How to write a poem
is one thing you thought you’d never forget
but after a while even the wobble escapes you.
Wheels warp, refuse to align.
Months of days passing the place you stashed it
before you notice it’s gone.
Stolen? At first it seems so, a ragged hole
the size of your fist
in the door just below the lock.
Nothing else has disappeared though,
at least nothing you can quite call up.
Do abandoned fragments simply erase themselves
from shadows and shelves?
Does memory fold the extra fabric, sew smooth the seam?
Conservation of energy perhaps.
Painted angels, band T-shirts, decisions made
by an earlier self who absconded with the packing list.
You the robber and the robbed.
You the bystander who can’t quite recall
seeing what you saw.
A third of the way
into a paperback unearthed from a battered box in the closet,
you find a letter from someone named Dave
to someone named Matt. You’ve know a dozen of each
at least, could be any
or none. A bent hand on notebook paper. Dave scrapes open
a corner of his heart.
Matt folds this into a story
that means something
until it doesn’t.
Maybe if you fall in love again.
That always shifts your center of gravity.
The poetry is tedious but oh, the surge!
Synaptic zing, oil and air,
the whole earth tilts downhill
as you fly over rime-seared shoots, the salted skin
of open road. Winter stands no chance
against your burn. Something like that
could certainly work a poem from the clench
of its frozen hull. But what comes first?
The love,
the words,
or the warming back to life?
How to write a poem
that spreads you
like wings
legs
marmalade?
Like flayed,
like the way the red maple unfurls eventually from its crimson fist?
Like a page?
You could use training wheels.
Letters, as Dave knows,
grip the earth. Each begins with a salutation
then a wish for well being.
Before the next stroke, a thread of desire
tracing the outline
of what’s gone missing.
You pick up a pen and draw a circle
on the lined blank back.
You ink this shape again and again.
Expansion, contraction,
it breathes itself into a different circle altogether.
It becomes crankshaft
and wheel, it becomes chain links spinning
on a multitude of rivets
fast enough to slide off the page
then narrow again
and narrower still until you finally tip
into the scuffed space where poetry
used to live,
your momentum ripping the seams
spilling a jumble of forgotten things.
The ragged hole
in the door. You slip your hand up through,
flip the lock
and steal back
what’s yours.
Image: Michael Valenti, Spring Ride, at VeloTykes
Shannon E. Williams 
My husband and I were arguing about a bench we wanted to buy and put in part of our backyard, a part which is actually a meadow of sorts, a half acre with tall grasses and weeds and the occasional wild flower because we do not mow it but leave it scrubby and unkempt. This bench would hardly ever be used and in summer when the grasses were high would remain partially hidden from view. We both knew we wanted the bench to be made of teak so that it would last a long time in the harsh weather and so that we would never have to paint it. Teak weathers to a soft silver that might, in November or March, disappear into the gray hills that are the backdrop of our lives. My husband wanted a four foot bench and I wanted a five foot bench. This is what we argued about. My husband insisted that a four foot bench was all we needed, since no more than two people (presumably ourselves) would ever sit on it at the same time. I felt his reasoning was not only beside the point but missed it entirely; I said what mattered most to me was the idea of the bench, the look of it there, to be gazed at with only the vaguest notion it could hold more people than would ever actually sit down. The life of the bench in my imagination was more important than any practical function the bench might serve. After all, I argued, we wanted a bench so that we could look at it, so that we could imagine sitting on it, so that, unexpectedly, a bird might sit on it, or fallen leaves, or inches of snow, and the longer the bench, the greater the expanse of that plank, the more it matched its true function, which was imaginary. My husband mentioned money and I said that I was happier to have no bench at all, which would cost nothing, than to have a four foot bench, which would be expensive. I said that having no bench at all was closer to the five foot bench than the four foot bench because having no bench served the imagination in similar ways, and so not having a bench became an option in our argument, became a third bench. We grew very tired of discussing the three benches and for a day we rested from our argument. During this day I had many things to do and many of them involved my driving past other houses, none of which had benches, that is they each had the third bench, and as I drove past the other houses I could see a bench here and a bench there; sometimes I saw the bench very close to the house, against a wall or on a porch, and sometimes I saw the bench under a tree or in the open grass, cut or uncut, and once I saw the bench at the end of the driveway, blocking the road. Always it was a five foot bench that I saw, a long sleek bench or a broken down bench, a bench with a slatted back or a bench with a solid, carved back, and always the bench was empty. But I knew that for my husband the third bench was only four feet long and he saw always two people sitting on it, two happy or tired people, two people who were happy to be alive or two people tired from having worked hard enough to buy the bench they were sitting on. Or they were happy and tired, happy to have reached the end of some argument, tired from having had it. For these people, the bench was an emblem of their days, which were fruitful because their suffering had come to an end. On my bench, which was always empty, nothing had come to an end because nothing had begun, no one had sat down, though the bench was always there waiting for exactly that to happen. And the bench was always long enough so that someone, if he desired to, could lie all the way down. That day passed. Another day followed it and my husband and I began, once more, to discuss the bench. The sound of our voices revealed a renewed interest and vigor. I thought I sensed in him a coming around to my view of the bench and I know he sensed in me a coming around to his view of the bench, because at one point I said that a four foot bench reminded me of rough notes towards a real bench while a five foot bench was like a fragment of an even longer bench and I admitted it was at times hard to tell the difference. He said he didn’t know anything about the difference between rough notes and fragments but he agreed that between the two benches there was, possibly, just perhaps—he could imagine it—very little difference. It was, after all, only a foot we were talking about. And I think it was then, in both of our minds, that a fourth bench came into being, a bench that was only a foot long, a miniature bench, a bench we could build ourselves, though of course we did not. This seemed to be, essentially, the bench we were talking about. Much later, when the birds came back, or the leaves drifted downwards, or the snow fell, slowly and lightly at first, then heavier and faster, it was this bench that we both saw when we looked out the window at the bench we eventually placed in the meadow which continued to grow as if there were no bench at all.
Mary Ruefle
ah what a lovely response from dmf / Ruefle (a favorite). This is wonderful writing – smirk… re-mark-able… thank you and here’s to 2018…
“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.”
-T.S. Eliot
Your legs repeating themselves across a broken field, across the rainy syntax of
October, pink brushstrokes, ten feet or so ahead of the other pack of girls, your
legs turning the corner of the athletic building, your legs repeating an argument
to the ground, your legs shouting their own names. The day you
became your best self, nothing seemed to happen. You weren’t any lighter, or
wiser, actually, you had three children at this point and you were exhausted,
probably heavier than you’d ever been. Nothing changed in any way except that
you were now, without question, your best self, which you’d come to think of as
a word existing not in service of itself, but only in relation to others. During the
long run when the lungs become tired, the brain loses focus, forgets the body
completely, floods itself with rainwater. The field between the words becomes
muddied, the line where one self finishes and another begins washes away.
THCarter Prepositions
Hello my friend. I have been gone so long and am comforted to come back and find you still here. Your writing always reflects a part of some of the thoughts I have been having, and yet goes further, says more, reveals thoughts that I can then mull and follow. I’m enjoying poking through all the pieces I’ve missed. I think of your stories often.