#5: Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner Soup

Pink spice, orange sugar, yellow zing, white sulfur
water
pressure
lentils
and the love of a friendship that continues to grow
in new directions after many years
but at the base has always been
cumin.



--
prompt: Look What I Made
"Make something. Anything! Write a poem about your spontaneous making experience."

#4: No hay señal

This webpage is
NOT AVAILABLE!!!!!!11
google
chrome could not load
the webpage because
w
w
w
DOT
amazon
DOT
com
took-too-long-to-respond;
the website may be
down
or you may be
experiencing issues with your Internet connection.
Here are some suggestions:





--
prompt: Found Poetry
"Look to Craigslist, newspapers, Twitter, anywhere for unintentional poetry. Using the original text, punctuate and use line breaks to turn it into a poem."

#3: Brother

You left in the womb gifts of nonsense and nicknames
and at birth they were in my marrow.

That mixture of aching love, admiration, fear, and guilt
that arcs through our aortas for the ones who gave us life--
we share a secret knowledge of how to titrate
what makes that blood.

The loveless lives of sad struggle the astrologers predicted for
both of us
don't depress me
because we will walk along, cursed hand in cursed hand,
under inauspicious full moons and pernicious sun beams,
laughing until our lungs breathe their last.




--
prompt: "3. Just For You"
Write a poem to someone and share it with them.

#2: Acquaintances

There are many of them
who will gather dust
as tattered new years resolutions
as moth-eaten dresses in dim attics
as shattered glasses in a library
full of books
and a crumpled old man
thirsting for words
and eyes too weak to see them
finds no respite from
solitude or
irony.

--
prompt: "2. Ink Stains"
Write a poem on paper quickly without lifting your pen from the page. Post image if possible. No edits.

#1: Two Tin Roofs

21: Sweating foreheads, father's tears and baby's yellow skin in a corrugated oven

26: Gray clouds rattling holes in the concrete and the loose-lipped husband
fingers grazing the wife's wincing stomach and quickening pulse

Did your naïveté give you the gift of hope to save a life
and did five years of books jade your heart about losing one?




--
prompt: "1. Easy Does It"
Write a short poem (less than 5 lines). Be sure to include at least two strong images. Don’t over think it, just do it!

El segundo nivel

You can't hear them, but you know what they're talking about. Her ashen face pales in comparison to her bright blue top, her bright red capri pants. The colors contrast starkly with the gray walls, narrowing into an unfriendly pair of doors, behind which lurks the smell of boiled plantain skins and death. Your eyes are drawn to the drama unfolding before you, but each time Doña Griselda offers a gawking comment, you avert your gaze to the stairs, to the ceiling, and you confuse the dim fluorescent bulbs with skylights under rainclouds.

Shame works on the eyes, but not on the ears.

She's the wife. Her pain is the most palpable. The others are too calm to have tasted that kind of love for him. They are dressed as drably as their surroundings. When the waiting area isn't teeming with hundreds of bodies, sweating, breathing, waiting, you can hear every tear. And she stifles her sobs into quiet gasps. How well you know those sounds, and how hard it is to ignore them after hours.

"He's in a critical condition," Griselda states to you in broken Spanish. It's not her first language, but the apple and the piece of gum you gave her unwound her jack-in-the-box tongue. The wife and the family members raise their hands in prayer, and the hallway inadvertently frames their woes into your personal theater. The wife half-falls to the floor, kneeling with palms cupped to receive the divine. The other family members remain standing. One of them places his palm on her crown. Your own hands begin to burn. You re-cross your legs and shift your weight, and the chairs groan uncomfortably.

Griselda’s narration continues. She looks at you, unabashedly, the wrinkles in her aged face contorted in pity and morbid fascination that you are too proud to admit you share. “They charge a lot for the coffins here,” she drawls, characteristically emphasizing the word mucho with a squeak. You nod affirmatively, and notice, in your peripheral vision, her jaw moving to and fro, her tongue punting the wad of gum from cheek to cheek. Her gray-black hair is draped over her back in a stringy ponytail. It barely moves as she leans over to mutter something unintelligible to Doña Linda, who just joined the audience from the chemotherapy salon. You look over to Luis, who swipes away furiously at text messages and emails on a tiny gorilla glass screen.

All four of you, sitting like ducks in a row, chew silently as you watch the wife rise from the floor. The prayer ends and she gets a phone call. “These moments are impressions that never leave you,” Luis remarks. His technological nonchalance is a ruse; his irises radiate with intensity and calm, his most charming paradox. Thirty-two years have given him crows’ feet, but you admire their elegance as he turns back to his phone. The wife disappears behind the swinging doors labeled with hostile red capital letters, “Inpatients.”

Seconds later, you hear a scream. “Bobby!” The wife runs through the doors, frantically, begging for someone to call a doctor. She begins to wail, as there is no response. All of the floor nurses have gone home but one, who emerges from the chemotherapy salon and states that the doctor has been telephoned and all should remain calm. The wife bursts back through the doors again, and as they oscillate between open and closed, you see a few pairs of blue and white scrubs and Crocs shuffling half-heartedly towards Bobby’s bed. Griselda and Linda cluck in disapproval.

A cold air washes over the four of you and you hear the wife’s strangled cry. She emerges once again, covered in yellow protective gear and a blue mask, defeated. Her agony boomerangs from her mouth to your eardrums. Your hands continue to burn. As your sternum hollows, Teresa, the pruny and frail lady you’d have never guessed was 34, hobbles through the door of the chemotherapy salon towards the cushioned chairs.

“Let’s go,” Luis says. You give Teresa a piece of gum, she beams at you, and the five of you walk towards the stairs in silence.

Sacrifice and the sweet smell of mangoes

The thankless job is standing
hands clutching for support as you swerve
in and out of clouds of carbon monoxide.

Your stomach and your anxiety
become the unsolvable riddle
of the chicken and the egg.

You crane your neck
feeble attempts to see the outside world
the sweeping landscape of tall cypress trees.

When your words start rusting as the bars that jail them
your cheeks grow red as the iron oxide
and your misuse of prepositions
scares you into silence.

To be quiet is a skill
not forgotten, but unlearned.