Although I’ve tried, I cannot stop the poet within me.  I do not want to be a poet, but poetry has always saved me from myself. If you are a poet, you’ll understand that writing poetry requires you to delve into your inner mind and clutch and pull at the thread of emotion, unraveling it little by little. This process often threatens to pluck at your sanity, but it can also be cathartic.  The final product is a rendering of your emotions molded into a poetic portrait.

Writing a poem is like throwing a pot

Recently, I’ve taken up pottery. Throwing a pot is much like spinning a poem. Toss a clump of clay–like memories– onto the wheel. Use your hands to squeeze and transform the raw material into a basic shape and attempt to pull up the sides until a pot blooms on your wheel or the underlying outline of the poem blossoms on the page. Cover it up for a week and let it sit undisturbed. Forget about it if you can.  When you come back and look at it with fresh eyes, you’ll have a better idea of what it can become. Put the pot back on the wheel and start slicing away at the excess.

Leave it a second time.

Fire the pot. Adorn it with wax and glaze. And then it’s done.

Behold your art. Share it with the world, and cross your fingers that someone will appreciate this fragmented piece of your experience.

A Poem for my mother

Here’s a poem that began as about five pages. It transformed over the years until I trimmed it away and found the core of what it demanded to become. This memory is for my mom.

P.s. Mom, expect a beautiful pot for Mother’s Day this year!

Girl Picks Bottles with Mother in the Heat of July

 We crab-crawl through ditches so dry

the grass disintegrates at our feet. We bend

and scoop, bend and scoop, bend and scoop

until something slithers as the muck pours out—

I scream and drop the bottle, but later go back

because in the end it’s just a snake in the muck.

Beneath the blazing heat of a prairie

summer sun that shows no mercy—

passing clouds cast shadows at intervals

too fleeting for a child to devour. Sun swelters.

It’s sohotyoucouldfryaneggonthehoodofyourcar.

 

Blisters form between sweaty thighs: the rubbing,

the burning pulse of pain, pleasure to the point of frenzy

as the salt from the sweat stings and itches, chafes a raw patch

between inflamed thighs. There’s nothing to soothe this fire

scorching the once grassy hillsides, torching our insides from the outside.

 

We’re bone-tired, weathered and weary.

Our poor hamstrings: pulled so tightly they snap and hang

like frazzled bits of horsehair clinging to a champion’s fiddle bow.

Wind gusts drag translucent fingers through brittle grass,

wake the crickets. Prairie ululations morph into lullabies.

 

The sun falls: a flaming fireball peeks its auburn head through the cover of night.

Our car—a firefly, a bullet—thunders home.

**This poem was published in The Quilliad, Issue 7, spring 2016.