Can I confess just how much I love the spring? Spring and summer are my favorite seasons, for sure. There's something pleasingly depressing about the fall, of course, but winter is just shit. Sorry, winter lovers, but cold and I don't like each other and never will. The older I get, the more my body rejects cold.
If we chart the progress of the poem a day exercise, we're now on the downhill slide, the denouement, heading toward "resolution." Ha. I began this cycle reluctantly, begrudgingly, and am now quite glad that I gave myself over to it. Yes, my creativity (for lack of a better word) has increased. My well is filling. Though I haven't created a wealth of poems that make my chest crack with pride, I am feeling the possibility that regular writing brings. I remind myself that I need to practice what I preach -- write daily, if only to remind myself that I'm alive. And thinking.
Today's poetry prompt: Write about a poem about a superhero coming to your house and confronting you about something. Somewhere in the poem, you have to state what your superpower is. (Taken from http://www.agodon.com/uploads/2/9/4/3/2943768/writing_prompts_by_kelli_russell_agodon.pdf)
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Who Feels the Power
Wonder Woman rings my bell
and even though I've just come out of the shower
and am wrapped in a stained and fraying towel,
hair dripping on the carpet,
hairy legs dappled with drops
that fling themselves against the petulant and circling cats,
I know, somehow,
that I've got to be present.
I unlock the door to her tall Amazonian magnificence
glowing through the storm door,
her golden belt cinched around her 16 inch waist,
her wide commanding hips in their spangled panties,
her torpedo breasts jutting out
like massive golden bullets
aimed at my heart,
and her long wild hair
snaking into the spring air
in exclamation points.
Laurie, she says,
what the hell is your problem,
arms akimbo, blocking the quantum air simmer
of her invisible jet
parked sideways across my pathetic lawn.
When you were a child, she says,
reaching forward to open my door,
stepping through and pushing me back,
into the untidy living room,
tripping me backwards over
my expensive clogs,
until I topple onto the sofa,
towel springing loose
and revealing to Wonder and the Saturday morning street
my breasts and pouchy stomach
and public nest,
when you were a child, she says,
you loved the notion of flight,
of freedom and invisibility,
you loved magic bracelets that stopped
bullets and criminals,
you loved independence,
costumes, and long nylon legs,
massive hair and boots,
the way I appeared in the nick of time
to save the day.
Now look at you.
What do you want to save?
Yourself?
Your paltry soul or its
middle class routine?
What happened to your sense
of importance,
of magic, of adventure?
What happened to your
wonder, woman?
I stand,
naked and nearly dry,
and pull the towel around my waist,
letting my breasts hang free.
The heat of her anger blends
with my shame,
with the heat of exposure,
and the twinge of muscles
pulled and stretched,
with my flat feet sticking to the floor,
and my fifty one years
and my weight on the world,
with my short gray hair
plugged into my scalp
with tentative tenacity.
Her x-ray eyes
burn my warty skin,
her righteous stance
mocks my weak knees,
her hourglass impossibility
dizzies me.
But then something cracks inside,
something opens wide inside my chest,
and I want to shout,
I want to push Wonder Woman out
to her stupid gelatin plane,
and that crack fills me with a cleansing fire
that rises up my throat and out my mouth
as words that snap and crackle
like a halo.
Listen, I say,
my importance, my flight, is invisible.
It lives in sound,
in letters, in song,
in memory and image and conversation.
It lives in my daughter,
who is magnificent.
It lives in each of her breaths.
It lives and loves in her
and in the lives of students
who touch me with their stories,
with their words.
It lives in the mingling of our breath
in a series of rooms,
in lives on paper and now
in the cloud.
It lives here -- and I tap my bare breast --
where my middle class soul
thrills to the sound of those words
and to the evocation of images
and to the rippling tide of lives
that cross and intersect with it
every day,
in poetry and story and song.
Listen, I say,
you are powerful, like Athena,
and you are certainly fierce.
I admire your passion, your sudden
intervention into suffering lives.
But you are also sad,
because solitary,
and you have no children,
real or imagined.
And then she vanishes,
invisible as her plane,
into the open door
and the waiting world.
Naked, I stand
in front of that world,
fierce and on fire,
one hundred percent aware of who I am
and fully present:
a mother,
a wife,
a writer,
a teacher,
an aging woman
who feels the wonder
that holds her here --
alive and powerful.
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