Category: Uncategorized

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

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