Posted by three in a row for the tupelo 30/30 project !! you can find my day 3 poem, along with other day 3 poems from my co-conspirators, at the 30/30 project’s web page.
yesterday’s poem: some anger, a curse upon a penis. today’s poem: something with less edge.
here’s a preview; it opens:
i name every injury like it was a comet:
what hurts. who did. when likely again. love –
like yesterday’s poem, i pulled pieces in from other sources. i borrowed a first line from corey van landingham’s poem “the louse” which appears in his collection antidote. i used heart facts from PBS/NOVA, and comet stats from universetoday.com and fallofathousandsuns.com. the epigraph is also from fallofathousandsuns.
i am still working in the modern sonnet form: 14 lines. today, although there’s internal rhyme, i let the end rhyme go. writing daily, things tend to fall away. and not just things like rhyme: eventually, guardedness, as well. for now, i am still self-conscious about cliche and the inadvisability of using the word “love” alongside stuff about the heart, of being too sentimental, of attempting to weave anatomy and comets and romance.
a note: in my haste to do a quick read/edit before sending the draft to tupelo, i left out a few words, which made one of the numbers wrong. the correct stat is three times “per minute.” your heart circulates blood through your entire body three times each minute.
“anatomy, comets & romance” sounds like a title for a book —