GloPoWriMo 2020 Day 24: Pomegranate Love

Prompt: Today’s prompt is a fairly simple one: to write about a particular fruit – your choice. But I’d like you to describe this fruit as closely as possible. Perhaps your poem could attempt to tell the reader some (or all!) of the following about your chosen fruit: What does it look like, how does it feel, how does it smell, what does it taste like, where did you find it, do you need to thump it to know if it’s ripe, how do you get into it (peeling, a knife, your teeth), do you need to spit out the seeds, should you bake it, can you make jam with it, do you have to fight the birds for it, when is it available, do you need a ladder to pick it, what is your favorite memory of eating it, if you threw it at someone’s head would it splatter them or knock them out, is it expensive . . . As you may have realized from this list, there’s honestly an awful lot you can write about a fruit!


As much as I've been wanting to write the last few days, life has gotten in the way with a vengeance - and with it the discouragement that comes with being so behind there's no earthly way of catching up. However, today's prompt reminded me of something I wrote a little while ago, so while it's technically cheating, it's still about a fruit, and it's still something up where there wasn't any five minutes ago, so even if it doesn't count, maybe it'll serve as inspiration for later, if life doesn't get in the damn way YET AGAIN...

POMEGRANATE LOVE      

My father's love is a big round pomegranate on the table after lunch.
For you, he says.

Two simple words which over forty years of troubled relations
hard work, and difficult love have polished to burnished gold sheen
wrapped about with the decades-old memory of a wayward daughter 

eating pomegranates in Virginia declaring that of all things 

she loved this fruit the best.

Yellow-streaked red. This pomegranate is heavy in my palm, not
quite as vivid as other pomegranates I have known but when I cut it apart
the thin red juice spurting from bruised sacs is sweet as honey.

Pale pinkish-and-red. Endothelium cells, contained by yellow membranes
thin as onion skin. Breaking them apart is like dissecting a body's secrets,
detaching each plump, ripe sac from the finger-clutch  of its yellow moorings
holding everything tight against smooth pomegranate peel
like flesh contained by its epidermis.

I stand at the sink, deseeding love that falls in tiny scarlet jewels -
pomegranate seeds, bleeding memory and the remembrance of things lost
and things gained, hope and the fear of things to come
thin pale-blood juice staining my fingers and the cutting board
with winter-sweet promise.

Tomorrow is tomorrow. Today, there are pomegranates
and my father, the kitchen god, storing up scents and conversation
like ribbons to tie around the next pomegranate
the next memento of unspoken love.

GloPoWriMo Day 16: (Ebulliently Effusive) Love Song

Prompt: Rather than encouraging minimalism, today we challenge you to write a poem of over-the-top compliments. Pick a person, place, or thing you love, and praise it in the most effusive way you can. Go for broke with metaphors, similes, and more. 

I really did try to be effusive and over-the-top. And then, like the deviant I am, things forked off into sarcasm, especially after two days of having to deal with parents who think that they shouldn't need to pay full fees if we're teaching online classes, or even pay fees at all.

(Ebulliently Effusive) Love Song

you swarovski my days

glimglamglimmerglitter

billy eilish blingblang

you ladygaga my moments

oh oh oh you’re over-garlicked bread

sinfully excessive butter-and-cheesed pasta

if round is a shape

you is the shape of shapes so shapely

nothing shape-ish can shape this

you sherlock my heart infinity times a day

you’re a million coins in the valley of plenty

you’re the effluve in effluvium

the rrar in ferrari

the moon in moonpies

oh superior intellect oh juno oh jupiter
oh wisdom of a thousand sages of the ages

what would my days be if they weren’t filled

with your buzz-saw clingclangclamour

that teachers like me should be paid less

(or not at all) for teaching your children online

(it’s push-button-stand-in-front-of-a-device easy

how hard could it possibly be

((like sewing a straight line))

right?)

GloPoWriMo2020 Day 15: Banishing Spell

Prompt: Today, I’d like  to challenge you to write a poem inspired by your favorite kind of music. Try to recreate the sounds and timing of a pop ballad, a jazz improvisation, or a Bach fugue. That could mean incorporating refrains, neologisms and flights of whimsy, or repeating/inverting lines or ideas – whatever your chosen musical form would seem to require! Perhaps a good way to start is to listen to your favorite piece of music and “free-write” for the duration  of the piece, and then use what you’ve written as the building blocks for your poem.

A few years ago, I performed in a choral production called Incantations, which involved music of ritual, rites, and altogether really interesting pieces of choral music. One of the pieces we performed was a very dark, experimental contemporary piece called Aglepta, which takes a Swedish trollproverb from the 19th century and brilliantly enacts it out in pitch, rhythm, and non-standard notation.

It's best to watch it here to get an idea of what it's like, but it's an amazing work and I love how Arne Mellnas uses various ranges of the voice to such effect.

The formatting for this was sheer hell so I left it in small font.

Banishing Spell

To leave an enemy without an answer, say these words to him: Aglaria Pidhol garia Ananus Qepta and blow in his direction; then he will not know which way he is headed and cannot answer you.

     - Smaland 19^th Century, Swedish Trollproverbs (collected by Bengt of Kintberg)

A chant for three voices in three staves

|          fffffffffFFFFFffffffff      ffffffffwoooooooffFFFFFFFffffffooooo   ffff

|  They say                                     to leave an e! ne! my!                         beee

|       a    a a AH      a a      AAAH ah a        a a     a a     AAAAA  a a          hiiinnnd 

| BlOWwwwww   in his direction    aa    AAAAAA ahhhaaha       piiiihhHHHOOL!

|     blowwwww   in his direction    ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh____  gaaaa a riii a

|  blowwwwww   in his direction        AAA a   a    AAA a  a     ga! a! A!   A! riAAA

|so I blow blow oh oh oh  ohhhhhhh hhhh               you                  you           away

|               and I send             and I send     and I send      and I send         you  away

|HAAAAaaaa            HAAAAaaaa    haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaway

               

|               iiiiissss    not child’s play                    we    are   no lon    ger  chil!  dren!

|         iiiiiiissssss                               we       are noooo lon   ger    chil!  dren! 

| This            iiiiiissss  noooooooooo   chiiiiiiiiiild’s pl – l – l –l –l aaaaaaaAAAAY

| go  go  go   I  claim my space s s S!   space s S! S!   i carve a space in air hh aairh
|    you you you  no lon       have a hooooooooooold       on me   dk dk chchCHTS S

| i i i i i i                        ger                hoo ho ho hold    i i i i breakkk your wordsss

|A GLAAAAA ri a     I take back my eyes                       I free my hands my words

|                I break my chains                          gaaaaaRIIIIIIaaaaa
|                                           PIIIIIDHOOOL                            I unsew my tongue

|ANANUSSSSSSSS       qepTAAAAaaaa                                   offfff your words

|        ANANUSSSSSSSS! S! S!                        looocked in the chains           
|    ANANUSS                         kept toooooo long           qep qep qep TA tat a aaaaa

| I blow ffffffff                           and you no! lon! ger! can answer              now

| I blow      fffffffffff             and you                                           answer            that

| I blow         fffffffffffff   and you                                                       answer             I

| blow your chains                  back          at   at at at              YOUuuuuuu h   ||        

|       ohhhhHOOOOOhhhhh      ohhhOOOOOhhh    qepta   YOUuuuuuu h   ||

| aglaaariiiia!   AGLAaariiiia!    garia   ANANUS qepta       YOUuuuuuu h   ||

GloPoWriMo Day 13: Bodysnatcher

Prompt: Today, I challenge you to write a non-apology for the things you’ve stolen. Maybe it’s something as small as your sister’s hairbrush (or maybe it was your sister’s boyfriend!) Regardless, I hope this sly prompt generates some provocative verse for you.

I'm not doing very well with this whole writing thing, given life keeps getting in the way. I'm half of a mind to just give up entirely, but today the prompt made me think of the grave robbers, the bodysnatchers in old England where they'd dig up bodies for doctors who needed them for medical experiments.

So I decided steal myself.

Bodysnatcher

I am the traitor, the Hanged Man:

I am a byword, society's upside-down fool

A mind reduced to a rattling skeleton

Hanging on a gibbet

Gutted from stem to stern

My heart a shriveled apple core

A cautionary tale on display.

I cut myself down and steal myself back:

My thoughts, my words, my space, my voice

The things I’ve been told to bury, to hide

Sealed up in a coffin of shame.

(Single, stupid, ladylike, ugly -

Every adjective a nail in the lid.

Judgements weigh me down like lead.

I sink. I am dead weight.)

I am a guerilla, a bodysnatcher, a rogue.

I am no thief – I take back only

What’s been stolen from me.

I reclaim my life.

I mark the shape of me in the air

And cut space for this body, this me:

I take up room, I stand

Forcing you to see me -

An inconvenient obstruction

In an elevator door

Holding your mind open

Preventing it from closing.

GloPoWriMo Day 9: Love In A Time Of Corona

           Click to enlarge! It eats the picture if I set it larger, grrr...

Prompt: Our prompt for the day (optional as always) is inspired by Kaschock’s use of space to organize her poems. Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a “concrete” poem – a poem in which the lines and words are organized to take a shape that reflects in some way the theme of the poem. This might seem like a very modernist idea, but poets have been writing concrete poems since the 1600s! Your poem can take a simple shape, like a box or ball, or maybe you’ll have fun trying something more elaborate, like this poem in the shape of a Christmas tree.


I am a fledgling calligrapher who hand letters sometimes, and my skills have gone so rusty I figured I'd use today's prompt to attempt to brush up on them. Since I also detest trying to write shaped poems on my computer (since the formatting always goes wonky) I decided to do it the old-fashioned way instead - pen and ink.


Here's the non-shaped poem in case it's difficult to read (I did try for legibility but may not have succeeded). There've been two deaths in two days in my circle - my SO's beloved 13 year old cat who was taken by gut lymphoma, and my friend's grandmother who succumbed to Covid-19 just today. There've been other deaths too, of frontliners here, and that, perhaps, influenced the poem (which I hope isn't appropriating or inappropriate because that would be bad.)



Love In A Time Of Corona

we’ll go to australia you said

we’ll count the oceans and i laughed

the moon outside our window

bright as the bat signal

make a wish on the moon love

you told me

make a wish

hold out your hands and hold the moon

and a day later you answered the call

(bat signal disguised

as a cellphone you

a superhero disguised

in mask and scrubs)

and now six weeks later

you’re gone without even the dignity  

of a farewell or a last kiss from me

(the virus gave you that)

when this grief is over

i’ll rise i’ll rise

but first let me hold the moon in my hands

and remember that when i woke when i slept

you were the first thing the last thing

imprinted on my eyes

and now you are gone

your imprint remains

set me as a seal upon your heart you said

on our wedding day

no no you are the seal

binding this box of memories

that holds within it

australia and all the oceans

of the world

GloPoWriMo Day 7: Welcome To America

Prompt: Today our prompt (optional, of course) is another oldie-but-goodie: a poem based on a news article. Frankly, I understand why you might be avoiding the news lately, but this is a good opportunity to find some “weird” and poetical news stories for inspiration. 

I really tried to find something hopeful to write about in the news. I wanted to (I'm not always an Angry Poet, I promise!) But after seeing some of my students in other countries posting about how they're afraid to go out now because they've been verbally assaulted and harrassed simply for being Asian, and reading a couple of news reports about the surge of racism going on - I got angry. Again.

I lived overseas for over a decade, and their experiences resonated even across the years.

I'll try not to be angry tomorrow.
This is the news article I used:

https://www.euronews.com/2020/03/05/covid-19-and-xenophobia-why-outbreaks-are-often-accompanied-by-racism

 WELCOME TO AMERICA

i was 22 in america when a veteran walking down the street screamed GO HOME YOU FUCKING JAP in my small college town (i am not japanese even though i have been mistaken for one even by japanese people // when i worked in a hospital years later japanese patients always addressed me in their native language and all i could do was smile and direct them to the interpreter's desk in rudimentary japanese)

23 when police stopped me at a gas station when i walked past because ‘there was a robbery earlier and the suspect was described as being short, and dressed in a green overcoat like yours’ (perhaps my hair marine-short and spiky made me look suspicious-bad-attitude-suspect i don’t know ((they let me go after the owner said no not this one – this one / what one / how many ones of us are there that look like me or do we all look the same to you / ahh that’s the answer  all asians look alike one / can be mistaken for the other no big deal they’re all the same))

the same year a trucker stopped beside me as i was walking home and asked HEY ARE YOU WORKING TONIGHT as if all asian girls walking in the evening are prostitutes and hookers not daughters or mothers or wives going home from work

the same summer the police trailed me as i walked the 2.5 miles to school in the blazing afternoon sun (if i were about to ply my trade afternoon would not be the time to do it / nor would a large backpack almost as big as my five-foot-frame be my choice of accessory) / they only stopped when i crossed the road into the university (do asian girls not walk at all unless we are soliciting customers / what do we do then if we need to go somewhere bicycle bus ((but the buses are non-existent here)) drive but what if we’re too poor to get a car / or fly)

welcome to america they tell you 

what they mean is / welcome to america so that in future
there is someone to blame

if something goes wrong (first the yellow peril now this virus / china is a country a people a virus

((all of asia is china so these virus-people should be eradicated))on immigration forms we are 'resident aliens'
not even the dignity of personhood
merely something foreign / another planet / to be conquered and subdued)

welcome to america (the scapegoats are here rejoice the whites will never
need to take responsibility again / not when there are people of colour to blame to stone to kill)

but first (before the gunfire the media crucifixion the xenophobia)

appropriate everything of the culture and call it [trendy / new / amazing // choose your own adjectives]

glorify the [exotic looks / submissive women / anime / food // take your pick]

i am a cultural accessory dangling from lips and arms and twitter feeds instagram posts

here in malaysia where my ancestors settled they scream at us
GO HOME TO CHINA

but i have never been back to the village of my ancestors in guangzhou

(there would not be a home for me there either ((unmarried childless over forty / that’s what failures

are made of))

i am a virus but there were viruses before me

((that took over asian countries and people (my country my people too))

but instead of a virus named after country of origin
(people argue that coronavirus should be china virus after all)

it was named

(settle infect multiply take over in colonies)

colonization

GloPoWriMo Day 6: 'Hieronymous Bosch Painted Primarily On Oak Panels'

Prompt: Today’s (optional) prompt is ekphrastic in nature – but rather particular! Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem from the point of view of one person/animal/thing from Hieronymous Bosch’s famous (and famously bizarre) triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. Whether you take the position of a twelve-legged clam, a narwhal with a cocktail olive speared on its horn, a man using an owl as a pool toy, or a backgammon board being carried through a crowd by a fish wearing a tambourine on its head, I hope that you find the experience deliriously amusing. And if the thought of speaking in the voice of a porcupine-as-painted-by-a-man-who-never-saw-one leaves you cold, perhaps you might write from the viewpoint of Bosch himself? Very little is known about him, so there’s plenty of room for invention, embroidery, and imagination.


Real life and illness decided to interfere with writing, so I'm missing 3 days which I'll catch up on eventually (or not). I happen to really love Hieronymus Bosch's work, but this was incredibly difficult to write because I was out of ideas as to what viewpoint I wanted. I eventually settled on writing from the perspective...of the oak panel that the work was painted on. An hour plus of research into historical painting techniques later, this is what emerged.

‘Hieronymus Bosch Painted Primarily On Oak Panels’

A Meditation on 'The Garden of Earthly Delights'

Chalk is a taste and so are colours –

Azurite, the copper taste of salt and sea and heaven, light as air

Malachite, copper-tanged like its sister Azurite but brighter

Bold as frog-skin, sharp as spring

Carmine, a musty, brittle intensity of crushed and dying insects

Ochre, cake-rich, earthy and thick as clay.

Oil, viscous and unctuous, swirled into pigments, seeping into cracks.

The master’s touch is deft. Gentle. Sweep by stroke by layer

The dark chalk underdrawings – the taste of dry dust and powder

Come alive on my surface -

I, this hewed oaken panel felled from a forest I will see no more

But perhaps relive through the master’s colours on my skin.

I taste. I feel. I rejoice in the sun that bathes this studio

The same sun that warmed me in the days

When leaves still grew on my branches

And the birds still sang.

Now they sing on my skin for eternity:
Flamboyant tattoos devised by the master
Outlandish, glorious, silent.

GloPoWriMo 2020 Day 2: A Geography of the Interior

Prompt: Our (optional) prompt for the day takes a leaf from Schuyler’s book, as it were, and asks you to write a poem about a specific place —  a particular house or store or school or office. Try to incorporate concrete details, like street names, distances (“three and a half blocks from the post office”), the types of trees or flowers, the color of the shirts on the people you remember there. Little details like this can really help the reader imagine not only the place, but its mood – and can take your poem to weird and wild places.

Today was a bad, bad pain day. This is all I could come up with for place before I gave it up, and now I'm going to bed in hopes that tomorrow will be better.


A Geography of the Interior

"It's only two small fibroids. They shouldn't cause this amount of pain. There's really no pathology to explain it."

After countless scans, more scans and ultrasounds

I should be intimately familiar with this space

but I’m not. Its geographical details elude me still:

grainy dots and nebulous lines delineating ovary walls

two small fibroids – closely-observed old friends

agglutinated amorphous clumps pale against a blurred

grey-black panorama, an arrested starfield in warp speed.

Decades of scientific advances, yet they still can’t explain why

these smooth blubber-pale egg-sacs, a delicate lace

of membrane, blood vessels and capillaries

a placid monochrome fishbowl curve on ultrasound

turns into a battlefield of morning stars each month

sharp spikes endlessly lacerating soft tissue

this space that should birth new life

but instead births infinite permutations of pain:

a penance (so they say) for unmarried, childless singlehood.

GloPoWriMo 2020 Day 1: Iron Synthetic Fabrics On Low Heat

Prompt:  Write a self-portrait poem in which you make a specific action a metaphor for your life – one that typically isn’t done all that often, or only in specific circumstances. For example, bowling, or shopping for socks, or shoveling snow, or teaching a child to tie its shoes.

I'm not sure if it's a good thing that the prompt for today was already hard for my brain. Regardless, it took me a while (and a shower, why is it that poetic muses always show up in the shower?) to find something relatable to write about.

So I wrote about ironing. Which I don't like. Hah!


Iron Synthetic Fabrics On Low Heat

I iron my life the way I iron my clothes:
high heat with a will and infrequently, scrubbing out creases
like ex-boyfriends and detested relatives

forgetting that synthetic people, like synthetic cheap fabrics
are high on irritation and low on melting point -
(damn it, another scorch mark)
that water is a gentler persuasion for stubborn creases
than fierce unrelenting heat
that all the ironing in the world won’t get every crease out of a life -
worn, wrinkled, wrung like fine cotton.

Every night I fall asleep and every morning I forget
that I’ve sworn, sworn by all heaven and earth and pink pigs
to do things differently.

Every morning I wake up, iron my life (or not)
burn my fingers again (or not)
shake my life out, and put it on.

They say creases smooth out with wear and time.
Creases be damned.

It’s not origami where Corner A must match Corner B - 
gridlines of ordered architecture folding in, pushing out
collapsing in on themselves into a preset design:
a  mathematical universe.

I’m lousy at ironing anyway.

Early Bird March 31: My Favourite Bird

I teach children's choir and youth choir, and I've run into all sorts of students over the years. When the topic for the Early Birders (hi, I'm on the early bird side of the sphere!) came up as My Favourite Bird, I immediately thought of this one student of mine whom I've taught for about 8 years now. Watching her progress and face down her inner demons has been one of the biggest rewards of my teaching career. I am so thoroughly proud of her.

MY FAVOURITE BIRD

Averted eyes. Face to the ground, afraid to look up.

Hunched over, shoulders rounded like a shield

Curling herself deep within herself week after week:

A terrified sparrow hiding in the comfort of the only nest she knew.

She cried in class even though only me and her mother were present.

And yet she persisted –

Week after week, children’s choir, individual lessons

Mute, a closed-off room with doors one could not open

From the outside.

Through it all though, she loved music.

After graduating from children's choir - 

I WANT TO GO TO YOUTH CHOIR, she insisted

And she did.

Six years of awkward silences, stuttering soft sentences

A gawky nestling with patchy feathers and clumsy wings

Shy, swallowing her voice, learning songs 

But locking them up as tight as her thoughts.

Then -
On choir production opening night - she marched out

(Lowered eyes, blank expression yes, but she marched out)

Stood on the stage with her fellow singers

And faced down the world.

Now – two years later

She stands tall before the camera, head held high

Preparing to shoot a concert trailer.

She laughs, she jokes, she teases

She banters with the tenor who’s filming with her

She spreads full-fledged wings and rises into the air

Her open mouth overflowing with song, with words.

She turns – looks straight into my eyes, fearless as an eagle

And she smiles.

My heart soars like a lark and sings, rejoices, sings.