Prompt: Write an express poem.

Breakdown

The old green sedan sits at the side
of the highway exit, hood propped high.
It must be bad because his feet
are off the ground. He’s climbed
onto the frame on bent knee, head
hovering over the engine block
as if surrendering in child’s pose
or yielding to the third call
for prayer. I can see his shoulder
move, but his arm is lost in the tangle
of hoses, wires, and metal.
She sits in the front seat in the green
polo shirt of her fast-food
uniform with her elbow propped
in the space of the rolled-down
window and her head cradled
in her right hand. Her eyes are empty
and fixed on a distant point, or perhaps,
the near future where she has to explain
her lateness again. But her face shows
no sign of angst or anger, no activity
except for the autonomic open and close
of eyelids—just an expression
that screams, “I am done.”

~Pamela L. Taylor © 2013

Prompt (Two for Tuesday): Write a possible poem. Write an impossible poem.

Untitled

the bird in my hand
does not sing.
he cranes his neck
to preen iridescent
blue feathers, puffs
his chest and coos
when I brush his soft
yellow breast, nibbles
fingertips during feedings,
but he does not sing
for me. the bird in the bush
delights my path
in song, though I cannot
see his feathers, touch
his chest, or feel the quick
snip of his beak. Do I reach
into the bush, capture
his melody with both hands?
Do I let my adequate
companion fly away
for the possibility of
perfection unseen?

~Pamela L. Taylor © 2013

Prompt: Write an infested poem

During the Legislative Session

This place is crawling with lobbyists
and their plastered smiles and practiced
sleight of handouts hidden in fixed
handshakes. They smell power and swarm,
corner you in bathrooms, on slow elevators,
blind you with the golden flash of name
plaques pinned to left lapels. They roam
the halls seeking a warm and willing
host to hatch their agendas. If you let
them get too close, they will burrow
into your office, feed off your kindness,
take tiny bites of your soul.

~Pamela L. Taylor © 2013

Prompt: Write a sonnet (14-line poem that rhymes)

42

It takes the strength of many to be first,
the prayers of others to be the only.
With each. you witness humanity’s worst
while self-doubt plagues your nights long and lonely.

Your rage and failure is what they expect
in response to their spit and ridicule.
You will never get praise, awe, or respect,
especially when you win by their rules.

You crisscross disparate worlds seamlessly
charging ahead though the path is unclear.
Why does a man choose this dichotomy—
star on the field, but exiled to the rear?

Black and white united each time you’d swing,
but blind to the depths of your suffering.

~Pamela L. Taylor © 2013

Prompt: Write a broke poem

How I Know I’m Not Broken

Last week, a glass slipped from my soapy
hands and shattered across the kitchen floor.

I swept up fragments and chunks from each corner
and even used the vacuum hose to swallow

the last of the invisible bits. But yesterday,
bare feet found a forgotten shard

near the electric stove. I felt the sting,
but the slice of pain didn’t break the skin.

Just like today, when I said your name
without wincing as the letters left my lips.

~Pamela L. Taylor © 2013

Prompt: In case of <blank>

In Case of a Wild Hair

No. Not that wayward cowlick
strand refusing to be held down.
More sudden than when Bahamians
turn left as soon as traffic lights go
green, before oncoming cars switch
from brakes to gas. This move
starts in your blind spot, overtakes
your senses like the drone of cicadas
or the stench of diesel mixed with garbage
during summers in Kiev. To react,
you must throw your body into the power
of its sharp bend—like the way
I had to match his sudden, urgent kiss
and touch—heat for heat, flesh for flesh.

Thanks to Sion Dayson of paris im(perfect) for giving me the line that inspired this poem, “It would be a beautiful suffering.”

Prompt: Write a suffering poem

The Last Time I Got My Hair Braided
~after Natasha Trethewey

I sit with back and neck stiff-straight.
I dare not move my head from side
to side, can barely read the book propped
to eye-level on elbows. My lids close to breathe
into the sensation of scalp pulled by strands
of desperate hair clinging to their roots.

We’re well past the four hours Sonya said
it would take, before four hands sunk
into the thicket of coils beneath my crown.
I still feel a loose patch near my right ear,
soon-to-be replaced by ten or twelve
pencil-thin braids. This, I reason, is less
effort than the biweekly press-and-curl, less
expensive than weaving in Remy hair, more
natural than a no-lye relaxer. But the pain
is no different from the hot comb’s singe,
the sizzle of the flat iron, or the burn
of the “creamy crack.” It feels no
better than when my mother’s firm
hands tried to coax a rat-tailed comb
through my tender six-year old head.

It will be three months before I will
think about suffering this way again,
three months before I stay shut in my room,
all my fingers intent on unraveling
the plaits to separate what is real
from what is not, three months
until I see this spongy, tangled mass
again and decide to cut it off.

~Pamela L. Taylor © 2013

Today’s poem combines the bop  (a poetic form invented at Cave Canem), the story from the last novel I read, and a Motown song I’ve always loved.

Prompt (Two for Tuesday): Write a hunter/hunted poem.

The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game (The Tiger’s Wife: A Bop)

Bombs rain down on the zoo, exploding
the tiger’s world from captivity
to freedom—beyond the melted
bars, past paved and tree-lined streets–
guided by the pit of its stomach and a faint
familiar smell from a distant village.

What’s this ol’ world coming to?
Things just ain’t the same.

Only the hunter can save the village,
draped in the ursine skin of the game
he has won, wielding knives and setting
snares, preying on the ways and habits
of the yellow devil in the forest.
But the tiger slips from the grasp
of this master of the business of death—
as if protected by some invisible force.

What’s this ol’ world coming to?
Things just ain’t the same.

But she lays winter fowl on steel-teeth snaps
to bait the hunter’s anger into knee-deep
snow, where her tiger-husband waits to feast
on a human heart, pick flesh and organs
clean from the rib cage, and leave the hunter’s
empty skin strewn across blood-smeared fields.

What’s this ol’ world coming to?
Things just ain’t the same.

~Pamela L. Taylor © 2013