It seems that my Poetry Sisters and I have officially been writing together for a decade.
Which is nearly impossible to me, in that time flies when you’re having fun.
But also, we didn’t exactly set out to do this — whatever this is — long term.
It just sort of… happened.

It is so often the way with life that really brilliant plans are only obvious in retrospect.
That in looking back we see patterns we didn’t notice at the time.
That in our successes, some plan or mastermindery becomes vividly apparent.
So much actually happens by gut or instinct or luck, at least for me.

For some reason these are the thoughts that emerged as I looked at one of this month’s artistic prompts (thanks to Tricia and an exhibit last year at the University of Richmond). These thoughts of patterns amidst chaos, of making our way through one while attempting to find the other. Which, when you think about it, is also what poetry is. So here’s my attempt at just that…

Color Equation 2 — Janine Wong

Life’s a Hard Job
Inspired by Color Equation 2 — Janine Wong

If you see a whole thing, it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives… But up close a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. –- Ursula K. Le Guin

From that initial bang
you’ve been beautiful
offering up a careful
constellation
of stepping stones
through this chaos
of soil and subatomic
particles, offering up
a predetermined
path to follow –
no – to hang onto
like an astronaut
does a safety-tether.

From that initial bang
you’ve unrolled choices
in front of us, row
after orderly row
of equally good choices
but when we make
the leap toward one
or the other, we discover
we are weightless
we are improvising
we are – yes, it must be
said – hurtling through
space and it is – it must be
said – a hard job.

Find my pals’ work here:
Tanita
Laura
Tricia
Kelly
Sara
Andi

And it’s Poetry Friday over at Poetry for Children. Enjoy!

My poetry sisters and I have a larger poem-project underway but we need to kick that can down the road a bit. So, for December, we decided on a list poem using at least 2 of the following words: paper, stars, messages, promises, dirt, flour, rum, hope. Here’s mine!

Commitment
By Liz Garton Scanlon

When you’re on a mission
to Mars, you pack carefully

You take it all, because once you’ve gone
there’s no hope of going back
to get what you’ve forgotten

And here are the others:
Laura
Tanita
Sara
Kelly
Tricia
Andi

Poetry Friday’s being hosted over at Elizabeth Steinglass’ blog!

Enjoy, and happy Friday!

This month’s assignment was to write an anaphora, which is a poem using deliberate repetition at the beginnings of lines. The theme, in this case, was to grapple with loss and, at the same time, grace and gratitude. I’m not at all sure that I captured that, and I’m a couple of days late to this regardless, but here goes….

Buried
By Liz Garton Scanlon

We bury bulbs in the garden.
We bury the dead.
We bury the lede.
We bury love letters underneath socks and slips.
We bury the kids up to their necks in sand.
We bury treasure.
We bury our feelings.
We bury the hatchet.
We bury bills.
We bury bones.
We bury our faces in our hands.
And then it is our job
to unearth it all.

To read more anaphora, go visit my poetry sisters:
Laura’s poem
Andi’s poem
Kelly’s poem
Tricia’s poem
Tanita’s poem
Sara’s poem

Hello and welcome to the animal kingdom!

Our challenge this month (from Laura Purdie Salas) was to write a short poem (six lines or less) describing an animal of our choice and incorporating the words spike, word and shadow.

Fun, right?
So I thought, instead of the usual suspects, what animals are unsung?
Unappreciated?
Even, dare I say, unloved?

And because hyenas are SO unsung, unappreciated and unloved, I wrote two — one a description, one a 7-word autobiography!

Here goes….

The Hyena

Hyena
looms large
casts a shadow
over warthog and antelope
under roof of Serengeti sky,
spotted coat spiked like a crown.

The Hyena’s Autobiography

I’m a scrappy grave robber —
laughing, unashamed.

Now, onward to other animals!
Laura’s is here
Tanita’s is here
Sara’s is here
Kelly’s is here
Tricia’s is here
Andi’s is here

And Poetry Friday is here!

Last month, for the first time ever, I skipped the prompt from my Poetry Sisters.
It was a sestina, for goodness sakes — but that’s no excuse.
Honestly, I might not have gotten to it even if it had been a haiku.
It was just that kind of month.

But I’m STILL sad about it, and you can rest assured it’s not gonna happen again.
So, without further therapeutic babbling I give you this month’s poem!

Form: A Cento
Assigned by: Sara Lewis Holmes
Source line: I see Argentina and Paraguay under a curfew of glass, their colors breaking, like oil.
From: I see Chile in my Rearview Mirror by Agha Shahid Ali

From the given source line, I chose the word “breaking.” I then built a poem using lines from other people’s poetry. Each line contained the word breaking (or break) (or broke) and I’ve cited all of those at the end of the piece.

Oh, and one last thing: Centos are a fun and obsessive puzzle. Try one!!

Broken Elsewhere
A Cento Compiled by Liz Garton Scanlon

He says we are prisms breaking light into color –
breaking the silence of the seas
breaking the rocks they break on
breaking with convention

It gave a piteous groan, and so it broke
as if a child breaking into a run. That is what I see.

Traci Brimhall – Our Bodies Break Light
William Wordswoth – The Solitary Reaper
Galway Killen – Old Arrivals
Michael Leong – Transmitting the Vertical Immensity of Coniferous Light
Jose B. Gonzalez – Lines Breaking
Stanley Kunitz
Jessie Redmon Fauset – La Vie C’est La Vie
Elizabeth Barrett Browning – A Musical Instrument
Dora Malech – Breaking News
Terrence Hayes – American Sonnet for my Past and Future Assassin
Agha Shahid Ali — I See Chile in My Review Mirror TITLE
Tina Chang – The Future is an Animal
A.R. Ammons – Easter Morning
Alexandra Harris – Virginia Woolf
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper – The Slave Mother
Abraham Crowley – The Heart Breakin
Khaled Mattawa – Before

To see more, go have a look at these posts:
Laura
Sara
Tanita
Tricia

And Poetry Friday, where there’s so much more, is at Beyond LiteracyLink!

At the end of last year when we plotted out our poetry calendar for 2018, Kelly chose our challenge for July. How prophetic was she to know that we’d want — nay, need — a voicey feminist to inspire us right now?

Enter Aphra Behn, a 17th-century playwright, poet and novelist who was also a scandalous rule-breaker — my favorite kind!

The assignment? A poem “In the style of Aphra Behn.” Kelly offered up Behn’s favored rhyme scheme and meter, which I followed, but I also wanted something of her tone and content in my piece. The first poem I tried was first-person, written in the voice of maybe Aphra Behn, maybe Hester Prynne. It was ok. The second one I wrote for my daughters who are coming into adulthood at a rather alarming time for women. It was a little better but very ragey. (Nothing wrong with rage, mind you…)

But then Kelly mentioned to us that Virginia Woolf had admired Behn so deeply that she’d said, in A Room of One’s Own, “All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.” And that parted the waters for me. I prefer gratitude to rage any day. So here’s to Woolf and Behn and everyone who spoke before us….

Let Flowers Fall
After Aphra Behn and Virginia Woolf

Let flowers fall upon the tombs
of those who opened up their throats
who braved the chill without their coats
to speak for us still in their wombs
so now we wail and raise demands
in person or upon the page
we beat our chests, we join our hands
we leave behind our gilded cage.
Let flowers fall in thanks, in praise
for words well spent and trails well blazed.

For more of Aphra Behn, visit:

Laura
Tricia
Sara
Tanita
Kelly

And our own beloved Tricia is hosting Poetry Friday today! Go visit her at the Miss Rumphius Effect!!

The assignment: Limericks. Three of them. About birds or bees or both.

Let me tell you. It is hard not to be silly or bawdy in this form. Plus, you feel as if you should be drinking a Guinness while composing. Oh, well. It’s summer vacation. Let the fun begin!

Hummers

The bees and the birds coexist
in a sweetness that’s hard to resist.
When the meadow’s in bloom
we all can presume
that even the bugs will be kissed.

My sisters wrote some fabulous ones and you’ll find them here:
Sara
Tricia
Kelly
Tanita
Laura

And Poetry Friday is at Buffy’s Blog today! Enjoy, all!

The assignment (from Sara this month): To make a toast!
The only rules: The toast has to begin and end with the same two words.

I’ve made toasts. At both weddings and funerals. At the occasional event or gala. Toasts are something writers are sometimes asked to make and something humans are sometimes moved to offer up.

So what’s the problem? I ran out of time. April was National Poetry Month so I was fixated on haiku. And then upon my own work and submissions. And then on my students’ work. My daughter’s exams. My other daughter’s dive meet. You get the idea. And suddenly here we are on the first Friday of the month.

Time to make a toast, I think.
About time, I think. And why not, I think, write it in Fibonacci style, in which syllables tick out like moments upon a page?Yes! I think.

See, just a couple of days ago, I read this beautiful article about the intersection of math and poetry. Add time to that equation and we’ve got one big swirling ball of universal magic! Right? Well, I mean, I have no idea if anything magical actually ended up on the page but who cares because it was fun! So, here goes. A toast!

A Toast to Time in Fibonacci Sequence

A
toast
to time
ticking by
perishable time
racing like heart palpitations
rushing past this daughter’s drawing of a yellow sun.

A
toast
to time
or rather
an apology
because it is me ticking by,
rushing past this drawing, past this perfect yellow sun.

A
toast
to time
a promise
a promise to stop
blaming, ticking, rushing right past
my daughter drawing, this yellow sun, the perfect kiss.

A
toast
to time
generous
both spacious and full
ready at a moment’s notice
to spread out like waxy rays upon a blank white page.

A
toast
to time
both promise
and apology
both opening kitchen curtains
and also doing nothing but this, making a toast.

Go read my pal’s poem-toasts here:
Tricia
Tanita
Sara

Sara, Laura and Andi are off this month.

But for more poetry goodness, here’s Poetry Friday! Enjoy!