"... friday is for fishing those struggling words out of the dishwasher ..."
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Kate Chenier recommends these on line literary sites.
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Kate Chenier
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Kate Chenier
Nomenclature
Your name lurches into
my kitchen and sits silent, two
random syllables
jointed too loosely.
You supply the contextual bones,
when you're willing.
I write you with blocked capitals,
edgy pairings,
you skulk between the lines, unruly,
unsubdued by blue-black blood magic.
I know no spelling potent enough
to excommunicate you.
Your touch recalls a sleepy lesson
a sun-shot afternoon blackboard
laced with vocabulary unremembered.
Although the repeated cadences, codas,
slip under my archaic skin.
You are a poem imperfectly translated,
a shift from a mellifluous language
I no longer speak.
daybook
wednesday is for burnt toast and
losing their shoes before the dinner-bell, it's
barefoot promises in the street, then
I'll have scrambled priorities on my toast and I want
my plastic plate with pirate ships, please, because
I like to make french fries walk the plank
friday is for fishing those
struggling words out of dishwater, to
cling on envelope backs in iridescent crayon, sometimes
later, I even understand connections between
charcoal and laughter and
lupins and desire
sunday is for sitting in the
kitchen, we're making kites while
my mind collects feathers, she says
why don't people have beaks? she's
eating stickers, I'm chewing a poem
tuesday is for baking and the
measured radio voices, it's
an interview with a blind mollusk researcher that
catches and holds on too long, he says
he distinguishes seaweed by smell, and
we're floury, yeast everywhere, then
some mariachi music, so we danced with
fruit on our heads and the bread was
burnt.
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