Sunday, April 16, 2017

Bad Tourists

Image copyrighted: Isadora Gruye Photography


We can’t leave our shine on the curb or shake the grey night rain from our shoes.



Written for Sunday Micro Challenge at Real Toads. The task: write about night rain in the streetlight using Ginsberg's American Sentence - that's a poem in one 17 syllable sentence. For this one, I used one of my own photos from my first rain soaked night in San Fran. B

Tuesday, April 11, 2017

Party Instructions

Eat the cake Magda, 
even if the flour and salt 
turn to paste on your tongue. 
And keep working the room. 
You’ve caught the eye of a single banker 
and a married baker.
Neither care that
you’ve crumpled your cocktail napkin
into a sweaty ball in your fist
instead of folding it twice over. 

Eat the cake, 
and dance alone. 
Your shoes are reading
This machine kills fascists. 
And you're making eyes
at a sweater vested 
jalopy owner who could 
smoosh your butterfly
good and proper
even with a mouth full 
of cake paste
and cab fare jangling 
in his pockets.

But you’ll eat the cake.
And come home alone,
still clutching that cocktail napkin
in your hand like you were saving it

for your scrapbook.

For my first Poems in April prompt at Toads, I wrote a new installment in my black birthday cake series. For this out of standard prompt, I asked the Garden Dwellers to pick an image of a protest sign and write a poem with the phrase that was in no way political.  For my image, I chose this image of my favorite protestor: Woody Guthrie.