Terry Wolverton produced this fevered writing based on four prompts given her by this month’s collaborating poet, Ramón Garcia. Ramón will be writing a new poem incorporating his choice of these words.
No on can be slain in absentia or in effigie.
I disagree. The night is long and one can die a thousand deaths at the hands of others’ imaginations. How they slaughter me–those who believe I have wronged them and those who envy something in my house, those who dispute my politics and those who have an ancient feud with my ancestors. All night long, I stagger and fall, rise again only to succumb to poison or bullets, fire or gossip. I am slain.
These first three steps are the acceptance steps.
The recovery cha-cha is a new dance craze but I am tripping over my feet again, stumbling across the floor, looking for my partner who is passed out on the bandstand. Her vomit cakes my new shoes, but still I make the moves–one-two-three and one-two-three, and my nose is shiny with the effort and no one is looking at me. I used to love to dance, a little girl in a tutu and everyone would smile but those days are over and now the music sounds like a machine that’s breaking.
Narcissus, the solitary, is the very image of the adolescent.
Why would they make it take so long before our brains develop? Why would someone engineer a being who was capable of reproducing long before its brain could make a good decision? Has something gone haywire with the food we eat or the water we drink or the chemicals we ingest? Are we developmentally delayed? Maybe we need to remain solitary until our brain catches up to our hormones.
Bloom is aware of conspicuous omissions.
What is the awareness of a bloom? Science tells us plants sense when another plant is in trouble and they send out shoots in that plant’s direction. They try to help. This means plants are sentient, another blow to our pathetic theories of superiority. Plants will be around to clean up the mess after we blow it all up.
Readers who are contemplating writing your own poems may work with just the prompts or choose to use one or more passages of fevered writing to inspire your poems. Best Reader poem we receive in October will win a $25 prize.
dis•articulations 2015 