And then there were

Free Entry 1 "You Are Ruining This Deal For The Rest Of Us" I have seen a homeless man possessing a five gear bike, guitar, and bookbag, put away his string and emo tunes only to pull out a cellular and become ecstatic about the big news of the day: a popular spot a few blocks away just opened up. He packed up and moved away from the rest of us. I told myself, every time I pass a homeless or a thumb looking for a ride or person trekking for gas, I will pick up the next one. I will freeze you in my brain and pick up the next one that’s like you, but I can’t pick you up this time, I’m late for class for work for hookups. The homeless are tied down to nothing, so I can’t catch up to them. My life will not be complete until I give some person a ride. Only then can they stab me steal my debit complete me. Free Entry 2 "Masculinity" When I told my best friend of the time that my mother passed away from breast cancer, he seized the cream walls of the North Fayette restroom...

"Samson broke down the walls of masculinity in the boys bathroom." ----------- "Your eye twitches like that of an 8th grade girl who cuts her thighs so no one knows." ----------- "I tip your mom real well." ----------- "Whether lace or guard rail, I want to get to the other side." ----------- "Her skin is turning purple with pressure"

Kathy Fagan’s strategy in dealing with clichés follows the strategy we are often taught, to inject fresh language into and around the cliché in order to personalize the phrase. Fagan does this every couple of poems, even developing an entire poem off the phrase “a monkey on her back” (2) in "Womb To Tomb Pantoum." This use of clichés makes the diction of Fagan’s poetry very casual and familiar, but the personalization of the clichés makes the specific language pop out with originality. Fagan takes the phrase “’pretty on the inside’” (19)in reference to girls that aren’t stereotypically beautiful and lets it reference specifically “the ones” (19)in "'69." Moments like this make Fagan’s poetry comfortable to an American audience, yet intriguing. If for no other reason, I continue to read Fagan’s work just to absorb how she twists clichés and trite phrases. When you catch one in her work, you expect her to twist the language into something that feels familiar, yet ...

Clowning My son’s feet grew a half every year, convincing him his feet wouldn’t stop their growth until the average man stops growing, around age 21, but when he was 18, 19, his feet pulled up at size 10 ½ two shopping trips in a row. I couldn’t stand to crush him. He wasn’t at the point in growth where he required ordering 13’s and paying more than usual, so I bought him 11’s. Now they call him a clown at school because his feet, I mean his shoes, don’t match his body type. I can’t make my son into a man. I can’t make my son, scared of clowns since he was 3, unafraid of what he is.

Five Years Separated One cold, damp day whenever we vote for the President I walked up the steps of the Fayetteville Crossing, downtown, still unsure of the possibility of changing history. I voted knowing little about any one up for office aside from the presidential candidates. Once I reached the tops steps, I saw her standing beside her mother much like I stood beside my father, and remembered the times she stood across from me at the threshold of her empty house with parents away at work from 9 to 5, ready to take me, since it was just a summer fling, making out behind bushes while her brothers drowned, drowned me in too wet kisses. Why am I allowed to see her like this—wide eyed at the sight of me? —turning 180 to face a wall of the voting poll building amid discussion with her mother over nothing, I’m sure, certainly not discussing me and how I accidentally slipped insider her as an 18 year old, pulled out wet and eyed wide, her voice quiet now in her throat, her bra covering her...

"What she could do…” When I cut my blade was hardly red— so little blood was in him. Less spill than suck, his wound worked like a mouth, and mouth and would alike drank what I fed him, my husband’s father, eyes fluttering like an infant’s, until I saw in them the sated look that women mistake for gratitude, and saw too, beneath my hands, a lustrous black returning to his beard, a pleasing heft to thigh and shoulder. What happened next was strictly clientele—I’d always been, as they say, in business, exchanging life for life. When Jason turned us out to wed another, it took no art of mine to kill our sons. I’d loved the magic for how it loved him. I loved the anger for how it did not. ------------------------ Bluest Eyes When I desired the bluest eyes possible I didn’t mean to offend. minus pain, then tears and I was good to go; I sorta look like the blonde on your bread, the blonde in your nightstand, but the mucus in my hair, loose tear duct, and newfound astigmatism defile the ...

Three, Becoming Spring On the urban grid of three PM she is off it—the bus just huffing from the curb, she lifts her backpack over her head, then brings it down dead weight, full speed to the ground. By its straps she heaves it up and down again. What’s in it she wants to kill? What’s in you that wants her to kill it? To KO the Collected Shakespeare, the Xmas knitting, the kittens, the bloody fetus? You want to help, help make it stop, help make it go. But in the ritual movement of three PM she is an errant woodwind outside the score. Where did it go, the good you believed was inside everything? She’s thrown it down. She won’t carry your faith on her back. ------------------------ Every period at :45 he begs for initials in his agenda— he claims to require the restroom, though what he needs is cranberry juice and a check-up. What is it that he pisses out, shits, throws up, or splooges? What’s in me that wants to find out? I want to save every student from anything that might do them h...

"I am that guy people cut in front of when the line blocks the exit." ------------- "I always wished archeologist would find dinosaur bones in our backyard, excavate the whole lawn. ------------- "Your guffaw goes on two chucks too long" ------------- It's not a complete ride through Temple without a Confederate flag sighting" ------------- "Blacks samples songs. whites sample genres"

Angie Estes strategy of Latin, French, and English quotes or translations distances the reader. Her book first appears difficult, but once the reader finds a comfort level with the language, the poetry isn't as difficult to enter. The foreign languages create a European and Romantic context for the work. In this sense, the nature of the quotes used, always in italics, sincerely speak to the subject matter and work as a whole. In a book about love, why not use romance languages. The quotes, along with epigraphs and sources quoted, create a learned atmosphere. Estes book marginalized you if you can't keep up with the discourse. Her English is already loaded, so with the addition of multiple texts and languages, we may struggle to keep up.

Last Words Let us cross over the river and sit in the shade of the trees. Pardonnez-moi, Monsieur , wait 'til I have finished my problem. It's been a long time since I've had champagne. Too late for fruit, too soon for flowers: hold the cross high so I may see it through the flames. Get my swan costume ready. I am about to--or I am going to--die: either expression is used. Who is it? Ah, Luisa, you always arrive just as I am leaving. Sweet Rosabel, I leave you the truth: if you can read this, you've come too close. L. is doing the rhododendrons, the boat is going down, and I'm going into the bathroom to read. More light. Am I dying or is this my birthday? I should have drunk more champagne. Either that wallpaper goes or I go. What is the answer? Very well, then, what is the question? Oh why does it take so long to come? ---------------- Last Words I hope the Styx doesn't have rapids. I don't do rapids. I don't do water. It does me in. I should have read ...

Script Folio 43 Split pomegranate, common rhinoceros beetle, Scarlet Turks='s cap lily folding back it's red lips while anthers circle the pistil's one hand: above them six lines are written in chancery script with lettere tagliate , letters cut like the long lines of pasta our parents cut on our plate, the work of two people who never met. The two halves of each letter--below and above-- are severed or sewn together by inked chain links like those that knot a fence or a stitch that unravels the whole length of a sentence if a stray thread is pulled--chain letter, chain gang, chain mail, chain saw-- or those paper links that wrap themselves around the Xmas tree: eentsy weentsy spider sidling up to each letter, each word, casting and binding in silk as if to ravel and unravel once felt the same. ---------------------------- Food Foods were eaten like the grossness our parents turned into freedom tickets away from the kitchen table, the alteration of rules we didn’t know exis...

Young Hoods Where would those boys be if mother never set down the rules for crossing streets on foot or riding gear bikes past the pink stucco house? No one would nab them anyway. They are too wily. No one would ignore them either. How could you? They throw granite at unidentified rear windows when drivers speed past the rose bushes of 125. If they deem you drive faster than 40 mph, you will hear a crack. These hoods lost too many dogs to speeders in their neighborhood of one circle and one court, 15 houses in total if you lose count and count some twice. They’re misguided hoods. Speeders thump thump their dogs. Their parents won’t buy cats, yet they have to be in once the street light buzz reaches its highest pitch. If they see hood shadows from the street light and not the sun, they might as well not come home. Dinner is already paper plated and sitting in the microwave. They’re already grounded and won’t see a meal like that for weeks. The neighborhood is so small, the big cheese d...

More Synecdoche I think slurs are more synecdoche than offensive, just a part of the impression of the whole man, woman, or race i.e. cracker only sums up a fraction of a Caucasian, much like no full nigger exists; only portions; a wop without proof, much like a wetback is not just a pair of hands or back. Hispanic heritage shoulders the world of the suits, blondes, and skirts. Skinheads work in the same fashion, though I hear they curb more often, like redheads and brunettes, though they don’t gain similar attention. A Chink, Jap, or Indian, dot or feather, is so much more, having lost their lands, diseases: the whole, gone, nothing left but a marker. I wish I could be the type of synecdoche where you gain the title of the material made from: condoms are rubbers and I would finally be America.

"It smells like baseball" -After walking out of the cafeteria, a friend said this. We knew she meant that the weather was nice, warm, and that it felt like baseball weather, but instead she said it smelled "like baseball," not even baseball season. ---------------- "I had a dream that every check I've ever written reappeared, was somehow misplaced and never used as payment" -This was my thought after a recent dream in which random checks I've written over the past year started to reappear as bookmarks and in binders. I started to freak out because I felt as if I didn't really own anything around me. ---------------- "I hate you. You are the only person I know that gets to have their cake and eat it too" -A friend said this to me after realizing that a friend I used to "talk" to was still capable of hanging out with me. He couldn't handle that we didn't have any baggage, which threw him off. ---------------- "Ses...

I am still searching for another example of this instance, but my favorite moment in Natasha Trethewey’s poetry so far happens in “Southern Gothic,” lines 10 to 15. The first two lines, “The lines in my young father’s face deepen/ toward an expression of grief” come across to me as an effect. The lines that follow this are the cause: “I have come home/ from the schoolyard with the words that shadow us/ in this small Southern town.” As I said, I can’t find another instance of this yet, but I really adore this move. By giving us the effect and then the cause, the cause bears more weight. During initial reading, we don’t know that the cause was coming first, so the strategy contrasts with what we expect. Now that we’ve moved through the effect, we come upon the cause and it hits harder than if the instance were reversed. This strategy stands out for me because I’ve never noticed it in a work before, though I assume Trethewey didn’t create it.

He had no dead in that area But we are dead down here, a broiler of mixed race peoples allowing fictional mulatto men with mulatto children to fight for the Confederacy. Down here, we’re over flowing with love for mulatto peoples, but they are the most self-loathing; it must be the black in them. Blacks are a self-loathing people. They hate themselves so much that they walk right up to polished counters, knowing they don’t belong there, knowing they will get a stare and a fight. Why else would a black sit wherever they chose on a bus if they didn’t hate themselves and want a beating? Slaves had to hate themselves. Why else would you run away so many times that they cut off half your foot, steal your equilibrium rather than equalizing your penis? A Native Guard must hate himself for signing up. He ain’t good enough to be considered dead, a real soldier, buried, monumented. But he’s good enough to take a bullet, though I’m sure the gunboat Jackson dwelled for a second.

Scenes From A Documentary History of Mississippi 2. Glyph, Aberdeen 1913 The child’s head droops as if in sleep. Stripped to the waist, in profile, he’s balanced on the man’s lap. The man, gaunt in his overalls, cradles the child’s thin arm—the sharp elbow, white signature of skin and bone—pulls it forward to show the deformity—the humped back, curve of spine—punctuating the routine hardships of their lives: how the child must follow him into the fields, haunting the long hours slumped beside a sack, his body asking how much cotton? or in the kitchen, leaning into the icebox, how much food? or kneeling beside him at the church house, why, Lord, why? They pose as if to say Look, this is the outline of suffering: the child shouldering it—a mound like dirt heaped on a grave. ------------------------------ Lesson, Banjo 19— The child cradles the forced banjo like a father with an unfamiliar, but kin, son. Nothing like a well worn grandfather would. The two of them, grandfather man and g...