We got some snow last night and then we got some freezing rain. This made for a lovely, hard mixture that greeted me as I walked out to my car this morning. After almost falling three times (yes, I know I’m a klutz but it was slippery!) I managed to get my car started, locate my snow scraper, and start hacking away at the ice. Twenty minutes later I was just getting into my car and heading to work. This is where the allure of winter starts to dim…
In other news, after crunching numbers, adding up student loans, and crunching more numbers, RJ and I have decided to wait a year before purchasing a home. I would advise anyone who has significant school debt to not add up all you loans unless you want to seriously ruin your day. Mine was ruined, to the point of tears ruined, but I bounced back when I realized that we could make a significant dent in all our other debt and be in a better financial position in a year and then look into buying a home.
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I subscribed to Poetry about a month and half ago, only to learn that my subscription does not start until January 2009. This irritates mostly because one of my mentors from MSU, Nicky Beer, is featured in the magazine. I plan to go buy it at the newsstand, but it would have been nice to receive it at home. Anyway. Both of the poems featured, Prairie Octopus and Ad Hominem, Nicky read to our poetry workshop this summer.
Ad Hominem
Nicky Beer
The Poet:
Fugitive lung, prodigal intestine—
where’s the pink crimp in my side
where they took you out?
The Octopus:
It must be a dull world, indeed,
where everything appears
to be a version or extrapolation
of you.
The birds are you.
The springtime is you.
Snails, hurricanes, saddles, elevators—
everything becomes
you.
I, with a shift
of my skin, divest my self
to become the rock
that shadows it.
Think of when
your reading eyes momentarily drift,
and in that instant
you see the maddening swarm of alien ciphers submerged within the text
gone before you can focus.
That’s me.
Or your dozing revelation
on the subway that you are
slowly being
digested. Me again.
I am the fever dream
in which you see your loved ones
as executioners. I am also their axe.
Friend, while you’re exhausting
the end of a day
with your sad approximations,
I’m a mile deep
in the earth, vamping
my most flawless impression
of the abyss
to the wild applause of eels.
Source: Poetry (December 2008).
Prairie Octopus, Awake
Nicky Beer
The night’s turned everything to junipers
shagged & spooked with cerulean chalk-fruit,
weird berries whiffing of Martians in rut.
I forget this isn’t my universe
sometimes. Sometimes I think I was falling
most of my life to land here, a lone skirl
in the immaculate hush. In my world
I waltzed with my ink-self, my black shantung.
Owls swallow vowels in stilled trees. It’s not
sleeplessness, it’s fear of what the dark will
do if I don’t keep a close eye on it.
Blue minutes leak from the pricked stars’ prisms,
seep into the earth unchecked. Just as well—
I’ve hardly enough arms to gather them.
Source: Poetry (December 2008).
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Brianna Pike 