracing paths on Ponderosa’s skin,
I place my cheek against her sturdiness,
and beg for answers to time’s sweet passage.

Considering all this forest holds,
I course through memory.
A snort disrupts my reverie.
I feel eyes upon my flesh.

Never losing contact with Ponderosa’s trunk,
I turn.
Rising up this she bear towers–her broad head
bruises the underside of branches
until she knocks something loose.

Maybe that’s all she wanted.
On all fours she turns,
and lumbers deep into dense dark woods.

My breath whooshes out
as I settle in a crumpled heap at the base of the tree.
The sun’s light draws my eyes to the ground.
There–what the she bear knocked down.

A key.
A skeleton key.
The skeleton key.

My laughter resonates through every tree’s being.

III.

Twenty years ago, I climbed this tree.
Twenty years ago, I hid this key.
The key to a secret chest I’d stolen
from the cup on my brother’s desk.
The cup with
Don’t Touch
(this means you Bitch)
scrawled on its side.

When confronted, I told him
I threw it in the lake.
At that, one hand grabbed the back of my neck,
the other engulfed my wrist.
He half-pushed, half-pulled me to the lake—
a back and forth waltz to the shore’s rocky edge.

“Get it!” he said.
“Make me!” I dared.

He danced me through the icy wet
until water lapped at my waist.
“Where is it!” he screamed.
No answer.
“Where is it!”
Nothing.

He grasped my hair
in both his hands and
shoved me under.
I struggled to hold onto
the limited air in my lungs,
letting it out in stops and starts.
I tried twisting, turning, kicking.
He jerked my head back,
and got in my face.
“Where is it, you little bitch?”
Nothing but heaving gasps with time for one deep breath.
Under again—I forced myself to open my eyes.
Mossy stones summoned through the muck.
My hands felt for stones with substance.
My hands felt for stones with sharp edges.
I let myself go limp.

He yanked me up.
I swung behind me.
A crack of stone on skull
punctuated the morning air.
He let loose, stunned,
blood dripping from his temple
and slid beneath the surface of the lake.

I held him there, under the water
until his bubbling ceased, thinking
he’d become part of the lake, and
nourish its fish with his blood.

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This prose poem is my first contribution to Open Link Night at dVerse The Poet’s Pub.

Process Notes:
The first draft of Fish Food was constructed from an intense prompt during a writer’s workshop I attended two years ago. The prompt was delivered an image at a time as we were writing, and the story unfolded from each image. The prompt was designed to explore Jungian archetypes. The images included key, forest, cup, bear, and body of water. The person who delivered the prompt had us close our eyes, and paint each new image into our piece mentally before writing. I revised this piece last summer, but still felt it was unfinished. I cut about 20% tightening it up today. This may be the final draft…but who knows? It just might beckon again some day.