Around two am I think to myself:
I should have read the baby books.
I used to think an oversized floral print
Would make me a better person.
Now I sip my coffee and watch my kid
Scrawl a D that resembles
A deflated bounce house.
She’s started to peel her fingernails
So neurosis must be genetic.
Inside a house of impossible people
A child is hula-hooping
Windmilling her arms for attention
Somehow born knowing everything
She does is worthy of applause.
a body attached to the moon making circles around a bad idea, someone else's sticky gift in waistband, big little offering. four and a half turns to get home, precious warm. out of the car in one motion, two if winter, two to five if nerve pain. house shuffle walk with a reason inside it. forty-two-then-three leaning on testing, silent scream under the x-ray while candy goes in, no one warned oversweet has a color and when you mix it with your blood it swirls wrong. christmas small talk plus tone shift, there is no code for queer and no code for borrowing, they'll just call you hollowed. no code for being blessed by the moonlight then quick up the stairs, an already-set scene every time. the heart is a circle cupped warm. methodical wiping, every precise thing plus softness.
i am not a hopeful person but i lay down
and hope my own arms around me, a holiness the church could never. if gawd looked down now they would see i'm hungry, see me keep trying, depress the plunger then hold the question. it doesn't matter how many times i haven't met you we talk all the time. when you were born i was three-thousand miles away and when you were born i was on a train in the wrong direction and when you were born i came right away, i knew you so soon. i've spent my patient hours on my back. what i knew would happen didn't happen. what i knew about hope stayed. i will never know you. i am sticky with hope, it never goes.
They drive you home
They unlock the door
They refer to people by first and last name
They press you for what you will give them
Give into them
They remove shoes
They walk with an umbrella but you are all wet
They are always reading
They strike matches
Pick up the rock if you have power
You do not have power
Kidnapped by narration
They are all in hell together
They wait at the mall gates
They will squeeze so hard until cancer rolls around and throws up everywhere
The needles go into a special glass
that will go into a special carton at the end of the day
Picked up by the ones who work there
When galloping with horses you are horses
They wear ribbed and satin ribbon
They forgot about cruelty and fell in love with the house
They slip into flannel
They will not bend
You thought you were free that you weren’t one of them
They slip into robes so cold they are blue
They said what about posture
And when the songs mock-scoffed in mirth the sky
between so hole-y opened and we all
fell down pulled by some wild unseen screamers of
the implacable current
Consolation at ground zero? a soft
body snow on fur mem fires shimmer
from dark fontanelle pulses how to slip
into the dream of time as if into
a hairshirt or daddy's robe There is
no resistance only revolution
another April another fool in
an otherwise being another where
in attention by which I mean desire
I wanted to taste the ocean with my
whole body I wanted the celestial
rose of M to make it so how it tore
me to see how I was scattered in a
matter of speaking repulsive in my
bleeding waiting for the next out
But how the rose hummed how inside it was
a casket and inside the casket a
one-eyed mollusc a cycloptopus
exhaling me how it was unappeasable
I had to grow extra arms to hold it
how I have starved how in a certain doom
it spoke to me The weak worm hiding down
in its small cave wanted my eggs in a
boba tea It was a stretch a dropped
eye-dentity a weird request to
liquefy like that but I did oblige and it seemed
I was delicious
harmonies of galaxies diamond in
a sooth Tasting the see so long in the
yooth And there was no more tea or mollusc
or rude rood me
[for Feng Sun Chen, with a line from WBY's “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time”]
HAPPY CRUELEST MONTH! I’LL BE POSTING REVISIONS FOR AN APRIL 15 DEADLINE THEN NEW THINGS THEREAFTER. VERY HAPPY TO BE HERE WITH YOU ALL. XOXOX
April 1
It’s hard to start a cold engine
even if the engine is my brain
my brain refuses reading
has refused me for the past two years
this morning I had to pay property taxes on my house
then I shouted BURN IT ALL DOWN!!! I meant every word
It’s hard to start a cold engine
when you want to burn down the house
not my house his house
Burn it all down motherfuckers.
The silent “h” in butterfly, the silent “h” in petrichor. How can I occupy
my hands when my hands are busy. Hot pink turkey vultures reassert
the commonplace. Taking off and putting on
imaginary blood studs, the outer edges
become less toothy. Our body now as
stable as a songbird. No sign of
northern pike in the days
that followed
but a matted
ball at the
neck hunks
or hanks deep
turkeys dark
whirlwinds
the silent “h”
in bluebells
(Yeah, I post this every April 1, yawn, but gimme a break I’m unprepared as usual … <3 )
April is a mood
A mope
It’s the moo
It’s the fucking moo
The cruelest of the most cruel months month
Stirring mixing clutching breeding bleeding branches also breeding and more breeding
always more branches clutching and breeding
Breeding tubers
And lilacs
And mopeds
Cruel mopeds
Fucking cruel mopeds neither living nor dead also snow and dead rain
How about drowning?
Yeah
How about some Earth feeding on the drowning?
Some sweaty faces in the stony places shouting and crying and we who were living
are now dying?
And the forgetful dead breeding us dry in ugly gray snow and Death undoing
with its unstoppered unguents your strange synthetic perfumes troubled confused and drowning in odours
fattening and flung into the dancery burning foaming forming more Earth and more roots and more lilacs
and dead rain
Don’t forget the dead rain, did I mention dead rain?
Even though it’s better than the fucking snow and wind the cold brutal wind that made my eye makeup run
before I discovered waterproof mascara
All of us with our roots breeding keeping us up with dead feelings and life stirring the withered stumps and canals and gashouses and whores morons and idiots a welcome indifference to whining mandolins and beneficent spiders fucking the lean solicitors and everything fucking the life out of everything so just fuckest me the fuck out hurry up please its time
Like an unmade bed
The galaxy is full
Stuffed, extinct, noise
My biceps, for instance,
Contain tiny zebras
Incorrigibly grazing
On yellow shirt years
The farm you see
Vegetable instructions
Intuit grapes, worms
Between teeth they pop
Protein language
A symbol on strike
Doesn’t it deserve a salary
Labor of being alongside
Like the corsage in a lapel
What an unusual vase
Wearing the indoor binoculars
Nightgear at noon
Clockle tickle tockle
The zoozoo death marches
On the Death of March
In Death-on-March
Two fortnites or so pass
Wax and wanty
Old thresh
What do you want?
The contraries
To soothe canaries
In this story, you are the messenger of the gods,
Your left hand not knowing where your right hand lives,
What is a snake more than underbelly?
I do not live by omissions, by secret, in shadow,
I do not live where I cannot be seen
and in this story, there is no resurrection in the darkness.
What if nothing ever comes to light?
I have a theory that goes something like this:
That which wraps itself around the staff
will eventually get entangled, too.
It’s all a matter of waiting, possibly even
2,500 years in the making.
In this story I have my suspicions
About attention-seeking, about what it means
to traverse the borderlands in search of
about what the boundary between intimacies
contain. It is the year of the pathetic man, after all,
according to National Public Radio
but are there podcasts for psychopomps
in the underworld?
In this story, you listen diligently as an undercurrent
to negotiation, here between gods
a secret third thing, a stasis, a stalemate.
Will you tell the truth this time around?
How, in order to be in the world, you must
be in back of to do some biting, too.
grabbing all the eye-catching (white orchids?) swirling tire-level high
before they were shredded by the passing traffic’s wake. Her arm-neck-
head-hands snatching (onion skin cups?) like emus with a flaxen rind
and poor co-ordination but the (spiderwebby mouthwash lids?)
blurpled through her mitts like mercury (Herculese). The surrounding
highway, unfettered by car parts and skid marks, showned she hadn’t
slown down and jumped out when she saw the tiny (paper pill cups?)
twisting. So she must’ve scrambled up the fill slope fill slope fill slope…
Woof! In what shoes? Those puffy soled ones? Naw. Barefoot? Give
that kid an (ankle monitor) for Surprisingly Useless Athleticism,
which must make me the soon-to-be Old Woman Pulled Over
with a Popped Trunk Filling with (thumb skirts?).
Hazards tocking like a heart.
Out the window I see some worn-out pigeons fighting for scraps of food waste. Again, I’m at the dentist. My chair goes horizontal. Whirring electricity. Commence scraping. Then screeching. It’s like a demon symphony in my mouth. Taste of iron and saliva. My chair returns to upright position. I rinse my mouth four times to rid the blood. Dental hygienist says some of my teeth are in bad shape; gums need serious attention. If I agree to work hard, she can fix it. After they take my money, I head straight to the taco stand. My teeth are killing me. Two bites into the taco and I have abandoned all ideas of eating. I run the words over and over in my mind. She can fix it. I’m no different than anyone else. Desperate to be saved. Maybe it was just a lie, but she said it so sincerely. Taste of blood at the back of my mouth; I walk home whistling my favorite song.
Bloof invites our poets and a few special guests to fling drafts at this blog every day for a month, in celebration of a little thing known as NaPoWriMo. What’s that?
NaPoWriMo, or National Poetry Writing Month, is an annual project in which participating poets attempt to write a poem a day for the month of April.
This website is owned and operated by Maureen Thorson, a poet then living in Washington, DC. Inspired by NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month), she started writing a poem a day for the month of April back in 2003, posting the poems on her blog. When other people started writing poems for April, and posting them on their own blogs, Maureen linked to them. After a few years, so many people were doing NaPoWriMo that Maureen decided to launch an independent website for the project.
Visit the NaPoWriMo.net website to list your site, read the daily prompts, and find other participants.
Stay tuned for a list of our April players!
I just did a quick count. As of this moment, day 8, there are 89 very fresh drafts posted!
Some may disappear as we go, so catch them while you can.
Click a poet’s name to see their drafts collected:
Natalie Eilbert
Irene Vázquez
JJ Rowan
Elisabeth Workman
Steven Karl
Jenn Marie Nunes, translating Yen Ai-lin
Rebecca Loudon
Nicole Steinberg
Katie Jean Shinkle
K. Lorraine Graham
Reagan Louise Wilson
Farrah Field
Jared White
Sharon Mesmer
Peter Davis
Danielle Pafunda
Becca Klaver
Shanna Compton
And we’ll be digging in mud-season style here on the Bloof blog, dropping some poem bulbs into the muck. That’s as far as I’m willing to stretch that metaphor. The point is, it’s NaPoWriMo time.
What is NaPoWriMo? It’s an unofficial, noncommercial, sans-sponsorship, egalitarian, world-wide (that’s GloPoWriMo to you, bub) celebration of poetry that induces a 30-day fever of daily drafts.
NaPoWriMo started 21 years ago when Maureen Thorson gave herself the challenge to write a poem a day on her blog and jokingly called it “national” even though it was just her, after NaNoWriMo, the novel-writing month (and now nonprofit org) that has been held every November since 1999. Shanna and a few others joined her on their own blogs the following year, and well, then it was a whole thing somehow.
You can read more about it at the NaPoWriMo.net site, where Maureen also very generously offers (optional) daily prompts, podcasts, feature sites, and other resources. (Pssst, we’ve got a new book of essays by Maureen, available here.)
Bloof poets are invited to post with abandon here all month. It’s generally a bit of a mess and a ton of fun to follow along.
APRIL ASSEMBLAGE:
Peter Davis
Natalie Eilbert
K. Lorraine Graham
Steven Karl
Kirsten Kaschock
Becca Klaver
Rebecca Loudon
Sharon Mesmer
Danielle Pafunda
JJ Rowan
Katie Jean Shinkle
Nicole Steinberg
Irene Vázquez
Reagan Louise Wilson
Elisabeth Workman
Shanna Compton
Sample April post. This is my text. You can write
directly into the post, or copy/paste from elsewhere
(but weird things sometimes happen in the transition from MSWord).
Experiment! and let me know if you need help.
Single spacing between lines is shift + return.
Double spacing between lines return only.
If you want to use variable spacing
or
stagger
your
lines
use the Preformatted block option
(It will look gray in the editor but
like this! when published!
The Verse paragraph setting
(shown here)
also lets you
manipulate spacing as much as you like
and keeps all the lines in one box
instead of w
e
i
r
d
l
y making each hard return into
a new spaced paragraph
Feel free to add media (Alt Text encouraged!)
Tags can be added by clicking the gear in the upper right
(That’s a bit different since April 2020)
—Shanna
PS: I expire my posts the day after they appear
What is #NaPoWriMo, you wonder? It’s an unofficial, unaffiliated poetry game played annually by poets all over the world (#GloPoWriMo). It grew, sort of accidentally, out of a personal challenge Maureen Thorson set for herself one April, many moons ago in the poetry-blog days of yore. I joined her the following year, and others did too, and soon it became an annual, organic free-for-all, a lively everybody-is-invited event.
Maureen’s idea has proven so popular, people have assumed it’s hosted by some Official Org or Institution, but nope. It’s entirely noncommercial and unsponsored. She’s created a site—napowrimo.net—and accompanying Twitter account to share daily prompts and featured participants every day in April, which is really nice of her.
Bloof always hosts a handful of our authors on our blog, and this April will be no exception. Wanna play? You can join in on your own site or social media account. See napowrimo.net for the details.
PS: This is the 20th year!
