Incendiary Lit

The Contemporary Verse 2, Two-Day Poem Contest is awesome. It was a blast, and you can sign up for next year’s contest already to be part of the fun next year! Click here for that (and more specifics about the contest). Anyway, the ten words assigned were: VESSEL FILAMENT PROOF ARTICLE THORAX WRENCH BUCKLE SIENNA RATTLE and NERVOUS. I wrote a sestina first, and it was first thought best thought. But I also wrote a double abecedarian, a white-space lovin’ free verse poem, and a witty kind of Tony Hoagland-esque one. Here are the three I didn’t submit.

Article Z: Open letter to Dad

Article Z:
Beware the easy.
Chest ≈ thorax.
Defend the (breast) plate like Harmon Kilibrew.
Even Nabokov
finds his words in you:
ghost filament.
Harmon, batting lefty, nervous.
I (innocently) disregarded your
jovial spirit, kindness, (even your) high IQ.
Keep them as proof, pop.
Let them wrench nothing from our grasp. No.
Make them buckle as the change up’s thrown.
No. Don’t leave your cumulous rostrum.
Orate and listen. Disprove hell.
Perceptions are best by bulk.
Question letters after j.
Repeatedly. How soft are cumuli?
Serrated teeth of disease vanish
there, where all linearity is going
under like any sense of
verde in San Diego. Sun’s burned sienna all foliage.
Well, rattle these facts, Dad.
X marks the spot. The words. The rhythm. The music.
Yell. Make me the vessel. Throw heat, no lob.
Zeb. Remember me? Visit again with that sweet cryptomnesia.

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Krakin-Upa and the Two-Day Poem Contest

Danny slurred “Thor didn’t ‘ave an ax, he ‘ad a hammer!”
General laughter. “Thorax,” someone stressed, “not Thor’s ax.”
We sat, staring at ten words. Such discussion of poetry, that of young
students bearing fortified wine. Splitting time to the very filament.
“Two days? I need two weeks!” Kai complained, nervous.
“I don’t even have an idea.” He fiddled with his absurdly large
belt buckle. Not sure who told him tonight was western themed,
but we all appreciated the comic relief. Geri looked at an article
titled “Ten ways to remind your man that you’re a woman.”
“Wouldn’t one way suffice?” she asked the room. “Having a vagina.”
Wine poured from coffee cup vessel for the fruits of our jubilancy.
Grapes, mainly. Proof that we didn’t need to eat any damn apples.
Chad’s couch, a raw sienna with constellations of maroon drying
(to his chagrin the next morning). Someone turned on South Park.
Gerald explicated a wrench from Chad’s tattered Clue box,
remnant of his childhood, seeking some physical representation.
Some sort of absolute proof that wrench is not only a noun, verb,
but also something less symbolic and more tangible. He flexed it
in the lamplight like a baby testing the tensile strength of a tiny rattle.
“Don’t bother,” Eddy chimed, “it’s just the Matrix.” More laughs.
That’s mostly what we did. More than write, read, eat. We drank,
we laughed. Why do anything else? Who needs a poem on a night
when the room’s ready to erupt with laughter, like Krakin-Upa,
mighty volcano god of the apartments at St. Joseph and First.

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