katsy

I've decided to post some prose. I like this stuff, it's all related and easy/quick to read. I think you will enjoy. I beleive you would call it a verse essay.

I've posted the first two essays, the rest can be found at the following link:
Prose » Linebreak

The Sick Book
By Carley Moore
"Hospital Time"

I was nine and away from home for the first time. There was a schedule, but I wasn’t in on it. I started to understand the weird rhythm of doctors—the way they’re never around when you need them or always with another patient or worst of all, in surgery. I went to appointments I didn’t know I had, and always without my parents who were two hours away at their jobs. I began to cultivate irrational fears: the orderly will lose me and I’ll never see my parents again, the nurse will forget to tell my parents I’m having a brain scan and they’ll leave without seeing me, or somehow my roommate and I will become separated and I’ll have to sleep alone.

"For Example"

Like the time I couldn’t get my underwear on. Like the time I wore a body stocking and got painted in plaster. Like the time I was carried home from the zoo. Like the time everyone was way too nice to me at the birthday party. Like the time I fell off the bleachers. Like the time I ate the gravel. Like the time I stepped on a bottle cap and someone’s older brother carried me home bleeding. Like the time I couldn’t walk across the lawn. Like the time when I got extra Valentines for being “special."

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Split the Lark-- and you'll find the Music - Emily Dickinson

katsy

Some more prose poetry:

CLAUDIA CORTESE

Dear Claudia—

I don’t know why you made a broken girl. I bury glass in the moonlight, eat Oreos at midnight, dream my skin abuzz with knives. Give me red hair, tits spry as sprites. Make me a Siren on the riverbank, bewitching boys with my liquid song. I’d scissor around them, take what’s mine. When you said I dreamt my father ****ed me, did you imagine your own father rocking above you? It’s true, I hate my belly fat, hide behind the spruce in gym class, but you don’t know why, Claudia. You think I feed worms to Mabel, tell her about the six-pack rings that strangle sea turtles, because I hate her. To love is to suffer, and to suffer is to give yourself to this world. The sun-freckled oak will blacken, night rotting its branches, and this I swear—if you write what happened to me beneath the unlit porch-light, I will wrap your veins around your throat.

Regards,
Lucy

AND THE FOLLOW UP:
CLAUDIA CORTESE

Lucy,

I’ve shorn the doll’s hair, sprinkled the strands on your bed. I know what you crave—welts on the wrist, a punishment, a cry. You need me to live, and I need you to feel. When I wrote you slept in a box, a box within a box, I meant we all need touch and more touch. There’s a razor in the peach, and your sister plants teeth beneath your bed. Stitch those images to your eyes because only time will tell who’s the wolf at your window—if his strings of saliva will bless or burn you. When I said you hoped your father wouldn’t hear the Oreos crunch in your mouth, I meant to say the body remembers woodsmoke and barns, the insects buzzing above you. The cypress is blue-veined and beautiful—your ticket out of this girl-forsaken town.

Love,
Claudia

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Split the Lark-- and you'll find the Music - Emily Dickinson

katsy

Brutal
By Andrea Cohen

Brutal to give
the prisoner a window—
a blue sky glimpse—

as if an afterlife
existed. Brutal
for you to parade

in a body
in the same
room where I dream you.

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Split the Lark-- and you'll find the Music - Emily Dickinson

VEGANGELICA

I've been getting into writing sonnets again and recently read and was impressed by the following sonnet, "Coming to Terms," by Catherine Chandler.

Crafted very well, her sonnet describes the somber subject matter with delicacy and immediacy so that the painful loss feels very real to me. I remember those elastic belly panel pants and all the nightmares I had about my unborn baby dying. I'm so glad none of them came true, and so sad that people's worst nightmares sometimes do:

* * *

Coming to Terms -- by Catherine Chandler

I put aside my white smocked cotton blouse,
the pants with the elastic belly panel.
The only music in the empty house
strains from a distant country western channel.
My breasts are weeping. I’ve been given leave —
a week in which to heal and convalesce.
I peel away the ceiling stars, unweave
the year I’d entered on your christening dress.
I rearrange my premises — perverse
assumptions! — gather unripe figs; throw out
the bloodied bedclothes; scour the universe
in search of you. And God. And go about
my business, as my crooked smile displays
the artful look of ordinary days.

* * *

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CoolBec

What a great thread Katsy! You have some very lovely pieces here and some talented writers too.

I also have a great love for poetry, erotic and sapphic verse in particular. Hope you don't mind if I add a couple of my favs.

katsy

I really, really love that, thanks for sharing.

I am not a poet, but if I were, the sonnet would intimidate me.

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Split the Lark-- and you'll find the Music - Emily Dickinson

katsy

"my heart a wordless prayer" -- so many great lines in this.

Please share as many as you like! I love reading new stuff.

__________________
Split the Lark-- and you'll find the Music - Emily Dickinson

katsy

San Antonio
by Naomi Shihab Nye

Tonight I lingered over your name,
the delicate assembly of vowels
a voice inside my head.
You were sleeping when I arrived.
I stood by your bed
and watched the sheets rise gently.
I knew what slant of light
would make you turn over.
It was then I felt
the highways slide out of my hands.
I remembered the old men
in the west side cafe,
dealing dominoes like magical charms.
It was then I knew,
like a woman looking backward,
I could not leave you,
or find anyone I loved more.

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Split the Lark-- and you'll find the Music - Emily Dickinson

katsy

Awesomeness:

Traci Brimhall
Incomplete Address To The Lord

When I found that mass of scales and muscle,
saw one anaconda twist around another, watched
a split tongue flick the air, choosing me, black

as the devil’s own and twice as thick, males coiled
around the female tickling her back with their spurs,
I knew I’d give anything to be her. I felt the pulse

in my eyelid, tasted the ants that paraded over
my plantains at night, drank all the darkness out
of my wife’s breast. Lord, I’d rather be crazy

than broken. The city bore its own children who
crawled from the gutters, their eyes in their pockets
and angels’ ashes in their mouths. They don’t believe

you exist even though they wrap slices of lamb
in the pages of the book you wrote for the illiterate
shepherds. I know you know this. You with your name

on the lips of graceless women. You with your face
tattooed on men’s arms. You who weep fire but never
for the dead. My Lord, I admit it. I let the angel win.

He wrapped himself around me, pinned me
to the riverbed, and I rose up wet, reeking, wearing
my shadow like a dress. When I pressed my chest,

milk bled a halo into the water and vanished.
For an hour I was whole, my heart undressed itself.
Temptation wore me down to my socks and assembled

me back into my old body. I’m still the man you made
in the image of who you used to be, my lover turned back
into my rib, and you who gifted me with a second skin,

I don’t want your inch of flesh, your interdisciplinary
erotica, or the heaven you held to my feet like fire.
I want everyone who comes looking for me to find—

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Split the Lark-- and you'll find the Music - Emily Dickinson

VEGANGELICA

^ My favorite lines are "I don't want [...] the heaven you held to my feet like fire" ... and of course the great descriptions of mating snakes!

Today while volunteering in my child's classroom, I read a short volume of children's poetry written by Langston Hughes. I was curious to read the book because I was familiar with little of his poetry. Most of the poems in the book were not memorable to me, but I liked a few, especially the one below:

Merry-Go-Round by Langston Hughes

COLORED CHILD AT CARNIVAL

Where is the Jim Crow section
On this merry-go-round,
Mister, cause I want to ride?
Down South where I come from
White and colored
Can't sit side by side.
Down South on the train
There's a Jim Crow car.
On the bus we're put in the back--
But there ain't no back
To a merry-go-round!
Where's the horse
For a kid that's black?

Merry-Go-Round - A poem by Langston Hughes - American Poems

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