Text Art: True or False

So, friends.....true or false? I could make some interesting welcome mats, no?

To everyone who read my poems and/or commented this week--thank you so much! And welcome to a few new readers. Hope your weekend is lovely!

A Thing

A Thing

A thing for rocks.
A thing for trees,
for dendrochronology.

A thing for dinosaurs.
A thing for coloring books.
A thing for tambourines.

A thing for ginger ale
in airplane half-cups.
A thing for visible stitching.

A thing for grapefruit.
A thing for the Kennedys.
A thing for skeletons

and skeletons dismantled.
A thing for concealer.
A thing for pockets

and what we find in them
after a garment’s sabbatical.
A thing for things,

for finding one thing
in a pile of bashed in
things and dirt and dust.

A thing for the mud
the dirt becomes,
a thing for paleontology,

for using a paintbrush
to clean off a thing,
a thing for you

to call significant,
the thing in your chest
a bee sting, a bruise.

Quadruple Zero

Quadruple Zero

Which 12:00. AM or PM.
The AM begins at midnight.

The middle of the night
is the morning. Add an hour

to the time it is now, and
you’ve shortened the day.

Hit snooze. We’ve made
the alarm into the time,

our body responds to noise,
not to 7:04 AM, not even

to morning. The second
hand on a clock is really

the third hand, a finger
flicking time away like

crumbs. Why no half-
second hand, no milli-

second hand. In my hand-
writing, numbers are starting

to disintegrate. My eight
is less propped-up infinity,

more a headless snowman
in weakening gravity, the top

sphere pulling away from
the base, slightly. Should

I draw a line through my
zeroes to designate them

as zeroes, as nothings,
not letter O’s, not the vowel

of surprise and pleasure.
Bar the zero, forbid any

thing from getting in,
a sign clasping what

we slide it over, a gel
slipped onto a stage light,

but no color, no light.
A lens cap. How can I

know that my zero and
your zero are equally null.

What I weigh in my house
is not what I weigh in yours,

our weight shifts based on
the country where we are

or the planet. The number
that is sewn into the back

of my pants fluctuates based
on who made the pants.

And now, the makers of pants
cut them larger while holding

the number still, as if we were
shrinking within our garments,

our bodies, size four, two, zero,
double zero, triple zero, quadruple

zero, all sizes of clothing a variant
of zero since that seems to calm us.

Bedside Manners

Bedside Manners

The goal is not to horrify you.
But the goal is not to not horrify you.

When you wake up, how much
of the previous day have you forgotten,

how much from all your years
sticks. If we can remember something,

we can keep it, that is what we
think. The baking aisle in the supermarket,

between the boxes of cake mix
and bagged chocolate chips and shakers

of rainbow sprinkles. Breathe
that in, cardboard and powdery sweetness.

A bowl and wooden spoon rise
within you, then quickly recede, Nessie

and then flat lake water. I dare
you, try to keep what the sugar summoned.

I don’t mean to be mean. Try,
how about what the word evergreen does

to you, how sure you are that
beneath its satin there is a lesson for you.

Think of who you can mean,
how it made you shiver when the new boy

called you her, see how this
happens to us both, beside one another.

Planetarium

Planetarium

We cannot replicate the night sky,
but we can suggest it. A domed ceiling,

a bulb with a perforated shade,
rounded rows of theater chairs and a voice,

female, calm, saying This is Orion,
this is Sirius. In the planetarium, a girl

places her hand on the armrest
in case the boy next to her wants to

touch it, or put his hand on hers.
Even the simulated sky seems romantic.

Any darkened and hushed room,
where you hear your own breath and

know that you are not watched.
The teacher has left the room, the ushers

are gone. We lean our heads
back, gaze up. A drive-in where we leave

our cars, where the screen
has been ripped out to show us the sky.

On Creativity (featuring Marly Youmans)

In this series of posts (which I’ll occasionally post on Fridays), I will feature an artist, writer, blogger, singer, or thinker. I’ll include a little information about them, and their answer to a question about creativity.

Marly Youmans is a prolific writer of both poetry and prose. I’ve long admired her work (here is a poem of hers that I love, from Qarrtsiluni) and collaborations with all types of artists.

Her new novel, A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage (Mercer University Press) will be available on March 30 (more info about the book after the Q & A), and tells the story of a Pip Tatnall, a road kid wandering America during the Depression.

My question for Marly:
When you write, what does it feel like? Is there a different mode or experience for fiction vs. poetry?

Her response:
I am afraid that I must be a rather secretive writer because I don’t want to answer the first question. The answer seems as secret as the answer to a question asking what happened to Tam Lin while he was with the Queen of Faery.  However, I will admit that my sense is that my poetry and fiction come from the same springs, though my “feelings” as I write are as variable as they are about any other repeated activity.

Nevertheless, I’m with Tom Disch on his remark in The Castle of Indolence (hat tip there to James Thomson) that nothing in the realm of writing feels better than “the lyric gush.”  But even in a novel or a very long poem, where one could not possibly rely on a sort of lyric uprising, there are portions that seem to have that same sense of outpouring and rightness during composition. In A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, the first two chapters streamed out very easily, and it was not till I passed that mark that any of the writing moved more slowly.

In both prose and poetry, a writer—well, my kind of writer--hopes to be always ready for a waterfall of words that feels as if it sweeps to us and through us from some higher, more powerful realm. But with each, there is the work of grinding and polishing—and with prose, sometimes a good bit of patching and gap-crossing and some practical moving-characters-about-a-setting writing is needed. The differences between the two may be obvious, but what is less obvious to readers is that both call for the writer to abandon self and get lost.  Yet when I do, somehow I feel more myself and more in my rightful place than before.

---
A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage is the winner of The Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction. Ron Rash calls it “a vividly realized, panoramic novel of survival during The Great Depression. There is poetry in Youmans' writing, but she also knows how to tell a riveting story.” For more information, visit Marly’s blog, The Palace at 2 AM.

58008

58008

In high school math, we learned
that there is something called
an imaginary number. I eyeballed
the lower-case i on the board, turned

it into a 1 by squinting. Aren’t all
numbers imaginary, like any marks
we scuff slates with. We know sharks
by one piece of their bodies, a small

fin poking through the ocean like a tooth.
A thing is real if you can touch it or
use it in a sentence or draw it for
your fridge. You can calculate truth,

math says. Type 58008 into your TI-83.
Turn it upside down for your friend to see.