Maureen Thorson’s NaPoWriMo prompt: “Today’s prompt (optional, as always) veers slightly away from our ekphrastic theme. To get started, pick a number between 1 and 10. Got your number? Okay! Now scroll down until you come to a chart. Find the row with your number. Then, write a poem describing the taste of the item in Column A, using the words that appear in that row in Column B and C. For bonus points, give your poem the title of the word that appears in Column A for your row, but don’t use that word in the poem itself.” Obviously, you'll have to go to the website to see the chart.
Robert Lee Brewer’s Poem-a-Day prompt: “[W]rite a reaction poem. Your poem can include the action that prompts the reaction, or it can start in medias res at the actual reaction. There are all manner of scientific reactions out there, as well as human reactions to local or world events.”
Merged the two prompts again . . . in a tanka, once more.
Watermelon
glared at me, mocking
the butcher knife in my hand.
A strange reaction
from something I’m gonna splash . . .
since soon we’re gonna be one.
—Draft by Vince Gotera [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.]
Many thanks to my partner Renee for a suggestion that helped me get this last line and get out of the poem!
As you may have noticed, I have been striving to write small poems both in the April poems so far as well as in the Stafford Challenge. Well, Alan went whole hog the other way, with a behemoth 71 lines! And merged the two prompts to boot.
Banana
When I was an adjunct faculty member
of the University of Tennessee English Department
during the early 1990s, for a couple of years
I was assigned a cubicle
in the approximate center of campus
on the top floor of McClung Tower.
From those twelfth-floor windows, we could see the administration building.
The internet hadn’t gotten a proper hold just yet—
when it did, one of the first things we learned to do
was to look up answers to Disney trivia questions
in a McDonald’s promotion
so we could get free food. It was usually fries
and sometimes a sandwich, if we were lucky.
Nobody talked in detail
about adjunct instructor pay even then
except among ourselves, and listening
to carefully revealed secrets, and learning
not to listen in a large room full of cubicles
seemed sometimes like courtesy
and sometimes like denial.
When I had lived in Tuscaloosa just years before,
graduate students had potluck parties
in part so we could be sure our friends were eating.
For years, I received $626 a month
on a nine-month contract
as a graduate teaching assistant, about half
a dollar more than minimum wage. My wife earned
minimum wage for years until she graduated
and got a slightly better job with a drug store chain
that does not exist anymore. The graduate director
of my department, after one of many attempts
to get the university to raise the English GTA pay,
once told me of a dismissed attempt with the line,
“Too bad, so sad, your dad,” which was the punchline
of a joke that started by a college student’s sending a postcard home
that read, “No mon, no fun.—Your son.” He put a rasp
in his voice when he said it, like a tired old guy. He knew
I knew that joke. I thought the world of him
until that moment. Some of us were mailing checks
to meet payment deadlines knowing that our accounts
were empty, due for deposits only a couple of days away.
It was before new electronic/internet banking systems
had come into play. Doing that now would bounce a check.
I had grown up when bouncing a check would be unpardonable.
I have bounced only one check in my life,
buying an engraved name plate
for someone who dropped out of school
to enter business. I thought my gesture of confidence
would mask my quiet disagreement with his plans.
It was the 1980s. Some people misunderstood
the “greed is good” line from a movie.
In the common mailroom of the UT English Department,
a graduate student told another she was dating
someone mostly because he always took her out to eat.
Years later, at my current institution,
in the department’s common mailroom
I overheard a student worker say the same thing.
The graduate students think I’m joking
when I suggest they should take a sealable plastic bag
with them when they attend events.
I imagine a couple of them
have figured out an extra cup, kept dry,
can hold a palmful of cheese cubes,
maybe with some mixed nuts on top.
Nobody tries to peek into a cup
you hold by its top rim by your side.
Often, my colleagues and I bring to work
cakes, cookies, crackers, and fruit, and we always
overorder food for events so we have extra
to bring back to our common room.
Some days, it lasts less than an hour.
—Draft by Thomas Alan Holmes [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.]
Friends, won’t you comment, please? Love to know what you’re thinking. Thanks!
Ingat, everyone. ヅ |
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