May Golden Shovel #3

source: Missing Out on a Lot, but Creatively Filling the Void

She thinks there is no trace of her missing

Stories since she threw them out

Of the Milky Way. She put them on

A comet trailing teal-colored wings, a

Free message to aliens that no lot

Here is large enough to land in. But

The stories return, lumped in a stewpot creatively

Spiced and seeded with a filling

Too rich for Earth creatures, who are the

Lost angels still searching the void.

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I’m continuing to use Terrance Hayes’s Golden Shovel poem format, as proposed by the Sunday New York Times "At Home" section, for 30 Poems in 30 Days during National Poetry Month.

 

Take a newspaper headline that attracts you.

Use each word in the line as the end word for each line in your poem.

Keep the end words in order.

Describe the story that the headline is for.

The poem does not have to be about the same subject as the headline that creates the end words.

 

 

SOLTuesday: Bookcase Finds

            No, this is not about books, although I’ve been doing a lot with my books lately.

            Recently, three shelves collapsed on one of my many bookcases—I’d had books two rows deep, and those shelves just weren’t built for that. I had to cull, and quickly, to get those books off of the floor.

            Having done that job on one bookcase, I thought I’d tackle the others before I was forced to by more collapse. But as I got started, my daughter reminded me that my husband used to stash emergency money, maybe $100, in “a book,” and since Jack’s no longer among the living, I can’t ask him which book it was. So Christie and her husband came over to help, riffling through books on four shelves of the “fiction” bookcase.

            In the process, they found, stuck behind books, a month’s worth of New York Times Book Reviews from 2005—and a brown paper bag. I know exactly what that bag is for.

            Jack used to buy a small container of yogurt at a neighborhood

deli as his movie snack, and often he didn’t get a bag to put it in. So he made a point of saving small paper bags like this one for his movie yogurt. Usually, he put the bags on a top shelf in a kitchen cabinet, but I guess this one never got there. It just ended up in the secret world “behind things,” out of sight, out of mind.

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