Wednesday, April 7, 2010

April 7, 2010


Currently, I am working on a new collection of poetry but this group will be all prose poems. I really like the format of a prose poem; my mentor through graduate school, poet Dennis Schmitz, often commented on my poems that they were really STORIES. Since then, I find that many of my poems seem to beg to be in a more narrative, story sort of composition.

In this poem, I am trying to capture how extra-ordinary this teenager (Moira) was to my twelve year old sensibility.


CHERRIES

Moira was my older sister’s friend. Her skin was as delicate as the milk glass candy dish on our mother’s highboy. I was only twelve but I used to think about her green eyes and how a boy could get carried away, just looking. Moira had a pink cardigan with thin, pale yellow shell buttons. One time she stayed for dinner and my dad was so impressed when Moira told a story about how she once tasted escargot. She stretched out the word and we just stared, our forks hanging in the air: s-carrrr- gooooooo. My mom told Moira they tasted like dried up chicken gizzards. “Oh, my,” Moira explained in her throaty, grown up voice. “You must drown them in hot butter first -- makes all the difference.” For dessert, my mother served sweet Rainier cherries, shining wet in the silver colander. “Yes, cherries!” Moira exclaimed.

2 comments:

  1. A thought...maybe we need less time being trendy and pretentious – trying to be someone we are not, trying to impress - and more time looking inside and discovering who we really are and enjoying that genuine glee when we find our "cherries".

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  2. You're too modest: I know Dennis Schmitz was a sincere admirer of your work. What stays in my mind with this prose poem is just that "milk glass candy dish" right off the bat--you have such a fine touch--I literally think of your having delicate hands--with details such as those.


    Shelley
    http://dustbowlpoetry.wordpress.com

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