King Arthur

Inspired by a week at Wrightsville Beach, NC.The title is a play off "La Morte d'Arthur," with the word "Slumber" instead of "Death."

"La Sommeil d'Arthur"
 

Transubstantiation always has

the shivering tint of cannibalism.

I partake of his flesh by the sea,

by the sea I gather his bones—

sea shells, like coins.

I am green, still—

grass green, and my King

has grown green as limestone

with waiting.

These many years, I have been searching

for a way to wake Him, for a way

to call his mer-men forth on Neptune’s steeds

in search of the Grail once more.

Hermaphrodeities

Wow, this thing is a MONSTER, but I'm really, REALLY pleased with it. I still feel like it needs polishing, but I managed to get my partner, who isn't a big poetry person, to call it "powerful," so I'm PSYCHED. Written based on my 100 Poem Project theme, "hermaphrodeities." You should totally go check out the book by the same name, written by Raven Kaldera.

Written (much faster than I could have anticipated) for 's Transgressions: Vices and Virtues Contest. The prompt: "In keeping with the theme of "transgressions", your topic this year (if you hadn't guessed) is virtues and vices. Is there really a difference between them? Can one person's virtue be another's vice? What makes something fall in one category and not the other?" I promise this is within the 60 line limit! I promise!

SO MANY REFERENCES. Parts of this are meditations on the definitions of "virtue" and "vice" as listed on the contest article, particularly:
vice
1
a : moral depravity or corruption : wickedness
b : a moral fault or failing
c : a habitual and usually trivial defect or shortcoming : foible
4
a often capitalized : a character representing one of the vices in an English morality play
b : buffoon, jester

virtue
6
: a capacity to act : potency
7
: chastity especially in a woman

Other references (because I think they're actually important for understanding the way I played with virtue/vice in this piece, and keep in mind that I DO NOT DO THIS OFTEN) include, in order:

• The Virgin Mary. One of my middle names is Mary, and my mother chose it because she had great difficulty conceiving, and prayed to the Virgin on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception for a child. Nine months later: TA-DA! Me.
• Spirit Animal: I am not talking about Native North Americans in this case, but indigenous Central Americans. Many Mayan people (NOT EXTINCT, they still live in Mexico) draw a line in the dirt when a child is born and lay the placenta on it. The first animal to cross is the child's spirit animal, and the child's well-being will be forever tied to that creature.
• Yarrow: this is a plant often brewed into tea to help improve clairvoyance and is associated with divination.
• Robert Frost's birches: "Birches" is one of my FAVORITE FAVORITE Frost poems (read here: [link]). One of the interpretations of it is that the birches in the poem are actually phallic symbols. If you want to know more about that, I'm sure you can find that analysis online somewhere.
• Fourble: IS A REAL WORD. I was so excited. It's a piece of mining equipment, also spelled "forble," but I liked this spelling better :)
• Heaven help you if you don't know where "fe fi fo fum" comes from. Or the Big Bad Wolf. Go look up Jack and the Beanstalk and Little Red Riding Hood.
• Victoria bones: Queen Victoria, thanks to constantly wearing a corset, had a waist of only 16" in circumference. Women during this period often used fans to help them breathe.
• (Light brown hairs: technically a reference to my favorite poem OF ALL TIME, T. S. Elliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.")
• FINALLY: Legion comes from the Bible. "Legion" is what a man possessed by multiple demons calls himself. Mark 5:9:[link]

OKAY. I think that covers them all. No wait, one more: the concept of people who are "two spirit" comes from the Navajo. They believe that there are people born with multiple spirits in their bodies, who are both man and woman, and because of this are blessed with greater spiritual power. If there is any gender identity I think fits me most, it is two spirit.

I hope you all enjoy! Sorry for the lengthy explanation >_<

Questions for critique:
1. What do you think of the flow? I feel like some of the imagery might not have a strong enough tie to the rest of the piece.
2. What do you think of the sections? I felt like they needed to be separated out somehow, but I feel like this could still be played with more. Thoughts?
3. I remain skeptical of the opening couplet. Comments appreciated.
4. HELP ME WITH THE TITLE! PLEASE!

All comments welcome! Thanks for reading!

"Poetry is Simply a Way to Stretch Myself Skyward"

In the end we’re all myths, hermaphroditic deities.

Our names are the most real things about us.

i. My mother named me for the Virgin

and I carry her legacy in my blood—

she is my spirit animal; the creature

who crawled first across the placenta line

outside my home. In truth, I imagine all

are wolves or coyotes drawn by the smell

of fresh blood.

ii. There is no purity in childhood:

we are simply jesters with blistered feet

and the purple skins of blueberries under our fingernails.

We feel no remorse.

Our bodies have not yet been burdened

with the weight of other hearts.

iii.

potency   portency   portents   ports

Before I make my tea I’ll watch my

little yarrow plants unfold themselves

fleshlike and phallic, petite bent men

hoping for heaven—a row of Frost’s

birch trees. Hardly potent in the dead of winter,

but witchly I will drink their secrets down.

iv.

foible   fourble    feeble   fable

                        fe fi fo fum

If power is measured by the air

with which we fill our lungs,

then call me Big Bad and scratch me

behind my furred triangle ears—these large teeth

were not made to bite

[you]—

if power is measured by lung capacity

then this great big ribcage of mine

cannot be contained by white Victoria bones;

I will need no laced fan to breathe,

my virtue is not the geometric shapes

of clothed bodies. I go about with

uncovered ankles, dusty and decorated

with light brown hairs.

I am a breathtaking Navajo tapestry.

Stick figures I may be, but I,

Legion, am many, and we wear the sun

as our crown.

Hark all ye who lay claim to only half yourselves—

on your wedding days, you shall speak

with breathtaken voices.

Mine will always rise in song.

 

Cliff Diving

Hmmm. I like this, but then I don't. Totally came up with an awesome idea for a setting for a dystopian futuristic novel today. Now I just need to actually write it...but let's be realistic here, I'll never have the drive to actually FINISH that idea.

NaPoWriMo day 26. Almost done!

PS. Why yes. That *is* a reference to Bladerunner. Oh, Harrison Ford. So beautiful at that age.

"The Plunge"

What have we to look forward to
but a dystopian future,
lives of running along knife blades,
lives like cliff-diving
and searching for our seeds in sand—

will they be balls of string, leading us to the sea
or minotaurs ravaging our bones?

—seeds that we will christen ourselves:
deserts devoid of sun.  

Satellite

This went....somewhere

I meditated on a prompt to think about something that didn't happen. And this resulted. What the hell?

No, I have never been fitted for a wedding dress. But damn, did I have to fend that one guy's mother off.... It was a near miss, let me tell you...

Comments appreciated!

"Trajectory"

I wonder what would have happened
if we hadn't awkwardly made out on my couch
that night.

What I most dread is that there was something
inevitable about it, that your mother
fitting me for her old wedding dress
dragged the whole thread of my life
inexorably forward.

That we were somehow built as
satellites; and all I can do
is think about all the other stars
I might have seen if some NASA scientist
had calculated the trajectory of my flight
just wrong enough, and set me free
of the earth's gravity field. 

Puzzle Pieces

NaPoWriMo day 22: OMIGOD A LONG POEM? NOWAI!


I feel like there are pieces of this poem in other poems. I've directly lifted my "poem" from yesterday. I thought it needed a place in a larger piece.

I'd love to hear any and all comments, but I am especially interested in how the piece flows, and in how well you think the three sections work.

"Puzzle Child"

i. Childhood Memory
As a child, I took my world in
through my palms, took in monkey bar splinters

and made myself for the first time as a weed beside
Walden Pond, as a clump of tenacious leaves fearing anthills.

My philosophy began as a collection of wood posts
marking the limits of a man's life at a time in mine

when names were simply the sounds that belonged
to people, not the other way 'round, when the stories

didn't yet blossom from my head, were still
daisy buds or infant Athenas. But I have always been

a mottled creature, a moss growth of
corresponding shapes. As a third-grader, I

marked these shapes on a world map with
brightly-colored pins, without understanding their names.

ii. Blood Memory
In my mind, Eastern Europe is
a black forest drowned in mist.

It stretches across the Atlantic
to the mining towns of Pennsylvania

where my great-grandfather filled his lungs
with black dust. It is the bodies of my great-aunts,

those earth mothers with their cliff bodies and witch laughs
and I am sure they all must polka in their graves.

Sicily is the bone-deep nourishment,
the roots of tomato vines and basil plants

tangled in my veins, crawling into my chest
through the recipes we only know through our blood.

Ireland's softness—its songs and its stories
have crept their delicate way into my breast,

but I see them only as a coastal village—
a stone church on cliffs overlooking the sea

and the raised voices of my family members
as we sing our laments with pressed palms

and say an Ave for those who are already gone:
We sleep no more in Ireland's sunshine or shadows.

iii. Earth Memory
Virginia is always tinted with red clay.
I was a deer, then, flashing frightened through

the wooded stretches of paths to avoid the demons
that waited for me. October brought piercing cold,

mackintosh apples and a harvest fair when I
buried myself face-first into a haystack labyrinth.

I fashioned myself as an elf-child, sang of
fifteen birds in five fir trees and gathered

sprigs of holly in winter to hang at my doors
and windows, to ward off the evil faces in the dark.

North Carolina came as a shock, a wave of stifling heat
and humidity that broke against me, swept me up

in its arms and dragged its feet in my wake.
I waded through its eddies and swirls

and coughed up whole trees of yellow dust
in August, waited for its thunderstorms in

hurricane season, the balm to soothe our
collective parched throats that rarely came.

Ultimately, I took in my home through my palms,
through sawdust and not doing handstands so I could

avoid the red ants' nests. I have given up trying to
sculpt myself, have let my many selves run riot,

let even my sweat run like rampant animals,
clear and quiet, burrowing into my armpit hairs.

I feel most at home in the summer,
when the years-long drought possesses the land

like a herd of horses, when even the rain that comes
flashes over my land too fast to do anything

but run with the dry brown horses
away to the sea, when the clouds

gather their electricity, slowly,
like a crown over my head.

Always, it is the thunder that heralds my homecoming,
the thunder that calls me homeward.  

Terraforming

I actually am quite pleased with this. Formatting it has been terrible, though. Augh. Still working on formatting. Any advice on how to justify text would be MOST welcome.

I also appreciate all comments and critique!


"Terraforming"

i do not know what to say to the moon when i
wander between the mesa shelves, a cliff
dweller and an unwanted library book
passing from hand to hand and never quite
brown or red enough to hide myself from the
coyotes. i remember something of the south-
west—my hands sticky with desert powder
and cactus sap, and a feeling i can't explain
without the gleaming scrub brush beetles to
draw my nazca lines. i can tell you, though,
of when i willed myself to fit within the
cracks of canyon walls and tried to sink my
toes down into the colorado river. terra will
not fit my form, so i must longingly fit mine to hers.

June Flowers

WOW I actually got this poem done EARLY today. Probably because I am trying to put off work on this final essay. *sigh* NaPoWriMo day 16!!!

Based this piece off the LOVELY photograph:
http://browse.deviantart.com/photography/people/expressive/?order=9&offset=24#/d23klyf

I'm not sure what I think of the piece. So much of what I've been writing lately feels like bits and pieces of something bigger. Hmm. Perhaps for my final day I shall take all my scraps and fit them together?

Anyway, written for the topic "June flowers" for my 100 Poem Project. Check out some June flowers from my part of the world here: http://www.exploreasheville.com/seasonal-fun/spring/flower-bloom-schedule/ (click on the reddish "June" button just below the description.)

"Losing my Head for the Summer"

I am wildflower,
a flame azalea drawing
its roots up from the asphalt -
an ox-eyed daisy,
ox-blood and whirling,
hair like the tops of cogon grass
caught in a
westward wind.

My head will come back to me
in September,
chased by the tornadoes
from across the Plains;
it will catch me up in time
for hurricane season

when I will don my hat again
to keep my head from spinning
and to ward off further freckling.