Delta Foliate (taken from John Berryman)

In summer I learned to fear green. Grasping at Tom's radio, too late, he advanced with the nuance of a final ta-ta. Ohio flooded us girls, angels in negligees, gruesome lips -- deadly red, little green, desperate taupe -- like collagists soon no more stories dropped on us so we bolted for California with her too-green gown. Hurt, torn, loose we attacked men's four-post beds with the devotion of choking swans. Even so, Cali left us fierce as roses so we drowned our way back home where was fear, if nothing else, certain. Gorged summer, budding man, weight gain a dire failure to illustrate a tension between evening and today. For Tom, green Tom, I wish angels with false teeth, egregious butterlies, certain demise that we might together gore the summer and dart between fierce and folly, hysteria and grit, fish-breath and eagle-soar. Take heart before gorgeous arrives with new gowns almost transparent and I'll wear Saran-Wrap and pretend losing was ivory and too soon evening.

Steph's poem up on Linebreak

Hi Everybody--

My friend Stephanie Rogers has a slinky little poem up on Linebreak today. I thought you might like it.

Will somebody give me a prompt or assignment?

Why My Computer and I Can't Keep a Charge (tercets!)

Edgewise along the lamppost: my shadow.
It fuses to light’s proclivity
a kind of diamond-backed French bulldog both

white and black. Gripping the leash, memory
unreels the evening’s analogue, first
of many. I remember the dinner

he made, its duck/cherry roulade, its blood,
what he called juice, smearing the plate
but in reverse, so with my battery

and my dog, I walk through the park, come
to a lake. A flush of ducks lines the shore
with down so another batch can be born—

all this before dinner, when I was small
and my shadow was a link in a dog’s choke,
chalking itself up to the play of light

on metal. I remember when he was born;
I was born then too, but in a different
city and in reverse, so every night

I’m rocked by myself in the dark where arms
meet chest to make a kind of cradle.
The leash and lamppost are so alike. Both

are straight lines leading either up or
away. I find I move around my block,
then back again to the body’s charging dock.

Travesty (a poem-in-progress)

Tickling raw nerves took you, taut in a velvet suit to Youngstown, Ohio. One of your red-faced nights ended in ellipses and singing me with a rose between my teeth, yawing out blues at 10 p.m. Taken lightly, rogue avatars that we were, elusive songstresses attached by our purses stolen from CVS clearance or was it a yard sale? You took small endings very admirably, Tom, though you said every absence turns a bruise yellow, then the bruise travels to Youngstown.

On the radio in your Nissan we’d get too high, grow silent, taken with the verandas we dreamed we’d sit on before Carson tried too hard to swim in a river and never emerged. You’d retort that Carson lived for summer and yet I’d turned sixteen and had never tried to die young. Too many junkyards in too-tight trailers, too much rotting not from the inside. This rot traveled up from the ground, from trashcan fires we started out town, rouge, then a colossal blue, almost radical though you said Youngstown was like a tattoo of a casket across his chest with a yellow interior like a notepad. Rubbing our lips in powered sugar to look like frozen corpses, we quoted movies in tire swings and took in summer like folks without jobs or time to worry though in that Dairy Queen vest you resembled a backward angel with a well for a heart. Youth tattled on us, eventually veering towards the sun’s radius and you’d say you’d never leave though a cousin in Wisconsin owned Vinny’s Pub and rather than yelp to death in Youngstown you could tour the Midwest in a stained white gown and I’d go with without trying.

Or you’d say it this way: Too much small town steered me wrong angel girl with your seizures like fallen elms that smashed, tambourines in leggings, each evening tired to the last until Reggie came in from Milwaukee and changed the topic to running. Into grief’s tin walls like a shackled queen of my own making, I was your doll but what did I think, rude accounted-for vortex angel, the Eve of the Dairy Queen without a spotlight or a truck to save you before Reggie came back with a promise that he’d keep me unsettled, take me riding ponies in Pennsylvania yet I think we both sang in off-beat patterns of triptychs until you stepped into the cave and I trailed behind.

Hello Ladies

I don't know if this is the place to chat, but I miss you and the VCCA at the moment, so I wanted to say hi. My husband Josh is watching golf now and we'll have some Chinese later (with red wine probably, which doesn't go so well with Chinese but it's my poison). We're closing on our house in Cincinnati that took TWO YEARS to sell in about a week and a half, then Josh goes to Byrdcliffe in NY. My birthday's on the 2nd, then I go to Sewanee on the 13th. (I'll be sure to tell you all about that once it starts, BTW.) I was just wondering what you guys think about your manuscripts. Do you feel, sometimes, like totally ripping them apart and starting from scratch? I'm having that feeling at this exact moment and it's very upsetting. What if I'm wrong? Or what if I'm right? Both options terrify me. I wish someone would tell me definitively. Help? Summer gets me down. Anyway, here's a poem I like that you might like too. My friend Maggie Smith wrote it and I just saw Maggie the other night and wrote a poem about her I'd love to share with you--maybe tomorrow. Here's Maggie's: SEE NO EVIL FItting, how I am the one covering my eyes in the photograph. Another covers her ears, another her mouth. This is years ago. My hair is dyed an auburn so dark, it is nearly violet. Hear No Evil is still a schoolgirl, her neat bangs cut straight across. Speak No Evil is still alive, her cigarette burning down in her ashtray. Not yet put to sleep, our black dog circles before lying down, lapping cords of smoke from the air. We hardly notice as evil, a dark leak of it, slips past the gates of our fingers and into our bodies. Smoothing the snapshot back into the album, I forgive us for believing our small hands were enough. I take mine from my eyes. Another uncovers her delicate ears and listens. The last is speechless, as the dead are.

Why My Computer and I Can't Keep a Charge

Edgewise along the lamppost: my shadow.

It fuses to light’s proclivity

a kind of diamond-backed French bulldog both

white and black. Gripping the leash, memory

unreels the evening’s analogue, first

of many. I remember the dinner

he made, its duck/cherry roulade, its blood,

what he called juice, smearing the plate

but in reverse, so with my battery

and my dog, I walk through the park, come

to a lake. A flush of ducks lines the shore

with down so another batch can be born—

all this before dinner, when I was small

and my shadow was a link in a dog’s choke,

chalking itself up to the play of light

on metal. I remember when he was born;

I was born then too, but in a different

city and in reverse, so every night

I’m rocked by myself in the dark where arms

meet chest to make a kind of cradle.

The leash and lamppost are so alike. Both

are straight lines leading either up or

away. I find I move around my block,

then back again to the body’s charging dock.

Poem-in-Progress

Apology to a Lost Purse

If I ever said anything mean about you,

I take it back now.

You’re a lovely purse,

and I miss the way you hold

the crumpled Kleenex tight,

how you encompass all my receipts,

your many, many fascinating zippers

and how you let me slide them for emphasis

at key moments in my proposals.

Oh, purse,

we were so happy when you hung from my shoulder

like a quiver of arrows, like a small

green leather truncheon.

When I got my eyebrows waxed it was all for you.

I chose my toenail polish to highlight your bounty.

Maybe I took you a tiny bit for granted.

But no more, I promise!

Come back to me and I will polish your interior.

I will write you a special song

and publish it on the mirror of my tongue.

I will enter every room with you first

and my body whispering after.

Greetings and salutations.

Thus begins our brilliant blog. I'd like to suggest that everyone post a poem to get things started. Let's shoot for Friday by 12 p.m.