Experimental Form Poetry
The Android's Prayer
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<title><em>The Android’s Prayer</em></title>
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<h1><em>The Android’s Prayer</em></h1>
<p id="prayerText" style="display: none;">
how can i know if this<br>
plush sofa is “forgiving”<br>
or your touch “exhilarating”<br>
or this fire “blistering”<br>
or your lavender dress “poignant”<br>
or my braided hair “bewitching”<br>
or your hazel eyes “craving”<br>
or the ash “innocent”<br>
or your kiss “agonizing”?<br>
all i know<br>
is to not know<br>
for myself. amen.
</p>
<button id="toggleButton">Sara's Prayer</button>
<script>
const prayerText = document.getElementById("prayerText");
const toggleButton = document.getElementById("toggleButton");
toggleButton.addEventListener("click", function () {
if (prayerText.style.display === "none") {
prayerText.style.display = "block";
} else {
prayerText.style.display = "none";
}
});
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Follow these steps:
1. Go to https://jsfiddle.net/
2. Copy and paste this code into the HTML box (beginning at <!DOCTYPE html> and ending at </html>).
3. Click Run at the top left.
4. In the Console box in the bottom right, click the Sara's Prayer button.
The poem displays. Enjoy.
Hybrid ARt & Poetry
Ghazal for Katrina
“The rest of the country needed to see and hear what was happening to this great Southern city. They needed to see that the reassuring pronouncements from federal officials meant absolutely nothing.”
-John Burnett, NPR correspondent reporting on Hurricane Katrina, August 2005
You went to the window and saw her storming, Katrina.
The eye that saw the eye Katrina.
The winds circled round, down fell the walls of the dollhouse
and sucked out the dolls to visit Katrina.
I couldn’t hear the people drown—
their voices swallowed, except Katrina.
A blue shoe that belonged to a child,
someone’s baby, someone’s baby Katrina.
She looked at me with mild disgust,
“I go by Katie—never Katrina.”
The putrid smell of filthy water—
pungent, pitiless, past Katrina.
I didn’t know she was deity
until I heard cries, “Dear God, Katrina!”
She’s here no more but still remains
in the faces of the young who smelled Katrina.
The drums begin, voices rising to the darkening sky,
a cry of war: “For Katrina!”
She came to my door and asked for entrance
I told her: “I do not know a Katrina.”
The girl, she found her mother bloated.
When he raped her, she asked him, “Are you Katrina?”
I took the food from a hand outstretched
and didn’t care there was blood under my fingernails. For you, Katrina.
More About Me
This poem was published in Touchstones: Journal of Literature and Art. To see more about my awards and publications, click below.
Hybrid ARt & Poetry
Visiting Alcatraz with my Teenager
I’m sober. Promise I really am this time—but I really want
that beer on the ferry. All these strangers, packed next
to me on all sides, and I feel that anxious itch creeping
up the back of my neck and I have to decide not to.
And again.
And again.
Instead, I buy my teen a cinnamon bun and take
a picture of them, wearing their favorite Cavetown beanie
from a concert we went to on our first visit
to San Francisco when I got completely sloshed
on three large ciders back to back after my second
attempt at cutting back—
Quitting?
But this time I really am sober. Painfully, honestly, nakedly
sober and I snap a photo of them, oblivious, clutching
their cinnamon bun, smiling in their braces.
We walk through the prison, seeing the cells where a few
actually escaped only to go to their presumed deaths.
I have a secret fear that I’ll get wrongly convicted.
Mistaken for some murderer, incarcerated for decades
until proven innocent.
But was it me?
Sometimes I don’t trust my own mind.
I am shocked by the beauty of the island. Red-orange
California fuchsia and magenta iceplant among the blue rose echeveria.
It’s strange that a man who killed his wife stood here.
I guess flowers don’t know violence.
My teen does a little photo shoot in front of one
of the dilapidated rocky buildings. They look uncomfortable,
carefully deciding how to pose. Peace sign? Pouty lips?
Stare off into the distance with a sexy face?
They take off their raincoat for best effect, and I snap
a few more. Cold rain is drizzling down their cheeks. Awkward
but innocent, they don’t know what it is to be a
prisoner yet.
Experimental Form Poetry
Passion and my {Sea persona}
Age twenty / short cropped and brilliant platinum hair / Philadelphia called first / I answered with {a prayer} to the god of Architecture / {hold me with your} gargoyle angels / endow me, Lord, with the {dignity of ancient} stone and a {crown} of dentils / {I clung to the simplicity} of the trees in the park / blossoms of spring, now fall {called} autumn/ now waiting, waiting / waiting to die /
Philadelphia held {an heir of Korea} / her hair / {her lips and touching hands} on the small of my back / exquisite / she {spoke to me} in kind words / No war. more hope / says she {with bending tongue over} dissolving letters / we walk around the park / beneath gargoyle sentinels / goddess of Architecture kept her promise of protection / one square of nature in a city of study / so much thought / I could hardly hear her black sweater / {the patter of} small feet / so still /
Pressing on, we met {the Sea} / She was waiting / patiently / fervently / {violently} / still {waiting for the drop of blood} I owed / She flowed in me, pulsing with brilliance and glory / what is glory but the whisper of salt and sand / a hissing in the hand of depths / I can’t swim {so I’m drowning in} land / I need my {liquid oxygen} / my mermaid voice / we paid a toll to see the Atlantic / paid to {return} / small roads lead to home / homespun gardens / starfish grow in mine / seaweed {so soft and fragile} in my mouth / swallowing rays of tender bites / blights / flights / I drove all night to see the ocean / all night, all day / for one moment / Stillness /
Father takes my profile portrait / {holding my breath} and a photo from behind / {to capture} the stillness of a heart beat and {the blood running} still and soft in the water and the wave and the wake / {so still with} the camera / recording {me in grayscale} / cut out my white / leave my coal to the sky / holding me at night / {my rebel} eyes two soft stars / my teeth an awkward constellation / {breath} a fig of night and Light / virtuoso and {dead} over home / this seasick tide / {feel her pulse} lap at my feet / deep in the pool of shallow foam / I see a face / blonde hair, swimming tear / I drove all night {to claim my reflection}
Hybrid ARt & Poetry
The Last Day of the Lantern Festival
fat raindrops distort the scene \ from the backseat of the Uber \ the blur of a man in a khaki rain jacket \ passes a technicolor toy stand \ while the elderly shopkeeper props himself \ against the metal door frame \ we duck into a bookstore \ selling only graphic novels in Chinese \ to avoid the rain \ buy a bundle \ the kind shop owner tells my daughter \ she needs to eat more cookies \ young woman blowing oversized bubbles \ near the buzz of the bus stop \ fireworks two alleys back startle us \ a crowd gathers \ steaming spring rolls burn our impatient tongues \ black and white Buddha mural \ backdrops the festival \ eclipsed by a lovely woman \ with blush pink umbrella \
My Art and Writing Publications
These two photos, "Buddha and the Pink Umbrella" and "Lantern Festival in the Rain" are to be published in Ponder Review. To see more about my awards and publications, click below.
Hybrid ARt & Poetry
Echo
Here in the icy shadow
of a towering pine
at dusk—stillness—too
awake, deer tracks
under my frigid feet,
calm as the fierce waves
break on a vigilant
lighthouse in Maine,
and in the half-second
it takes to realize
where I am not,
I remember my daughter
sleeps on a tiny
bed, my husband
reads the other
news, my mother
cooks a family
dinner, my sister
carves her nickname
on a bone-dry stick
and thinks of nothing
but the warmth of the
campfire, my uncle
fishes for melon bellied
trout with bulbous black
eyes by the silky lake
where I am not, my son
waits safe inside
darkness, years unborn
in his birthmother’s
umber belly, my god
sleeps on a feather
pillow beside my daughter,
and I am in the place
that I am—still lost—
holding these visions
like a rust red iris
unfolds it’s helpless,
waxy petals on the last
day it blooms,
before the sun burns
it to fine dust, ashy
nothingness.
Until I turn and run
to find my home
for the night, run
until I must stop
to make a bed of pine
needles and damp
dirt, under a decaying
log, daylight dying
by an unnamed pond.
I cry out to my sleeping
god, trembling and wrecked
on the rocky bank
with only my echo
off the piercing stones
to keep me company.
I scream for help
and no one answers
but myself.
More About Me
This poem won first place in 2019 Touchstones: Journal of Literature and Art poetry contest. To see more about my awards and publications, click below.
Hybrid ARt & Poetry
Yachats
when I think of you—
no, of us—
my mind goes back
to the Oregon coast,
five lazy days
hiking through moss-covered
ponderosa pines,
eating fish and chips,
buying soda from a woman
who still rents out DVDs,
and descending and climbing
stairs built of wooden ties
lining the steep cliffs
littered with lighthouses.
my legs hurt a little
by day three.
walking hand in hand
along the shore,
scaring off sandpipers
searching for the elusive mayfly.
we kissed at length in the fog,
knowing no one was watching.
I rolled up my pants
and put my feet in the water
but you scuttled away—
too cold, you said—
but I wanted the frigid ache,
at least for a minute.
each beach was different.
this one cobble stones
and pea size pebbles,
that one fine sand
with the rocky stacks
just offshore,
another with a river running
all the way to the ocean,
a return home.
one had a mysterious
garden of cairns—
that one you loved.
the beach by our place
we were entirely alone
with just the wind
and the tremendous waves.
another we visited
at low tide, twisted rocks
made fine homes for anemones,
clumps of mussels
and barnacles.
but the beach at Yachats
stank of decay
near the rotting carcass
of a young beached gray whale.
they couldn’t tow it back to the ocean
to decompose with dignity
so it laid there naked,
baking and rancid.
you got close to check it out
but I stood with my back turned,
blinking in the harsh sunlight,
kicking at a dead jelly
and listening to the waves rolling in,
as though nothing
had changed
More About Me
This poem was published in Touchstones: Journal of Literature and Art. To see more about my awards and publications, click below.
Collection of Poetry
Tanka Diary
I don’t grow tomatoes so when weeding
spare this snail and that but grow tired—toss
the last one in the garbage bag with some guilt
someone cut off the top of our accidental
and unapproved peach tree—but it
felt like they cut off my limbs and fruit instead
in a short summer downpour I danced with
my four-year-old, splashed in puddles on the
driveway—a lesson she recalls at fifteen
she lies on my bedroom floor, curled up on
one side, her thoughts a mystery to me
like secrets lie on the floor of the ocean
my mom gifts my kids three beaded jump ropes
I remember double-dutch at recess—
back then playgrounds were not built to protect me
when I see houses destroyed—boards, shingles
and couches strewn across the lawn—I can’t
help thinking tornadoes only do their best
a man dances with ribbons on campus
while I sit to write—he creates an orange
blossom in the setting sun—then leaves me
upturned end table—broken leg rests on the side—
I can see where troubled screws once held
cheap things together—now ripped from faux wood
I can now see the expanse of the universe,
so burn me to ash and scatter
me—not in the Atlantic—but on Saturn
why are there hundreds of green flags on the
lawn—too apathetic to ask—what does
that say about me and curiosity
lemon leaves against the azure sky—I’ve
been here 18 years—another fall, one
more child, a different wife and another life
three compliments today—two about my
pink sparkly Doc Martens—another girl
simply said “I just think you are so pretty”
reminded today about the apricot
tree in grandma’s neighborhood—her canned
fruit made the best sweet, tart, oniony chicken
a plant with large flat leaves wraps around a
bench near the new library—which one do
you suppose is overgrowing the other
in ketamine yesterday I felt like
I lived a thousand years—today I drink
diet soda and pop more anxiety meds
I take a photo of the free queer group
therapy poster at the university,
pop my head in—but I won’t attend
Hybrid ARt & Poetry
Coronavirus Dreams
I sometimes dream about making love
in southern Utah red rock desert.
Maybe on the green of some golf course
or near a spring or a falls,
where new life thrives on the red bones of some
ancestral creature, now turned to lovely dust.
My best friend Bridget and I drove to the desert
and skinny dipped
in the pool at the motel.
We were dead drunk
and all I could see were the electric pink
flowers by the side of the pool,
vivid but mortal at the same time,
like they were begging to be cut,
and it made me think of a funeral home.
I laughed at Bridget’s joke
but I wanted to cry.
Static crackled on the TV
left on in the lobby.
“… 3,018,491 deaths as of April 17.”
More About Me
This poem was published in Touchstones: Journal of Literature and Art. To learn more about my awards and publications, click below.
Hybrid ARt & Poetry
Portrait of Us at Kamas Country Store, Uinta Mountains
We were driving through the forest
late September, the aspen leaves turned
lemon, rust, and scarlet,
when we came upon
a little country store.
I’d never noticed it before.
A small log cabin, just two rooms,
one for selling and one for cooking.
I roamed the aisles, picking up
smoked mozzarella here,
a sasquatch sticker there,
and a piece of pecan turtle fudge.
Instead of the Redd’s I wanted
I found hard kombucha—
even better. The prices were high
but I wasn’t surprised
considering the topless Porsche in the parking lot.
The overpriced trinkets and souvenirs
aimed at out-of-towners visiting Park City.
We weren’t tourists per se—
we lived just an hour away—
but just as foreign,
two women holding hands,
touching the small of your back,
sneaking a kiss in the beef jerky section,
in a state where Trump swept the election.
My mind goes back to the girl I was,
staying in Kamas every summer
at our family cabin,
reading the Book of Mormon by day,
hoping I wouldn’t be bad anymore if I pray
hard enough. Now here I am, in line
with my hard kombucha
in a tank top and short shorts
more like the tourists than the good
Christian farmer I could
have been, would have been.
As we drove home,
I devoured the fudge, wishing
I didn’t feel ashamed of us.
More About Me
This poem has been published three times in different journals and anthologies. To learn more about my awards and publications, click below.