Day 29 brings us Ohio poet Nathan Moore, with a poem entitled “Business Casual Pajamas.”

THOUGHTS ABOUT THE POEM

After a quick walk through Nathan’s work, you begin to recall any number of pleasure centers you forgot about. The first line of the following poem sets the stage for agitation. What chaos awaits? Just a little reordering of our known world.

Business Casual Pajamas

Panic plans the day’s shape. A confusion of chains. Steady:
no one stole the toothbrush. My portrait is not centered
in a haze of candle smoke. Even so, during the instant
of preoccupation, the aquarium goes green and my daughter
diapers the cat.

I shake stock props from a box: a bootlace, an object
that remains unnamed. Elevators and highways rumble
through my personal anecdotes. My precious crescent
is brittle like an antique handgun but shiny like the sheen
of soap on a daffodil.

There’s no teaching what the neighbor’s know: frozen
balloons and fishnet. Minutes are ellipses. Now is
the hour when gnats binge on heat. I’ll paint the trees
to resemble street lights and eliminate cover. Still,
a melody begs . . . the whirring nowhere.

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A Poet a Day is a month-long celebration of poets and poetry, in honor of National Poetry Month. Writers reserve all rights to their work, and all work appears with their permission.

**

The following comes from Read Write Poem’s prompt #87, working with vowel sounds. I decided to work with “A”.

Avenue A was the first place I’d look for Tina
when she disappeared. It wasn’t anything psychic.
I knew her haunts by the way
she’d crawl around the parquet floor scrawling loops
with bisecting pens, muttering Sweet Jesus
what will our Christian soldiers do now that the war
has wound to a halt?

Starting at the back of Alphabet City
she’d head north where St. Al’s parish was a shadow
behind canopies, its towers
pointing like missalettes at God.
There, the patron saint of Gaston Isles would hang
her wine drunk hair from the tallest perch
until all the birds came back.

The following poem feels rather undone to me. It comes from Read Write Poem prompt # 85 image prompt, “Cemetery in Malvern”. It’s a sepia print of two men squatting in a graveyard. I went in a couple of directions before I boiled it down to the idea that these men were old buddies, not necessarily friends, but former coworkers. They were grave diggers – one of them still worked there, the other had left but decided to walk through on a morning and find his old friend. Obviously, in this setting, what more could you have but a conversation that somehow relates to work?

GROUNDS CREW MORNING

You said this work shouldn’t hurt. It only did once, when a girl
of nine or ten came to a grave with her dog at the end
of a long leash. She was right out of Rockwell print, red hair,
freckles, yellow sun dress and floppy hat to spare her neck.

I imagined she was here to see a dead grandparent. I didn’t
make a habit of watching people pass through.
There was something about the girl. Too reserved
for her age. Not banged up about the dead body
under the grass.

She was the loveliest thing I’d ever want to see from the shade
of a tall pine. I stopped thinking about all the rest I had to dig.
That’s when I remembered how you said never check the graves,
forget the dates, be content
with whoever it is you think is down there.

This one time I drew the nerve, waited until she and the dog
were gone then walked to the stone. Did the math
on someone named Margaret. “Loving Mom,” dead a year.
Figured God sometimes leaves the little ones here to work it out.

The following piece is a result of ReadWritePoem’s prompt #84, brought to us from the fantastical mind of Buckeye State poet, Nathan Moore (not to be confused with the Virginian songwriter, Nathan Moore). I can’t explain the prompt in complete detail here, other to say that it involves using a dictionary, and that it was great fun.

PEAS & DOPE

Remember when Tim aimed his peashooter
from the veranda at Sally with her D cups
sunbathing in the yard and launched?

We scattered like a post-traumatic waterfall,
twelve rug rats through the arborvitae
where her father, the self-made senior controller

of his Masonic village, stood from his poker game –
a royal flush at that – and whipped each of us
for castigating the one beautiful thing

his sperm ever made. Remember how the slash
burned the backs of our thighs? Bent over chairs
as the old man sang Yankee Doodle Dandy, we cried

Daddy whenever his belt cracked and belched.
Years later, after an unwarranted search
and seizure put me away for a long weekend,

the sheriff sized up my dreadlocks, said us hippies
had no clue about pain. So I dropped my pants,
let my scars correct him.

The following poem comes from Read Write Poem’s prompt #83 – a “wordle” that looks like this.

SEANCE

I’d like to burn intentions into a powder stump,
apply a pinky’s worth atop my tongue

for later when loitering souls stop in
to talk about the aftertaste of wasted meat and bones.

It’s too late to caution Thomas not to take
that river plunge, to yell, “Hold tight to the rope,”
instead of “Jump.”

“Grab the fallen log,” instead of, “Go with the flow.”

“Fight as if your life will end,” rather than

“Surrender, let go.

Come tell me what it’s like when you’re there.”

The following poem comes from Read Write Poem’s prompt #81 – a picture of some sort of donkey-man looking quite glum sitting under a spindly umbrella. Dana Guthrie Martin, RWP’s resident maven, shared the image, which is brought to us by nwolc.

DONKEY BOY

This is how it feels to be kicked in the heart.

Worst is the hole left behind, and the bubble where ribs bulge back.

Last night, after a long round of such talk,
Sally said I should do a fire walk. I’d feel great,

better than all the therapy that hadn’t cured a thing.

If hot coals didn’t work then nothing would.

Just me and a few smoldered thoughts
with which to cross the threshold.

I’d know everything I needed to know
as soon as I tasted burn at the back of my throat.

Half way I’d see the beauty in the end of things.

How like cures like, what bows wrap shut.

None of which means much atop flame,
oxtail smoking nearby

for later when we’ll eat and tell stories of our lives made of flesh.

An hour into work I forget I got up from bed
at all, how the cold fir floor was a shock,
that the kettle took too long to warm.
I’m sure I touched the curve of my wife’s back
before I left, certain she rolled over, reached
in the dark for my face.

I remember the frost, how my car wouldn’t start
then coughed down Milwaukee Ave through lights
that blinked yellow this early.

Now, finished cleaning the piss stalls, set to mop
the bar where last night’s smoke still hangs,
all I can think about is Gilbert in the ice cream –
his weakness, he said when I caught him
sneaking it once, too hard for him to deny
the tall vanilla drum just beneath the sinks.

Smiling at me elbow deep, I know the morning
can only go three ways. The version where I rush him
to the ER, his fourth diabetic shock in a month.
The one where our boss walks in, fires him
on the spot because he warned him last time
about the ice cream. Or the one we actually get to,

where I call Gilbert over to the lunch I forgot
I brought, three cuts of pizza, a slice of apple pie,
tell him to scoop out two bowls but make it quick,
then we split to dry storage, sit with our food
and the needle he needs to take, laugh
about how sweet life is.

(special thanks to Read Write Poem prompt #69)

One of my writing students said, “Tore toward the stairs” the other day, and I thought it was too precious not to use. Thanks to Read Write Poem for the “play with sounds” prompt (number 68)

TORTURED, THE STAIRS

Eloise blamed the walk and was right.
No one wanted to deal with six flights
up to her loft, the view from her door
of switch-backed steps before
the half-landing where she smoked
and made eyes at the neighbor boy,
then up and up to the attic
that creaked in the sway of wind,
a dent of loneliness in her throat
when nothing came to join her
but the idea that something might.