Category Archives: Quagmire

dire

Barbara Turney Wieland, Belonging, Birds, Choices, Dance, Death, Dream Imagery, Men & Women, Napowrimo, Night, nostalgia, Pain, Quagmire, Rain, Relationships, Response Poem, Short Story, Time

napowrimo day 8

.

quagmire rises to release her/his words

up to no good

no bad – birds knife at the dirt to wake 

up the dead

inside her/his head

he/she’s never slept in the depth

night/morning yawning

from an 8-foot down-echo chamber 

chill whispers come up

comeuppances

            rain down 

                     steady as

                               steady as

                                                               chatter 

                                                                        chatter

remember me

the embers of me

unscattered

you buried me

while i was alive

and once again

made sure i died

haggard

.

remember me

untethered

tongues of me

crawl into your bed

to unsettle your raw bride

6-inches into her/his skin

shrivel galaxies hidden

everywhere aware

here/there

.

remember me

can never be rid of me

foolish one/twos

stamp your shoes on me

spit your 7-curses on me

time again

again

dismember me

remember this

statutory lying-in begins

endless as sins

lying in waiting

there’s no escape 

remember me

remember me

.

.

April 8, 2021

btw

NaPoWriMo

https://www.napowrimo.net/

And last but not least, our (optional) prompt. I call this one “Return to Spoon River,” after Edgar Lee Masters’ eminently creepy 1915 book Spoon River Anthology. The book consists of well over 100 poetic monologues, each spoken by a person buried in the cemetery of the fictional town of Spoon River, Illinois.

Today, I’d like to challenge you to read a few of the poems from Spoon River Anthology, and then write your own poem in the form of a monologue delivered by someone who is dead. Not a famous person, necessarily – perhaps a remembered acquaintance from your childhood, like the gentleman who ran the shoeshine stand, or one of your grandmother’s bingo buddies. As with Masters’ poems, the monologue doesn’t have to be a recounting of the person’s whole life, but could be a fictional remembering of some important moment, or statement of purpose or philosophy. Be as dramatic as you like – Masters’ certainly didn’t shy away from high emotion in writing his poems.