April dis•articulations poem by Angela Peñaredondo

At the beginning of the month, Angela gave Terry four prompts. She engaged in fevered writing with each of them and gave the results to Angela. Angela used the words from that fevered writing to create this dis•articulations poem.

A VAMPIRE GIRL LIVES IN BAD CITY

after the film, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (Directed by Ana Lily Amirpour)

What is first gathered, she disassembles
on the dry, insatiable ground.
Secrets she has taken apart
like little screws
from a dead clock.

One must cultivate needs
                         into readied heat, rekindled to breath—
                         alert without want of sun.

If not, then kill them, extinguish
what blossoms. When in the garden,
why prune what is already waste,
soon to be devoured by insects
& taken up by weeds.

How does equity keep
without human sacrifice?

She doubts the ancients, rebukes
any God-given things,
their quick, unnatural handle of power.

Easy she resists their sense of rites,
their invasions and talents,
their detached wings of thought,
their sweat and women
                         you don’t remember wanting, she says,

those old furnaces like lines of jars, fumes
bottled for safekeeping.
What is worth keeping
until the end of your life?

No necessity to run, she occupies
the meditative buzz
just, like, that.

Elsewhere in corners,
she ascends
not to sainthood
but blooms into some sign of midnight:

an I
an underneath of Now
a being of Only
that which finally rewards failure with gifts.

Minus any flash,
she becomes speed.
Through a crowd of others, her veil
l
ike a black wave of resistance:    truth is a scab.

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April Fevered Writing – Angela Peñaredondo

This month’s collaborating poet, Angela Peñaredondo, did the following fevered writing based on four prompts given her by Terry Wolverton:

The World’s Most Oblivious Driver Leaves Canada.
It must be the closer one is to the artic. The white and black everything. Here and somewhere there, only the goon chill and its people. No time and all time for idleness. Try to be slick. In zoos, cats grow even wilder. They are so ready for death. Drivers aren’t we all. Not knowing the story of our own feet. Anymore. The underneath map of our towing. A dried mouth. A piece of coal. Who owns our feet? And the road, what foreign road. Strangers they’ve turned to. To hate this poem just as much as driving. Drive me out.

If You’re Reading this, It’s Too Late.
The anthuriums have stiffened to statues on the ledge of my dying balcony, exoskeletons only the super moon can summon. It is weightlessness. A book becomes pigeon-holed, then a green mile long and sky, sky. I have become wood. And the thistles today not reborn into another invention of dirt. June has not come yet and you don’t want it to. Lilies be your fingers and must you now speak anymore of your blasted appendages. Keep keys. The musical kind is what you want, not the kind which opens. But a stuck, sticky hinged thing.

Herd of Goats Get Loose, Chase Children.
Let me be their sweet, blistered feet on something of want and moving.
Let me be there iron horse, small and in three, precious parts. On the self, never alone with the sea rocks and dandelions. Charms left from a steep drop.
Let the wild cats chase me until I jump. Jump without thinking. Jump from sharpest, weakest ledge, yes needle-thin. Still it does not collapse under my weight.
I come at it fast and tear each wing like a transparent petal. Eat and eat and wait. There is that toothsome hint but do not mistake the sacchariferous for the weak. Blood is sugar.

At Pepperdine’s Surf Chapel.
Somewhere up in the toss and roll, something from your world that you would call a far-off cast. It shook like Miles Davis but without autumn leaves. Sea salt has no room for that. No sway for that. It gives up to the marriage of light and mud like sardines in their thin slithering swim. Once I saw a chapel buried up by sea. What is left from doubt and Spanish conquest? It sinks in full like a boulder. Sometime the cross sticks out of the gray waves, thorn-like, covered in barnacles and sea mos. The road-side cliff brushes its shoulders jagged, paying no mind at all.

Readers who are contemplating writing your own poems may work with just the prompts or may choose to use one or more passages of fevered writing to inspire your poems. Best Reader poem we receive in April will win a $25 prize.